Dog Owner's Home Veterinary Handbook.pdf - Mr. Walnuts

426 •DOG OWNER’S HOME VETERINARY HANDBOOK
and must be specially designed to work with dogs. The dog’s blood is circulated
through a machine with filters that tries to duplicate the filtering tasks
of a healthy kidney. Special catheters are required and dogs need treatments
of three to four hours, up to three times a week. This is a very expensive therapy
and is ideally only needed for short-term problems such as poisoning or
leptospirosis—giving the dog’s own kidneys time to heal. Dogs with chronic
kidney failure have been maintained on hemodialysis for up to one year, but
that is unusual.
KIDNEY TRANSPLANT
Another option for dogs with terminal kidney failure is to consider a kidney
transplant. Kidney transplants are only done a few veterinary referral centers,
but are becoming more common. As with human transplant patients, drugs
must be given post-transplant to prevent organ rejection. These drugs are
quite expensive and must be carefully calibrated to minimize side effects.
The current method for finding kidney donors is to test shelter dogs for tissue
compatibility. The shelter dog then donates one kidney; dogs, like people;
can do fine with just one healthy kidney. The shelter dog is then adopted by
the family of the recipient dog, who have to agree ahead of time to provide a
home for the donor dog for the rest of her life.