When 15-year-old Edie developed a urinary infection, it took almost a month to get her on the right treatment. Her owner, Chris, has spent more than 30 years in the veterinary industry. He still found the not knowing hard.
Chris with his arm around Edie, his 15-year-old collie cross, on a park bench.
Meet Edie
Edie is a 15-year-old Collie cross. She came over from Ireland as a rescue puppy, part of a litter, and her brother still lives with friends nearby. She has been with Chris and his family ever since.
She’s the love of our life. Kids love her, we all love her. She’s such an easy-going dog.
Chris has spent more than 30 years in the veterinary industry. He knows how diagnosis and treatment work from the inside. When Edie fell ill, he saw it from the other side of the consult room, as a worried owner.
The first signs
The first thing Chris noticed was a change in Edie’s behaviour. She was agitated, which was unusual for such a calm dog. Then came something more worrying.
We noticed blood in her urine. She had urinated in the house and there were blood specks in it.
For a dog of 15, that was a real cause for concern. Chris suspected a urinary tract infection (UTI) and took Edie to the vet.
Treating on a suspicion
At the first visit, the vet suspected a urine infection. No sample was taken, but with blood in the urine, a UTI seemed the logical answer. Edie went home with a week of antibiotics.
For a while, it seemed to work. After about a week, Edie looked a lot better in herself. There was no more urinating in the house and no blood in her urine.
Then, about two weeks later, the symptoms came back, and this time they were worse.
She was going outside to try and urinate, but nothing came out.
Looking back, Chris put it simply:
We didn’t have a test at that point, so we were treating on a suspicion rather than on the reality.
That isn’t a criticism of the vet. Without a quick test, treating the most likely cause first is often the only practical option in a consult.
Seven days
At the second visit, Edie was given another course of antibiotics and a container for a urine sample. Chris took the sample straight back to the practice. A dipstick test that evening showed nothing suspicious, so Chris asked for it to be sent to an external lab for culture. It went the following morning.
Chris knew what to expect.
I know from my experience it would be three, four days before you get a culture and sensitivity back.
When he rang after that time, the result still wasn’t back. The waiting wasn’t only his. As Chris put it, there was “family all over the country phoning you up every five minutes asking how she is.”
On day seven, the vet called. The result was E. coli, one of the most common causes of urinary infections in dogs.
The waiting seven days for a result to come back is difficult.
Getting it right
With the result in, Edie was prescribed a longer course of the same antibiotic. Edie had already been on it without a clear response, and Chris wasn’t sure it was the right choice. A microbiologist he once worked for always told him the same thing:
You’ve got to get the right antibiotic to fit the right bug at the right time.
So Chris raised it with the vet.
I just felt I needed to challenge and understand whether it was the right choice for Edie, for the infection that she had. We both came to an agreement that maybe it would be the right decision to change. So that really helped.
Edie moved to a different antibiotic, and this time it cleared the infection. When we filmed with Chris three weeks later, there had been no recurrence.
She’s recovered well and she’s back to her normal self.
From the first signs to the second treatment, it had taken almost a month.
Why stories like Edie’s matter
Edie’s vet did everything right. What was missing was an answer, sooner. That gap is felt on both sides of the table.
There’s always going to be a degree of anxiety from the client’s point of view, but also from the vet’s point of view. So there must be a better way of looking at this.
What Chris wished for was simple.
What I would like to have known was, almost immediately, that there was an E. coli, and therefore we could treat the infection from day one.
Urine culture at an external lab can take days. In that time, vets often have to treat on the most likely cause, and owners wait and watch. Knowing which bacteria are involved at the first consult supports more confident treatment decisions and responsible antibiotic use. That’s why there’s such a need for rapid diagnostics in practice.
At FluoretiQ, that’s the gap we’re working to close: bringing bacterial identification into the consult room, so answers arrive during the appointment rather than days after it.
