Dog Bladder Stone Surgery (Cystotomy) in Wilmington, DE

What is a canine cystotomy?

A cystotomy is a surgical incision into the urinary bladder. In most cases we perform it to retrieve uroliths — bladder stones — that have formed in the urine and are now grinding against the bladder wall every time your dog moves.

Urolithiasis is painful in a way that dogs hide well. The signs owners notice first are usually behavioural: straining in the yard for longer than usual, asking to go out more often, having accidents indoors after years of not doing so, or blood-tinged urine on the paving.

Signs your dog has bladder stones

• Straining to urinate, or taking much longer than normal
• Frequent small urinations rather than one normal-volume one
• Blood in the urine, sometimes visible only on light-coloured ground
• Accidents indoors from a previously house-trained dog
• Licking at the genital area more than usual
• Discomfort or vocalising while urinating

Producing nothing at all is an emergency

A dog straining without passing any urine may have a complete urethral obstruction. That backs pressure into the kidneys and becomes life-threatening within about a day. Go to your nearest emergency hospital immediately.

Struvite vs calcium oxalate: why the type matters

Two stone types account for most canine cases, and they behave completely differently.

	Struvite	Calcium oxalate
Common cause	Usually secondary to a urinary tract infection	Metabolic; more common in certain breeds
Dissolves with diet?	Often yes, over several weeks	No — surgery is required
Prevention	Treat infection, therapeutic diet	Urine-diluting diet, high water intake
Typical patients	More often female dogs	More often male dogs, small breeds

This is why we send removed stones for stone analysis. The surgery solves today’s problem; the analysis is what stops the same surgery happening again in eighteen months.

How the surgery works

Urinalysis and culture come first, to identify infection and crystal type. Imaging confirms how many stones there are and where they sit. Pre-anesthetic blood screening pays particular attention to kidney values, because a partially obstructed dog can arrive with elevated numbers that change the anesthetic plan.

The cystotomy incision is made through the abdominal midline and then into the bladder itself, in the least vascular area. We retrieve every stone we can see and then run a catheter to perform retrograde urethral hydropropulsion — flushing sterile fluid backwards up the urethra to push any small fragment sitting there back into the bladder where it can be removed. Skipping that step is the single most common reason a dog is back in surgery within months.

Bladder mucosal closure is done with fine absorbable suture — Monocryl or PDS — in a pattern that keeps knots out of the bladder lumen, because exposed suture material inside the bladder becomes a nucleus for a new stone.

Recovery and preventing recurrence

Post-op hematuria management is mostly reassurance: blood-tinged urine for three to five days is normal and should lighten daily. Heavy bleeding, clots, or an inability to urinate needs an immediate call.

Long-term prevention rests on three things: the therapeutic diet matched to the stone analysis, generous water intake, and periodic urinalysis to catch a returning infection before it seeds new stones. Where there is any doubt about clearance, a post-op cystogram confirms the bladder is empty.

Non-stone cystotomy

The same approach handles traumatic bladder tears after a road accident, deep tissue biopsies of the bladder wall, and excision of benign bladder-wall masses. These start at $900 and carry the same monitoring protocol. For a full price walkthrough see our dog bladder stone surgery cost guide for Wilmington.