How insanely cool is this?

Poking through my most recent Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association in a desultory way after lunch yesterday I ran across the article titled:
“Successful Replacement of an Obstructed Ureter with an Ileal Graft in a Cat”.

Oh……kay?……

And I’m reading the article, because I didn’t really have much else to do at the time, only to find out….

The cat in the article presents to a specialty care hospital with a history of progressive renal failure and marked abdominal pain. In doing a general workup the referring veterinarian had found that the cat had both kidney and ureteral (the passage between the kidney and the bladder) stones. One ureter was completely obstructed by stones which was the primary source of the cat’s worsening renal status and a good portion of the cat’s pain.

So the cat is referred for emergency surgery to remove both the kidney and the ureteral stones.

Surgeon goes in, removes the stones from the kidney and goes on to the ureter only to find that a good section of the ureter is so badly scarred by the stones that it is no longer patent.
This wouldn’t be a problem in most cats, the kidney with the non-patent ureter could be removed. In most cats you can remove one kidney entirely and not have any significant effect on renal function, but in the case of this cat the other kidney (the one without the stones) gave every evidence of being non-functional.
So one kidney doesn’t work and while the other kidney works the pathway between the functional kidney and the outside world is, to put it briefly, screwed.

“Hm!” says the surgeon, “I need some sort of tube shaped something to bypass the blocked portion of this ureter. Wherever shall I find such a thing?”

So he goes in and harvests a section of small intestine, patches one end into the open, functional, end of the ureter, and patches the other end into the bladder. Viola!

How insanely cool is this?!

Who thinks of this sort of shit?

It’s even more cool that the cat survived and did well until she was lost to follow up more than three years postoperatively.