127 | Acute kidney injury in dogs and cats: myths, misconceptions, and how we should REALLY nurse these patients in 2026

In episode 127 of the Medical Nursing Podcast, we're turning our attention to acute kidney injury.

AKI is one of the diseases I see go wrong a LOT, because there are still - I think - a lot of misconceptions and myths about how we treat it, especially when it comes to things like fluid therapy.

If you're like me, you probably grew up as a VN thinking that kidney disease = treatment with aggressive fluid therapy. The idea behind this was that high rates of IV fluids would 'flush' the kidneys and bring the numbers down - and we applied it to almost every azotaemic patient that came through the door.

Looking back, I wonder how many of those patients had fluid overload that I didn't spot - because I didn't know to look for it. And now, it's one of the biggest areas I tell nurses to take initiative on and monitor for when caring for their kidney patients - because we see it all the time.

Across the next half an hour or so we'll look at what AKI actually is, how it's related to CKD, how we tell the two apart, and why we manage them so differently. And then we'll look at some of the biggest myths and misconceptions around AKI - and what they mean for us when we're nursing these patients.

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