This Week Sucks

what a week! why is it that you never just get one sick animal...its always at least two!

got home from work monday and went straight in to the garden to groom the bunnies. grabbed chong and set her down on the grooming table only to nearly scream at the sight of her left eye! it was totally gunged up and sealed shut! it looked awful. the left eye had been a little weepy on saturday when i groomed them and the skin around it looked a little sore but my two buns were born with eye problems and this was nothing unusual. i bathed the eyes in the normal way and she seemed fine! i couldn´t believe the mess on monday. obviously, called the vet immediately and they told me to bring her straight in. to be honest, she looked like she had myxi even though she is vaccinated! couldn´t see my usual vet, kate, but the girl we did see was very good. she too said she would have though myxi if she had not read up on chong´s history and saw she suffered with eye problems. i explained that i had never seen them anywhere near this bad though. we were told to seperate her from binky and give her baytril twice a day by syringe and eye drops three times a day, keep an eye on her eating etc. and bring her back in two days time.

got home, made up the run in the lounge and settled her down for the night. sat down and ate our dinner and then my husband went to feed the rats their fresh food for the night. gleefully he exclaimed "look, koda is letting me stroke him" (our rats are rescues and not particularly hand tame), i instantly got a bit suspicious but ten seconds later he yelled "oh my god, he´s got blood coming out of his eyes". luckily i had read a few rat books before getting the ratty boys so i was aware that this probably wasn´t blood but more likely porphyrin (a substance in rat tears when they are stressed that is red and therefore looks like blood) but still, it was not a good sign. he was sat in his cage, all hunched up with these horrible red crusts all round his eyes...not a happy chappy. i checked my rat book and it suggested that he may have a respitory infection and if so, get him to the vets at once. by this time it was about 9.30pm so i called the emergency vet - who told me to bring him right in, which i did.

long story short - emergency vet was awful. kept us waiting for 40 minutes while they mopped floors etc (this is an EMERGENCY service?) didn´t listen to a word we said, gave him one crappy antibiotic injection and told us to see our own vet in the morning. oh, and charged us £55 for the pleasure! totally mis-diagnosed him too!

got koda to my own vet asap on tuesday, she was quite concerned but unsure as to what the problem was. gave us baytril twice a day and metacam once a day - told us to seperate him from the others (which we had already done the night before) and keep an eye on his food and water intake. i said he hadn´t eaten or drunk anything and she said we may need to assist feed also.

it is now thursday and he is still not really eating or drinking on his own. i am syringe feeding him baby food mixed with water to try to get some food and fluid in him but can´t possibly do it enough to match his correct dietry and water intakes. he did try to nibble on a muffin yesterday but that is about it! whenever he does manage to walk he just looks like he´s drunk. explained this to the vet when i took chong back in to see her yesterday (chong is A-OKAY now btw) and she is not massively hopeful for his outlook. she explained that unfortunately it is really hard to get blood from small animals such as rats and therefore very hard to do tests to find out 100% what is wrong with him. so...we go on with the medication and assist feeding, trying to tempt him with ANY food or liquid as well, and hope for the best. kate the vet asked us to call her tomorrow with a progress report and suggested we talk then about our further options, although to be honest i think the only option may be to have him pts!

i´ll keep you posted :-(