Here's a practice-makes-perfect subject, and the one that I personally feel the need to practice the most. This is tricky stuff. And one of the biggest requirements to know.
Restraint.
Simply put, it's restraining pets for the vet's exam, for the tests or treatments they need...dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, lizards, ferrets, snakes, and more. Relaxed dogs, anxious cats, hostile rabbits, dangerous birds, aggressive lizards...or anxious dogs, aggressive cats, happy ferrets, hostile birds, dangerous lizards.....or hostile dogs, calm cats, anxious lizards, happy birds, sad turtles....well, you get the picture. Anyone can be anything. At ANY time. And a visit to the veterinarian's office can be a big, tricky stressor.
So, some tips:
Prey animals have eyes placed at each side of their skull. This provides a wide visual field.
Predators have forward-facing eyes, providing depth perception to help capture prey.
Prey animals have a blind spot in front of them.
Predators do not have as far of a side visual field as prey animals.
Prey have young who can stand and run shortly after birth.
Predators have young who are completely dependent on them the first few weeks.
So. Bunnies as predators then. Little bunniculas.
I kinda like that thought.
We must revisit those facts.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
Good Grief (and Real Grief)
I apologize for letting the blog go so long without an entry, but life really interfered. It does seem amazing that I couldn't carve out 10 minutes....it feels LAME to use real life as an excuse, but the fact of the matter is that although I am a master (mistress?) of coordination my poor little blog fell by the wayside.
NOT by way of an excuse, but as a sharing thing, we lost another bun on May 18 - our eldest boy Dusty. Some of you I know already know what happened. Dusty had a prolonged bout of stasis in February/March. We couldn't figure out the cause, but because he was a prolific shedder when he shed (which did seem to be all the time), it was assumed that the excess fur he ingested while grooming was the culprit. Stasis is known as the 'silent killer' in rabbits. Typically it manifests in the bun refusing to eat something it always eats. That's when the alarm bells should sound. As a way of explaining, sometimes during moulting buns will ingest a lot of fur when they groom themselves. Or at any time they can potentially eat something that shouldn't be eaten (carpet fibers, towel fibers, cushioning, etc. -rabbits are prodigious chewers and will pretty much chew ANYTHING). The excess "stuff" makes them feel full, so they don't feel the need to eat. That's the start of the problem, because they NEED to eat their hay (which has fiber) and they NEED to drink (ESSENTIAL to their health). Without those two things, well, Houston, you have a problem. Their gut motility slows down. Gas builds up -which is very painful for them and causes them to REALLY not want to eat. Plus whatever they did eat stays "stuck" because their gut is not working properly to move things along. The train is not running on the tracks like it should. Picture a train having seizures. That's what the gut system is doing.
The fluid in the bun's last meal is pulled away from the stomach/intestines to go to the major organs because of the bun's lack of drinking. What happens? Everything in the stomach and intestines becomes drier. And harder. It's still there so they still feel full. Oooooh, but painful, too. So who wants to eat or drink? They don't. And that just makes the "stuff" drier and harder -and harder to MOVE. Then you have a huge problem. A blockage.
"Stasis" can take the form of a bun still eating a little, still drinking a little, passing tiny dry stool, or pointed-end stool in fits and starts and being generally unhappy with glimmers of hope, to a bun that is passing nothing, taking in nothing, and in a critical situation. Stasis is the result of something, not the cause. So bunny owners must look at stasis as having an origin. WHAT is causing it?
Going back to Dusty, it was thought that he was ingesting a lot of fur while grooming during his shed and that that caused his stasis. That's always a possibility in buns. Or eating some foreign object. Or pain from another source (OFTEN molar spurs which can puncture the inner cheeks or lacerate the tongue -note to self** must write about molar spurs at another time), infection, stress, trauma.
Again back to the Dust Bunny and his stasis....general anorexia...maybe eat this...maybe not want that. It was the strangest thing I had ever encountered in a bun who had an appetite like King Kong. The sun might not rise but Dusty would always want to eat. You could count on it even if you couldn't count on anything else in your life.
Eventually he began to eat again but not like his old self. He lost weight and could not regain it. One morning I noticed him holding his left leg up, in pain. He could not bear weight on it. Our vet found that the area around the knee was swollen, but it didn't feel like a normal swelling. She wondered if it could be a mass. X-rays showed there was something, but it didn't involve the bone and could be just inflammation, so Dusty was put on pain reliever. At his next appointment the swelling was reduced. HURRAY!
Short lived. In a matter of days, it was back again. And he had lost more weight. Aspirations of the tissue showed red and white blood cells, signs of inflammation. There was possibly an infection somewhere in the tissue so the vet put Dusty on antibiotics.
On the night of the 18th Jimmy and I went out to eat, and when we came home had one of those "I don't like the look of this" moments. Dusty was sitting in a corner, but I didn't like how he was breathing. The difference was subtle but one of the things I learned in class was watching for an abdominal tuck as a sign of difficulty in breathing. Dusty wasn't gasping, or breathing through his mouth (which bunnies never do unless it's an emergency), but his nostrils were flaring wider and there was that tuck. It was 10:30 p.m. but I couldn't go to sleep unless I knew he was OK. So, off to the vet hospital we went.
The tech who checked him when we got there confirmed he was not breathing well and took him to put him on oxygen. The doctor came in shortly thereafter to tell me that she had listened to him and while there were noisy sounds in the upper part of his lungs, there was silence in the lower part and that had concerned her enough so she had done an X-ray. She wanted to show me what it revealed. Can you guess? Tumors. You couldn't even see his heart on the X-ray. Area in his lungs that should have been black with air were white. His esophagus was pushed up to his spine. As much as it was startling, it was comforting because it EXPLAINED the last few months.
While the doctor was gently trying to tell me how bad this looked Dusty went into cardiac arrest....and died. I gave my permission for them to stop CPR. I'm sure that if I had not brought him in we would have found him dead the next morning and never known the exact cause. At least now we knew. The consensus is that Dusty had a soft tissue cancer in his left leg that over a short course of time metastasized. Nothing we could have done even 3 months ago.
So, there is real life. And real grief in the middle of saying "Good grief! There's been so much going on I haven't gotten to my blog!" But things go on, and that's as much a part of my learning about the veterinary world of life and death as it is my own learning about life and death. The lessons continue.
NOT by way of an excuse, but as a sharing thing, we lost another bun on May 18 - our eldest boy Dusty. Some of you I know already know what happened. Dusty had a prolonged bout of stasis in February/March. We couldn't figure out the cause, but because he was a prolific shedder when he shed (which did seem to be all the time), it was assumed that the excess fur he ingested while grooming was the culprit. Stasis is known as the 'silent killer' in rabbits. Typically it manifests in the bun refusing to eat something it always eats. That's when the alarm bells should sound. As a way of explaining, sometimes during moulting buns will ingest a lot of fur when they groom themselves. Or at any time they can potentially eat something that shouldn't be eaten (carpet fibers, towel fibers, cushioning, etc. -rabbits are prodigious chewers and will pretty much chew ANYTHING). The excess "stuff" makes them feel full, so they don't feel the need to eat. That's the start of the problem, because they NEED to eat their hay (which has fiber) and they NEED to drink (ESSENTIAL to their health). Without those two things, well, Houston, you have a problem. Their gut motility slows down. Gas builds up -which is very painful for them and causes them to REALLY not want to eat. Plus whatever they did eat stays "stuck" because their gut is not working properly to move things along. The train is not running on the tracks like it should. Picture a train having seizures. That's what the gut system is doing.
The fluid in the bun's last meal is pulled away from the stomach/intestines to go to the major organs because of the bun's lack of drinking. What happens? Everything in the stomach and intestines becomes drier. And harder. It's still there so they still feel full. Oooooh, but painful, too. So who wants to eat or drink? They don't. And that just makes the "stuff" drier and harder -and harder to MOVE. Then you have a huge problem. A blockage.
"Stasis" can take the form of a bun still eating a little, still drinking a little, passing tiny dry stool, or pointed-end stool in fits and starts and being generally unhappy with glimmers of hope, to a bun that is passing nothing, taking in nothing, and in a critical situation. Stasis is the result of something, not the cause. So bunny owners must look at stasis as having an origin. WHAT is causing it?
Going back to Dusty, it was thought that he was ingesting a lot of fur while grooming during his shed and that that caused his stasis. That's always a possibility in buns. Or eating some foreign object. Or pain from another source (OFTEN molar spurs which can puncture the inner cheeks or lacerate the tongue -note to self** must write about molar spurs at another time), infection, stress, trauma.
Again back to the Dust Bunny and his stasis....general anorexia...maybe eat this...maybe not want that. It was the strangest thing I had ever encountered in a bun who had an appetite like King Kong. The sun might not rise but Dusty would always want to eat. You could count on it even if you couldn't count on anything else in your life.
Eventually he began to eat again but not like his old self. He lost weight and could not regain it. One morning I noticed him holding his left leg up, in pain. He could not bear weight on it. Our vet found that the area around the knee was swollen, but it didn't feel like a normal swelling. She wondered if it could be a mass. X-rays showed there was something, but it didn't involve the bone and could be just inflammation, so Dusty was put on pain reliever. At his next appointment the swelling was reduced. HURRAY!
Short lived. In a matter of days, it was back again. And he had lost more weight. Aspirations of the tissue showed red and white blood cells, signs of inflammation. There was possibly an infection somewhere in the tissue so the vet put Dusty on antibiotics.
On the night of the 18th Jimmy and I went out to eat, and when we came home had one of those "I don't like the look of this" moments. Dusty was sitting in a corner, but I didn't like how he was breathing. The difference was subtle but one of the things I learned in class was watching for an abdominal tuck as a sign of difficulty in breathing. Dusty wasn't gasping, or breathing through his mouth (which bunnies never do unless it's an emergency), but his nostrils were flaring wider and there was that tuck. It was 10:30 p.m. but I couldn't go to sleep unless I knew he was OK. So, off to the vet hospital we went.
The tech who checked him when we got there confirmed he was not breathing well and took him to put him on oxygen. The doctor came in shortly thereafter to tell me that she had listened to him and while there were noisy sounds in the upper part of his lungs, there was silence in the lower part and that had concerned her enough so she had done an X-ray. She wanted to show me what it revealed. Can you guess? Tumors. You couldn't even see his heart on the X-ray. Area in his lungs that should have been black with air were white. His esophagus was pushed up to his spine. As much as it was startling, it was comforting because it EXPLAINED the last few months.
While the doctor was gently trying to tell me how bad this looked Dusty went into cardiac arrest....and died. I gave my permission for them to stop CPR. I'm sure that if I had not brought him in we would have found him dead the next morning and never known the exact cause. At least now we knew. The consensus is that Dusty had a soft tissue cancer in his left leg that over a short course of time metastasized. Nothing we could have done even 3 months ago.
So, there is real life. And real grief in the middle of saying "Good grief! There's been so much going on I haven't gotten to my blog!" But things go on, and that's as much a part of my learning about the veterinary world of life and death as it is my own learning about life and death. The lessons continue.
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