Rabbit Check-Up

The rabbits went in for their check-up yesterday, and $165 later, we have good and bad news.

Good news is that besides a whole lot of earwax build up that was a whole lot of fun for him and the vet to clean, Snoopy is perfectly healthy. His upper eye lid will always be split at the bottom, but all of his cuts and scrapes will heal just fine and none should cause him any problems. Bad news is that Cadbury has an ear infection, poor thing.

The ear cleaning, not so fun. First you squirt this one kind of liquid in the ear, and then you massage the base of the ear for a minute. This helps to loosen up the earwax. Then you squirt in this second stuff and also massage it around. I can’t remember what this does, maybe just helps clean things out. Then you stick in some extra long q-tips and try to scoop it all out, one extra long q-tip at a time.

First of all, rabbits don’t like having liquid squirted into their ears, secondly, they definitely don’t like having their ears violated by extra long q-tips. There was a whole lot of head shaking and ear flapping going on which just prolonged the process because it’s hard to clean out a rabbit’s ear when it’s shaking its head around.


Cadbury’s ears were much cleaner, with hardly any wax buildup at all, due I believe, to a recent deep down ear cleaning by Snoopy. I was watching him do one ear, and it was really weird because he moved from cleaning the inside of her ear to grooming her cheek which apparently also included chewing and yanking on it. When I checked her out later, I found that she had a little bald spot at the base of that ear (also the infected one). For some odd reason, Snoopy was chewing on and pulling out the hair there, and Cadbury let him. I think it’s because she felt guilty for almost taking out his eye. Where she used to spend most of her time in her shoe, she’s hardly ever away from him now.

You can actually feel the infection in her ear. It feels like someone dropped a pea sized marble down her ear shaft and it’s laying in the ear canal. Rabbits have very large ears, and long shafts that lead to their ear canals. The problem with lops is that they have a defect that keeps their ears from standing upright, so these long shafts don’t get aired out, leading to wax buildup and ear infections. She’s on Baytril, an oral antibiotic that she has to take daily for two weeks but tastes like bananas, and has ear drops that she has to get twice daily (oh fun). And the vet wants to see her again in two weeks.

This is where is gets messy. If the infection is not down in two weeks, we have a problem. Ear infections in rabbits are bad because they lead to much worse conditions like head tilt, and because the ear channels are so long, it’s hard to get to the infection. The next step, if the infection is not down, is to take an x-ray and see how large the infection is and whether or not it’s in the bone. This will determine whether or not surgery is necessary to get to the ear canal to battle the infection. It’s possible that they’ll have to remove an approximate one inch section from her ear so that they can access the ear canal.

My poor baby! Not only does this sound really expensive, it sounds really invasive and I don’t want Cadbury to have to go through all of that. Of course she will have it done, though, if she needs it, I just hope that she won’t. And I feel guilty too, because it’s been about two years since we’ve been to the vet and if we’d kept up with her yearly checkups, she probably wouldn’t have this problem.

So, I urge you, if it’s been some time since you took your pet to the vet, do it. It could save you heartache, save your pet pain, and save you money.

2 rabbits at $48 an exam ($96) - $9 multiple patient discount + $20 ear cleaning +$45 in meds. *sigh* Yay for credit cards. Mine loves me.

And I love my bunnies.