Was it Fly Strike which killed her? (Seeking out second opinion)

Hi,

Recently my 8 y.o. bunny, stopped eating and drinking and I was naturally extremely worried..
She never exhibited such behavior. She has been previously diagnosed with mammary gland tumor and vet said tha unless it hardens or gets bigger it's probably not that serious yet. I kept checking her cautiously every time I was peting her and it even felt like the bumps on her belly actually became smaller!

Anyway, after this happened I took her to vet and she examined her. She was also really surprised and also said it's kinda interesting that her belly-the tumor doesn't seem to be bad or worsened.
She seemed positively surprised even. Then she checked her lymph nodes and said they are also completely normal. Then she checked her front teeth and they were not overgrown. I was naturally still extremely worried for her but as the vet actually seemed so relieved and over-positive I calmed down. She told me it looks really good and that it's probably some sharp teeth in the back of her mouth and that it's fairly common problem. And that I don't need to worry as there's a simple solution to it. They just need to put her to narcosis so they can check it well and she promised to do x-ray to be sure about the tumor situation.

I waited for her to wake up... and then the news came. She managed to wake-up from the narcosis but then her body was too weak to keep fighting and so she died. You can imagine how devastated I was! The vet was absolutely sure before it it's nothing and now this. But the reason I'm writing this here... when she came to tell me the news she said in reproachful tone also that she however had worms as well on top of the tumor etc. This came like a total shock, because I thought I would notice something like that. I have to admit I was quite busy past month but still thought I examined her carefully when peting her so I thought I'd notice if something is wrong.. . We've had some flies at out house and I just considered it as disgusting and pesky but I would never guess it could be so threatening to rabbits!!


Anyway, the doctor said that she thinks the reason why she wasn't eating was indeed that her back teeth were sharp or there was some problem with it and also that the tumor has metastasized deeper... plus those worms.
She just told me, that the reason of her dying was that she wasn't strong enough and her body gave up. But since it happened I was really wondering about all and searching for HONEST opinion about this, so here I am... it all seem a bit weird and so I wonder if it wasn't after all really the Fly Strike which killed her and the vet just didn't want to tell me up straight to make me feel worse at that moment?

I've been wondering that if it in reality wasn't so that if she wouldn't have those worms she would wake up successfully from the narcosis because maybe THIS was what weakened her body? What do you guys think? I'm starting to be almost sure about it.. :/

Also, do you think it's possible for her to have a Fly Strike and me really not noticing it on her skin while grooming her?

Sorry for the lengthy post and thanks so much for your honesty and possible answers, I would really appreciate an second opinion!

(Also, I'm posting this from mobile so hopefully it displays as it should)

Was pre anesthetic blood work ever done?

I am so sorry for your loss- our thoughts are with you.

How long had she not been eating before you brought her in? Also, did the vet say it was worms internally, or actual maggots (fly strike)? It seems much more likely to have a tumor metastasize and that cause weakness than flies (which generally don't cause HUGE problems unless they are abundant). It's pretty much impossible to give a second opinion with just a description of something- your vet would probably know much better.

No she just put her under and then made x-ray and checked her.

Thank you!

It's been a day she haven't been eating and then I brought her to vet. I was really shocked, because day before that she was just eating as usual. (AKA was totally crazy about food)
About the worms... that's what I just assumed now as we have flies here and I even found some worms in her cage now, terrible! (Few in the place she was peeing at) I'm really horrified and ashamed. But about the vet.. I think she said they were in her mouth though... but since I found some worms in the cage now I assumed (maybe wrongly) it's the fly strike...

Also, her poop seemed normal. And she didn't lose or gain weight.

As ravenous dragon was explaining, fly strike is diagnosed by the presence of maggots (fly eggs that have hatched). This is different than "worms." With fly strike, there may be no presence of maggots at all on the main body of the rabbit. It can be just around the anus. The maggots end up in the rabbit's rear and eat the rabbit from the inside.

You can google photos of maggots to compare them to the 'worms' you saw in the cage.

I'm really sorry for your loss.
Yeah... If you ever get another rabbit, I would change vet. Your rabbit was intact, right? Does die from cancer when they are not spayed (uterine / ovarian / mammary, the risks of this are over 80% after the doe's 5 year, so yours was actually really lucky to live that long). A tumor doesn't just go away on its own, either you can operate (but that needs more than a quick examination) either you can't and the rabbit dies. Not operating might have been the good solution, but the way you relate the event, it sounds as if the vet didn't looked very hard into other possibilities.
Where do you live? Winter isn't really the season for fly strike. It's more of a 'hot season' problem. And if your rabbit had been suffering from this, either it would have been a small problem or (the problems being when the maggots get inside the skin and eat the flesh) she would have had entry wounds, which generally get infected. Often, it's on the bum area like Blue eyes said. Fly strikes are eggs that are laid on the rabbit and 'dig' the skin to go inside, they are not regular internal worms. Your vet examined the rabbit before operating, so if your rabbit was suffering from fly strikes and that she didn't see it, she's as (more) guilty as you are on that count.
Here are photos from a pretty ugly flystrike case:
http://www.dierenkliniekwilhelminapark.nl/dierinfo/konijn/myasis.html

It doesn't sound like your vet did any real exam before operating, which is just ridiculous on an older doe with known health issues.
Moreover, god, you don't operate on a rabbit that is currently suffering from stasis unless you are trying to remove a blockage. The guts should have been restarted before, with reglan and force-feeding to stabilize her before. The main rule of operating and vaccinating, be it with animals or humans, is not to do it when you are otherwise sick if you can help it.

I'm saying that your rabbit wouldn't have died short term anyway, considering that she seemed to suffer from a lot of things and she probably had a generalized cancer. But yeah, my money would be on a bad general state making it too hard for her to survive the anesthesia.

Exactly, when I came there with her the first time, when the tumor was found, they have told me they would have not risked operating her because
she was already quite old and that she would very likely died. So it was decided that if she doesn't have really bad pain she can still probably live for
some time and if it would change I should have come immediately and then we would need to put her to sleep. So no operation was done even now,
but the vet just said that if the rabbit wouldn't be put under narcosis, she wouldn't be able to check her back teeth.

About the fly strike option, it's actually total irony because I live in cold climate and we have winter season now! (I live in Finland) I also can't
wrap my mind around it that still (!) even now we have some flies here at our apartment! But then again my roommates are unfortunately quite
messy so that's probably why, it's just terrible. :/

After it happened, I've been of course thinking what kind of worms it could have been and so I looked to the cage and found few maggots in the place she was
peeing at and that totally shocked me.. And so I probably wrongly (?) connected those two together. But as some of you correctly write, probably those two could
be just unrelated... and probably (hopefully) are. But I just wonder how else is it possible to contain worms? Does it come from contaminated food source for
example? How it could be prevented?

And yes, the vets here seem to be quite bad. I'm actually originally from central Europe and now I live abroad here and when I came I was shocked that
here they don't even vaccinate rabbits and nothing like annual health checkup exists for them. So it makes it double hard to actually then detect some health
issue on your own...

Ah yeah, it's kinda weird about the maggots. I've been in Finland before (my sister studied in Tampere for a while) and that's really not the kind of country where I would have expected to have fly strikes problems, especially during winter.
Worms can come from the food. Or fleas. If she had worms, you would find some in her poos. Like that:
https://www.samteddys39.fr/maladies/les-vers-parasites-du-lapin/

You can't really prevent it, but you can treat it with Panacur and the like. For fly strikes, you can't prevent it either. During summer (but clearly, not only!) it's recommended to examine rabbits regularly to check there is no maggots around the ears / the bum. My rabbits living in their own room, there is a mosquito net in front of their windows. Flies can still enter from the rest of the house, but it's never more than one and I shoo them away when I see one.

It's always really hard to find a good rabbit vet. I had a very good one when I lived in Paris, but I moved in a smaller town and there is not one knowledgeable vet around. I'm actually considering keeping only cats and dogs in the future because it's less hard to have them treated when you have a problem (and even then, I wouldn't have them operated here - hell, I wouldn't have myself operated in this town ^^).

Still, even if it's always hard when one of our pets die, yours lived quite a long life. 8 years is really not that bad for a rabbit. And you clearly did your best to help her...

Rabbits are too darned good at hiding problems from you and she wasn't the youngest of bunnies. We have had a couple that were fine in the morning and were gone that night and both were around 4--old in the wild but young as house rabbits are reckoned. My sympathies on her passing.

Oh really? That's so cool! I live 240km from Tampere up north, in Vaasa. (so in here it's even colder and yet we still somehow have flies in our household.. :/)
I didn't notice any bad things in her poo but maybe it was just some initial stage or who knows... I messaged the vet today hoping that maybe email
could be better as they can answer when they have time for it but I will try to call her in the end of this week if it stays unnoticed. (No answers yet)

Thanks so much for all the useful tips, I will definitely keep that in mind for the future! At least I feel good that I used to check up her ears, eyes etc. quite meticulously
when grooming her, so fortunately I'm sure that at least there wasn't any problem now. I'm sad I haven't known about the bum and that it should be checked too,
but well, at least now I'm a bit smarter. I think that she was mixed with lionhead and thus had extremely long fur around her butt
(never seen something like that, actually it was like 5cm behind the end of her tail even ) so that also made it bit harder to check it/notice immediately, so hopefully
this wasn't the problem. Anyway, enough speculating and let's see what the vet says... .

Haha, this made me laugh! I'm EXACTLY in the same situation now also here, even regular healthcare sucks! Now even people who get hearth attack need to travel
60 minutes in ambulance to another city "because they don't do such stuff here". So I almost wonder if it's both connected. The vets are the same terrible quality and this
was actually only clinic in the city which treats other animals except dog and cats. (!) It seems so crazy.. Fortunately I'm planning to move away from here to another city
in Finland so hopefully there it will be better.

Nancy McClelland said:

Rabbits are too darned good at hiding problems from you and she wasn't the youngest of bunnies. We have had a couple that were fine in the morning and were gone that night and both were around 4--old in the wild but young as house rabbits are reckoned. My sympathies on her passing.

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Oh, I'm so sorry for your rabbits but thanks for posting this, even though it's so sad I find some comfort in this that sometimes no matter what you could have done or not, some issues maybe still couldn't have been spotted or prevented. Hopefully this doesn't sound heartless but I'm finding it hard to put my thoughts it into words.

Ok, so the vet called today and she said that she actually DIDN'T have any worms! It's kinda crazy, because I remember her saying that when she brought her
and I also saw it written down in the report. (Unfortunately I haven't asked for the copy) She told me that probably she mispronounced some
english word and that's what caused this misunderstanding. -.- Crazy. Not sure what to even say about that, it's kind of weird because other than that her english
was really good and usually people here speak english so fluently, so this really surprised me now. But yeah,... that maybe also probably tells a bit about the
overall level of service at that vet clinic. :/ She now even mentioned that she wasn't even specialized for treating rabbits and that she had to now still consult her colleague
which is specialized for "exotic animals" (!) about the rabbits and worms because she should know the best about that... So strange that in here where hares and
rabbits are so common in the wild they are still considered to be "exotic".. Oh well, maybe it's just this city where everything sucks.

Anyway, so this is the closure of this case. Thanks a lot to all who participated and even though the worms probably weren't the issue after all I still appreciate your advice and
support so much, it really helped me to understand more about this topic and also to deal better with her passing away! I think it would be helpful also for the future when I'm again
ready to adopt another rabbit.

Well unfortunately you find this sort of thing all over the medical profession. People hate to admit when they're wrong so they try to make you think you misheard or had it wrong in your head. Even here in Canada, I once had a veterinarian tell me that rabbits have 4 stomachs like a cow. They will take your money and run whether they know anything beyond cats and dogs or not. So sad. I know they're not all like that but I will always be wary and suspicious.

Pretty much everything that isn't a cat, dog, cow, horse, or pig is considered an exotic. At least in the US, VERY few veterinary schools even offer classes about exotic animals (and really, there are so many differences! You can't give budgies the same drugs as pigeons, even though they are both birds, for example). It's difficult to find a veterinarian who is good at exotic animal medicine and unfortunately, they usually have to get experience after school hours (classes are 8-4 and for every hour you are in class you are expected to study 3 hours outside of class- making much extracurricular difficult) or even after they graduate! Granted, this is all in the US, I don't know anything about vet med in other countries. Good luck in finding a good vet for any further rabbits you decide to love!