Bathing ill rabbit - How often?

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Prap

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Hello.
I made a forum post concerning my rabbit with diarrhea.
His poop is finally nice and round but super sticky. He gets metacam twice a day, fiber paste 3 times a day and has had critical care 6 times a day. He is finally starting to eat small amounts of hay today which is day 4 of him being ill.
He got severe diarrhea saturday night having refused to eat (Then had an empty stomach. Also this was post neuter which happened Monday) and was taken to the vet... This diarrhea unfortunely caused him to be completely smudged on his bottom area, so I had to give him a bottom bath (It's summer and there may be flies and i didn't want to risk flystrike).. But then it kept going and I washed him again monday. It's with rodent shampoo and baby powder to keep it dry.
However, last night he suddenly started peeing very large amounts, very thin and only tinted yellow, so I called the vet immediately and they ensured me it was only a good thing water was passing through his system and that I should not be concerned.
However, he is super wet above his tail area and on his tail and he smells terribly of pee (Not diarrhea anymore thank god). I've been trying to keep it clean and dry but it's looking terrible and doesn't appear to dry easily. Only that area keeps being wet, his legs and feet appear to be dry.
Would it be okay for me to bottom bathe him again, even though i did it Sunday and Monday too? So it can be cleaned up properly and dried. I'm terrible scared of flystrikes or skin infections (All of this was caused by antibiotics in the first place, and i'll do anything to avoid him needing more medicine).
I'm not sure if the pee still goes up there or if the area just won't dry easily, which is also why i want it to be cleaned up properly... Considering as a last resort to bringing him to the vet to get help having the area shaved so he can focus on getting healthy without other concerns of skin infections or fly strikes.
So would he be allowed another bath?
 
Poor bunny! I'm glad he's on the mend. If it doesn't seem to stress him too much, I see no reason why you couldn't (butt) bathe him again. Without knowing what's in the rodent shampoo, I'm not sure if it's a good thing to use or not, though. You can definitely use a small amount of Dawn dishsoap, though. If the butt bath does seem to stress him more than you'd like, you could use pet-safe wipes or just a damp cloth to give him more of a light sponge-bath, since it's just pee at this point. Make sure you dry him as best as you can if you give him a butt-bath and that he's not in too cool or drafty an area while still drying off (rabbits love cold and are susceptible to heat under normal conditions, but sick bunnies tend to prefer it a little warmer).

On a side note, he's adorable... his name made me laugh, too - I have a 7 year old lionhead named Nala :).
 
He's actually really tolerant (For someone who freaks just from accidentally stepping in his waterbowl) and he happily hops around even despite being ill. The shampoo is mild shampoo and I have mixed it with water just in case (It tells you to do that on the label too)
I decided to give him another butt bath and he is now perfectly clean and dry. I was worried about the area above his tail as it was looking terrible, but is now dry, fluffy and clean. Unfortunately he seems to have reverted back and his poo is now more mushy and not nice and round anymore so I'm worried he'll get himself dirty again :( So far he has stayed clean, i made sure he was perfectly dry and he's resting on thick blankets :)

As i want to bond him i originally wanted to find another lionhead and name it Nala as it would be fitting haha. I fell in love with a little girl instead he'll be bonded with once he's completely healthy with, but she's full lop so she ended up with the name Luna instead and is a real troublemaker :)
She's going to get spayed once she's old enough, but the way poor Simba has reacted to the surgery I'm really worried about how she'll be... He was really poorly Sunday and I was worried he might not make it at that point. He's only 15 weeks and I feel like he's too young to go through this nightmare, poor guy :(
 
My Nala is a weirdo like that, too - she doesn't seem to object at all to a butt bath and will calmly sit in a dishpan with half an inch or so of warm soapy water in it without my hands even being on her (I've had to do it on numerous occasions after she sat on an uneaten cecal and got it clumped to her behind). Many animals really seem to understand that you're trying to help them even though you're doing something they don't like, whether it's a poopy-butt rabbit, a cat needing to be shampoo'd for fleas, a bite-happy but ill sugar glider who recognizes a syringe of pain meds when he sees it and pops his mouth open... sick or otherwise unhappy animals just seem to inherently recognize when someone is trying to fix their problem(s).

I, too, started with a Lionhead and lop pair... and, while Gazzles (my original lop) passed away many years ago, we still have a Lionhead and a lop in our little warren (along with a Dutch and a Californian).
 
Yeah it probably also has something to do with him being quite poorly, because he hasn't been resisting much with anything not the force feeding either. This is my first rabbit and I've had him for about a month so I'm just feeling so panicky and stressed out and the vet has not been very helpful. He was so much better this morning, having had some special pellets for stomach issues(Just a few and then he stops eating them), grass, small bits of parsley and few bits of hay every now and then. But his diarrhea now appears to be back (It's not really watery just lumpy and really really soft so it's hard to clean) and he stopped eating all together again. The only thing I've done definitely was to give him pain meds again. It has been 4 days and I'm just at a loss and i hope it's just after-surgery issues and nothing serious :( (Vet has only checked his stitches and then given me food and meds and nothing else). Meanwhile I'm losing sleep because I'm really worried about him and I insist on staying until the middle of the night feeding him another portion of critical care as I'm scared he won't get enough food. He's also got mucus in his feces since yesterday and something only mucus is coming out :confused:
 
Oh yeah and I've been weighing him as well. He weighed 1.3 kg when he was first brought to the vet and he's currently at 1.1 kg. I'm just terrified there may be a chance I'd lose him but the vet also don't seem to care about my worries :(
 
Defecating mucous and jelly substance is due to irritation to the digestive tract. It can sometimes occur after a bout with stasis, but with your rabbit having had diarrhea, it's more likely occurring due to pathogenic bacteria, which is also the cause for the diarrhea.

Mucous/jelly poop is called mucoid enteritis or mucoid enteropathy. It's extremely serious and needs to be treated with the correct meds. I would still recommend getting those meds I recommended previously. I would tell them he's continuing to not do well, has mucous/jelly poop, and that you would like to try those meds to see if they help. In the very least I would want to try baytril if they won't give you the metronidazole or questran(with good fluid therapy). His condition is concerning and I would demand that something be done. Sometimes you have to push and be the advocate for your animal when the vet doesn't seem to be doing enough.
http://www.medirabbit.com/EN/GI_diseases/Generalities/Enteritis_en.htm
http://wildpro.twycrosszoo.org/S/00dis/Miscellaneous/Mucoid_EnteropathyRabbits.htm
 
Yeah. I feel bad for continously putting him through the stress of going to the vets. They prescribed him more medicine and ensured me that would be enough to get him to eat, which it did as he has actually eaten on his own today as well as having been around to explore the house for the first time and the feces were really starting to look like something proper. Sunday he only hid. I want to bring him back to the vet with the diarrhea returning especially. He's still much better, but I don't want him to regress when he was finally doing so well. I was told by the vet that this entire thing was most likely caused by the Baytril he got post surgery and that his digestion just needs some help to return to normal and that the lack of eating was due to him being in pain (Although the only thing I've done different after he started getting better was giving him pain meds.. So I don't want to rule that out of being a reason for his stomach to feel worse again. He's definitely becoming a very expensive little bun, but I'll try anything to ensure I don't lose him to this :(
I definitely don't feel good about needing to get my other bunny spayed after this.
 
Ok, well no baytril. It could be the sugars in the pain meds. The best thing for rabbits with digestive issues, is good quality grass hay(preferably a mix of leaf and stalks). So if you can get him eating lots of that, that will help the most(provided it's not moldy and has no noxious weeds). I would encourage primarily hay eating, even over pellets. Though if he won't eat the hay well, then not much you can do.
 
Yes he was progressing really well until the diarrhea started again. He was slowly starting to eat and hopping around and definitely seemed much more lively.. Then I gave him the pain meds about 10 in the morning and it has slowly been going downhill since then and the feces got worse around 6 in the evening. I will call the vet about the mucus and hear their opinion on it and hopefully they can help him if it's that serious... Otherwise I chose not to give him the pain meds in the evening as I was told to, and I'm going to see if he will feel better again once it's out of his system. He was actually starting to do just fine without the meds, but as the vet told me to i also figured it may relief him of any possible stomach pains.. Maybe he would've been a lot better by now had I not given him that and I feel terrible:(
 
Are you able to get your hands on some small animal probiotics? In the states, they sell them at many pet stores and feed stores/livestock supply stores (BeneBac and Probios are two brand names here; brands may well differ in your country, though). Baytril can be very harsh on the digestive system and can kill off too much of the good bacteria in addition to fighting the bad stuff - it's a good rule of thumb to give probiotics (both to pets and humans) whenever an antibiotic is administered. As JBun recommended, push hay and water and get (politely) pushy with your vet about your concerns. Don't beat yourself up - I seriously doubt that the pain meds are what caused him to go downhill again. It does sound like a bacterial imbalance or infection to me as well.
 
Yeah I find the weight loss to be very scary as well. I will mention the bacterial imbalance and infection to the vet and and ask about the probiotics. I know a nurse vet who also said to me that at their clinic baytril isn't something they like to use for rabbits, but when i went to the vet they just said that they switch between 3 types of antibiotics and change if it doesn't work... I have read several bad things about it as well as been told it can be very hard on them, so when my other rabbit needs to be spayed I will ask them to go for something different (However the clinic has not been helpful during this process so chances are that I will search for a different clinic from now on)... They generally don't seem as concerned about the pets as they are about the money. For one thing when he had the surgery he didn't poop or pee for like 18 hours and i confronted them about it, and they acted like it didn't matter but since then I've only been told that it's very bad for them by everyone else I've talked to.
I really appreciate the advice and I'll keep being persistent with the vet so hopefully he'll recover soon :)
 
If you have access to rabbit probiotics sold in the UK/Europe, Fibreplex, Bio lapis, and Pro c probiotics are the ones I know of used specifically for rabbits. Bio lapis would be the one I would prefer using.

Baytril is actually a very common antibiotic used in rabbits because it is usually well tolerated and rarely will cause digestive upset. But of course there is always the rare chance that it could cause upset in some rabbits. If you were giving it as a syrup, I wonder if your rabbit might just be sensitive to the suspension syrup they use for the meds like baytril and in the pain med. I had a rabbit that I thought was sensitive to suspension syrups, because every time she got an oral med in a syrup it seemed to cause digestive upset for her.

Usually rabbits don't need to be given an antibiotic after spay/neuter surgery. I have never been given it after my rabbits have been spayed/neutered, and I've had more than 10 done over the years. The only reason I can see that they would need an antibiotic, is if during surgery they may have been exposed to non sterile objects, resulting in a higher chance of infection occurring.
 
Even with several trips to the vet, different meds and force feeding he didn't make it in the end. The vet tried to save him but we lost him when we got home again. It has been a terrible experience and I fear for the life of my girl who was going to get spayed. He's now buried and free of pain.
He's the first pet I've had for many years and this has just left me drained and sad and I'm at a loss with what to do now. I've only had him for 5 weeks and he was only 15 weeks old so it's really tough :(
 
I'm so sorry to hear that he passed away... poor little guy; and so young, too! Binky free, little bunn!
 

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