Thumper Has the Most Terrible Time.

Thumper relaxing

They say things come in threes, well it certainly did in the bunny shed.  As if Toffee having a stroke & battling over a pain killer plan for Daisy wasn’t enough, Thumper was the next victim of illness. It all started one morning when I noticed he was being picky at breakfast. I tempted him with his favourite treat, he refused it, then I knew something was very wrong. I immediately suspected he was starting with gut stasis. I dosed him up on the appropriate medication, which is painkillers & gut stimulants, & monitored him.
By afternoon he had improved but was still not right & then by evening he deteriorated. He felt very cold too, so immediately I set up a basket with a heat mat & brought him inside overnight.  I turned the heating up in his room & provided him with food, drink & gave him more medication. I continued to monitor him. By morning he was a lot better. He had eaten some pieces of vegetables, had urinated but hadn’t pooed.
Thumper is very much a stress head & I knew the best place for him was to be back in his own pen with Katie. As he felt warmer & he had improved so much I put him back in his pen.

Thumper Looking more comfortable.

I also decided to give him & Katie free run of the shed to hopefully get him moving about so his guts would start to pass things through. The weather was in our favour too so they were let out under supervision.

Katie not sure about the step down.
Thumper not bothered, out straight away.
Thumper ate a good amount of grass.

Whilst outside Thumper ate a good amount of grass, visited Peanut who was out in his pen & even started to binky.  I thought this is great we’ve cracked it & to further support this Thumper ate his tea. You can imagine my shock when I went to feed him his breakfast the following morning & found Thumper looking gravely ill.  He was shaking, breathing fast, no interest in anything & looked so uncomfortable. I immediately gave him the medication & quickly got him booked in at the vets. By the time we had got to the vets, Thumper had stopped shaking & was looking a lot better. The vet said the painkillers will have kicked in by now so that explains why he was better. The vet examined him & couldn’t hear much gut movement but fortunately there wasn’t a huge amount of gas build up.  He was given a thorough check up, his temperature was a little low & his heart checked out ok;  it was confirmed as gut stasis. I left the vets with Thumper & with increased dosages of painkiller & gut stimulants to give him. Once home I got his heat mat out & it was time to start syringe feeding him.
That afternoon he deteriorated & I had to call the vet.  It was decided to up his painkillers as it seemed pain was knocking him for six. He eventually settled. By morning he was just as bad again so another call to the vets & he needed to be x rayed, bloods taken & possibly a scan.  This was to check that nothing else was going on.

Thumper settling on his hay.

Thumper’s X-ray was fine, he had no sedation as we didn’t want that risking slowing his guts down even more.  His bloods all came back within normal range which was a surprise given his age of 9.5 yrs. There was no need for a scan. They had managed to get liquids into him & syringe fed him some food but the vet said he needed to come home asap because he was so stressed at being there & all the handling. The next few days we got into a routine of meds & syringe feeding him & trying to get him moving about. The syringe feeding was very stressful for Thumper so it got to the point I stopped for a day thinking I would do it every other day. However, the day I stopped syringe feeding him was the day he started to make improvement. He seemed brighter & was attempting small pieces of food. Not daring to leave him without some syringe food I did start my plan of every other day but he took a step backwards. I quit the syringe feeding & everyday he started to make little improvements, mind you I was tempting him with everything under the sun. It’s possible the stress of syringe feeding was hampering his guts recovery. Over the following week he made good improvements everyday & we finally got to the point where I felt I could back off some of his medication. I did this over several days & he showed no ill effects. By this point he was more or less eating normally. The less he was handled the better he became.  To date Thumper is back to normal & gaining weight. His poos have more or less returned to normal.  Whilst ill they were very black and small.

On the right are Thumper’s very small currents, middle is when he was improving so they were larger and the left is a normal sized current.

I have to admit, I have never had a bunny with gut stasis go on for so long.  It is suspected this was partly because of his age & the fact he is such a stress head bunny the handling stress hindered his recovery. We have no idea what caused it as nothing had changed. Hoping never again!

Thumper able to fully relax with his Katie.

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