Rabbit neuter gone wrong

[HannyKrany]

Hi everyone! This is gonna be a long post, so please bear with me.... First of all, long story short, I found out about a week ago that my female rabbit is actually a male. I posted awhile back that I found him on the side of the road. Anyways, yesterday I brought him in for his neutering. I got a call at 10:30 am saying hes out of surgery, and waking up good. 3:30 rolls around and I go to pick him up. I get home around 4 and let him hop out of his carrier and into his cage, which btw is small for his recovery. 4:05 and he’s bleeding. I call the vet and ask what I should do, and they suggest and cold compress. I start applying the compress, and by this times he full on actively bleeding. I call again and they say continue with the compresses. I tell them compresses will NOT stop his bleeding, because he was bleeding a lot. His whole underside was just caked in blood. So I finally convince them that i NEED to bring him in. I get there and the vet was absolutely shocked by the amount of blood. She cleans him off, quite roughly I might say, glues him back up and says he’s good to go. Okay awesome. I bring him home, and 15 minutes later he’s covered in more fresh blood then before. I rush him to the emergency vet, and they finally truly get the bleeding to stop. They tell us that he could of pulled an internal suture, but couldn’t say for sure. They also say he’s got a blood clot in his right ball (for lack of a better word). So they keep him over night with an IV drip with fluids because he lost so much blood. 10:00 that night I call, and they say he hasn’t started bleeding again, and that he’s just chilling. 2:00am I call and they say he’s doing great and accepting syringe food. 6am I go and pick him up. They have a soft e collar on, because he kept trying to lick where he was bleeding from. I get him home, and he just chills for a bit. He wouldn’t eat anything until I offered him some banana. He stubbornly ate that. Later in the day he started to eat a bit of hay and forage. At this time he also starts drinking. Also his e collar is off while eating and drinking, it’s only on when I’m not able to monitor him or stop him from licking. So far he’s doing better then I thought. He poops, but they are little irregular looking, which I think would be expected. I have not noticed any pee yet though. Should I be concerned, or does it maybe hurt to much to pee at the moment? They also prescribed him pain meds. 2 1/2 doses to be correct and administered every 6 hours or as needed. So I guess my question is, has anyone experienced anything like this before?

 

[Blue eyes]

That sounds like a nightmare. That vet who did the procedure is one I doubt you'll go back to.
Hopefully your bun will continue to improve. Poor thing. (And poor you to have to go through that.)

One of the members here who have more medical knowledge may have more insight or suggestions.

 

[cwebster]

Poor bunny. Hope he is all better soon.

 

[Popsicles]

I’m so sorry, that must’ve have been really stressful for both you and your bun. I’m glad to hear he has improved! Has he peed since your last post? How is he doing now? I hope he is healing better.

That sounds like a nightmare. That vet who did the procedure is one I doubt you'll go back to.

It is a really unfortunate consequence of surgery that sometimes stitches fail, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the vet is any less competent or that he did anything wrong. These things unfortunately do happen.

 

[Blue eyes]

It is a really unfortunate consequence of surgery that sometimes stitches fail, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the vet is any less competent or that he did anything wrong. These things unfortunately do happen.

Agreed but, in this case, the vet's response was not good -- first dismissing the severity of the bleeding (somewhat understandable until she saw it),
then being rough with clean up,
then gluing him back up only to have that also fail in a very short time.

Then the emergency vet had to wonder if there was an internal suture issue,
found a blood clot, and
had to keep him overnight with IV because of amount of blood loss.

Makes me wonder if the original vet considered the possibility of an internal suture issue, if the blood clot was missed (or just hadn't occurred yet), or why they didn't see a need to keep a closer eye on this rabbit (by keeping him longer).

 

[Popsicles]

I completely agree from this account it does sound like things were missed that maybe shouldn’t have been, but it’s just worth remembering that what we see as clients is often completely different to what the vet is seeing. You wouldn’t believe how many people call up and say their pet is pouring blood post surgery, and it is really just some oozing from the wound, and you don’t know how many times just gluing up a wound is enough to stop the bleeding eithout any further issues. Yes in hindsight things could have been done differently but there are always two sides to any story, and medicine just isn’t a perfect science; there’s always things that could have been “done better” but seemed the right thing at the time.
Basically, it is a really unfortunate thing that happened and I would totally be upset if it had been my pet, but it doesn’t necessarily make the vet any less competent as we just weren’t there and also don’t have the medical knowledge to make those judgement calls.