This pertains to my previous posts and all of your kind responses – Thank you again! – to “I’m in Agony Cause Don’t Know if My Bun Is in Worse Agony” but since it has chiefly to do with Neuter issues I thought it appropriate to put it under that.

I took Buddie for the neuter surgery yesterday when they opened. No sleep at all the previous night. (See ”I’m in Agony Cause Don’t Know if My Bun Is in Worse Agony.)  When I got the call in the afternoon from the vet hospital that the surgery had gone well and he was recovering and had been fed some Critical Care food slurry to get him eating, I felt relief with a nagging almost subconscious feeling that I should be concerned about something. That turned out to be: why didn’t he want to eat, was that abnormal?   When I got him home, I set him on the bed in his pen and he made his way ambling to his enclosed corner litterbox and settled in there, rested his chin on the rim shut his eyes and went into a deep sleep that lasted about 3 hours. He’d sneeze or gasp, I couldn’t tell which, every 30 minutes or so but slept all the while. When he woke up I offered him a bit of apple peel and for a moment he perked up and bit it, then let it drop to the floor disinterested.  The same response with a bit of banana.  He crawled into his cardboard mini-haven then and went back to deep sleep in there.  When he woke up I tried with banana again and he munched some of it, left some of it. At this point, wanting to stay with him and see if he would eat anything, I went to bed to catch up on my sleep and slept until 2:10pm today.  In all that time, his pellets I’d filled to the brim, hay, and some cilantro I’d left for him were untouched.  I thought his gastric system from not eating anything would go into stasis and I’d lose him. I had been told by the tech that if he didn’t poop or wasn’t eating by morning, to bring him in for syringe feeding.  I was a little heartened when, when I got up, he came out of his mini-haven and came to his pen gate to be petted. Then he went to his pellet bowl and ate 7 pellets. I called the vet hospital and the same tech I spoke to asked if I could bring him in for syringe feeding. I said I had hoped it wouldn’t be necessary but I guess I could. She then suggested I drop some pellets in his mini-haven and try a little romaine lettuce there in case he preferred to eat in seclusion and call back in an hour. She seemed to be right, he ate 16 pellets in his mini haven and then ate the small lettuce leaf I’d put there. I called back and she said he seemed to be on track so to see how he did the rest of the evening and let them know in the morning. I gave him a syringe of pain medication which he very violently opposed but finally  I was able to squirt the medication in his mouth at one point when his head was still.  When I came back from the store, he ate a considerable amount of banana (rabbits aren’t supposed to have too much of it because it contains sugar and too much disturbs the bacteria in their intestine I understand). He also ate some more lettuce. I’m so glad that it’s well into the next day and the effects of the sedation he was under wore off finally. He seems to be getting to be back to his old young self hopping up on the roof of the mini-haven to be petted and sleeping up there to be more sociable with me I guess. I need to syringe feed him the pain medication for 4 more days. He was in his haybox eating some fresh hay I’d put in too. This evening he ate some banana, apple peel, cilantro, Italian parsley, romaine lettuce, pellets and hay.  It’s good to have him back, but I dread the syringe feedings of the metacam that they’re going to be another ordeal.  But I wanted to make sure he got it and was worried if I sprinkled it on his pellets, he’d somehow avoid the medication.