The bu-bu recessive glaucoma may be a bit different from the adult glaucoma. It came on suddenly! I was down on the floor playing with him and his eye was expanding right in front of my face. I knew something was really wrong and threw him into the car to take him to our then 24-hour vet—I had just moved so that was a 2-hour drive. I was afraid his eye was going to explode. They stabilized him for about two days with the Tobramid/Dobramicile and then I was back to them; then sent me to a UK-trained exotics specialist who was closer to me who worked closely with an animal opthalmologist. We added cosopt. Less than five days later we added a very expensive eyedrop which began with a P, I can’t think of the name of it now ; ; He was getting all of these and I had to wait a certain amount of time between drops . . . 3 times per day. That did pretty well for awhile but then we ended up adding the most effective but least expensive medicine — It’s a Bausch & Lomb product for temporary relief of glaucoma . It is essentially a very high concentration saline solution that draws fluids outof the eye osmotically. I had really hoped to preserve some of his sight in that eye although all literature says they go blind in the one eye between 4-7 months and it doesn’t tackle the other eye. Well, he was in extreme pain and it had gone on long enough that we were pretty certain most of the sight tissue was dead so she anaesthetized him and injected gentamycin to kill the eye (which was VERY painful for two days, I had not been expecting that) while also neutering him. Contrary to the literature on bu-bu, he seems to have a very mild amount of glaucoma in his other eye but it doesn’t seem to bother him. . . . I found it surprisingly unmanageable . . . oh, yeah, I had him on a pretty heavy dose of a table t too –I’d have to look it up at home. Vets tend not to like oral meds because they worry about sensitive GI tracts, but this med — methizadole (/)– was for him the most effective and certainly the most cost effective. (Al these were human medicines that my vet ordered for me at the regular pharmacy because it was cheaper than getting it at the vet; trained in the UK she considers most human meds to have been safety tested on rabbits before ever having been tested on humans. . . I think there is something to that.

He is pretty careful about his eyes, a slow mover through his environment because he’s disoriented. I know he is lonely and look forward to the day when I can bond him with the others and they can be seeing bunnies for him. . . . . I wish I could remember the name of that expenseive drop for you. I can look it up tonight. It has very quick onset in relieving pressure as measured in the vet’s office. The high saline (non-prewscription) Bausch and Lomb project really makes them wince and doesn’t last many hours but is extremely effective and based on simple technology–osmosis.

The thing with the bu-bu gaucoma is it strikes in only one eye, around 4-7 months and often “works itself out”. Somehow the tear duct figures things out and starts working okay on its own. That was what I was hoping for for Bronson but I finally concluded he was suffering too much for me wanting pie in the sky and had it deadened since no vision seemed preserved at that point. And that’s usually what happens/. By the time the tear duct sorts itself out, the eye is blind. Of course, it is very painful so the more you can manage the pain, the better off you are. Also, at least with the bu-bu variety. it is very hard to manage, very unpredictable, I was always having to improvise new doses and regimins of the various medicines to try and keep it under control. It was personally very stressful that it was not more predictable. I don’t know if it is that way with an older bun. But once the eye was killed, and those first awful days of pain completed, life was MUCH, MUCH simpler. . . . Let meknow about how Vivian is doing.