Hi all,

Long time reader, first time poster.  Long story, the important parts the last paragraph.

We picked up our first rescue rabbit named Charles about 3 months ago, he’s getting to his retirement age (6 years).  He is cute and somewhat affectionate – but generally cranky (and that’s a perfect match for us).

Now, we do give him a lot of leeway.  Prior to us he appeared to have lived most of his life in a plastic cage (one of the first things we did was treat some sloghtly sore hocks).  Now the entire living room is his and he has tons of toys and areas (and its a lot of work to clean after him) and all the electricals are well protected. In the day time he gets access to a couple of rooms and a staircase which he absolutely loves racing up and down.

On the advice of the forum… every week the little bugger gets held, cuddled, brushed, and checked head to toe – which he believes is the end of the world.  We even found a big growth about a month ago on his neck (we suspect that’s why the stupid-evil-insideous previous owner gave him up) that turned out to be benign (but was expensive to remove) due to the weekly checks.

Anyway, I digress.  This morning I grabbed him for his weekly cleanup and nervously decided to cut his nails – I’ve done this once before, but he has dark nails so I get nervous.  He usually sits still for me, but pulled away when I clipped the last nail.  It has the tiniest amount of blood, but when I looked close, I can see the whole nail came off except for the quick.  In fact the quick is still in tact.  I have never seen that before with other animals

I stopped the bleeding, and let him play… but noticed this evening he was chewing at the quick .  The last thing I want is him to break it and bleed to death while I’m sleeping (I know, neurotic much!).  So, as a former medic, I figured it was best to wrap his foot up in a sturdy bandage (well, two bandages, the first wasn’t sturdy enough until I learned about vetrap) and monitored him for 3 hours to make sure its solid.

My vet won’t be available until tomorrow, so I will reassess in the morning…  My plan is to keep to bandaged and polysporined for a few days… assuming he will leave it alone.  But I was curious to see if anyone else has encountered this before?  Am I just being neurotic?  The emergency vet advised I give him time to recover, but I thought I’d post here too and see what others may have done.  Thanks for reading my novel!