Hi! I have a 5.5 year old rescue English Lop who is, quite frankly, a medical nightmare. I’ll go through some of his health history to give important context but I’m certain I’ll forget some stuff.

main issue: severe respiratory disease that started a few months ago after developing pneumonia seems to be the same (terrible) despite several antibiotics, nebulizer, humidifier, changing carpet, medicated eye drops, and nasal cleanings. He’s my baby and I’m worried nothing is working.

background:

rescued 4 years ago, later learned he was used for breeding previously then dumped at a farm auction where the person I adopted him from rescued him. I realized about 4-5 months in that he had dental issues. CT showed severe dental disease that spread through his bones.

we treated him with antibiotics for a few years to control aggressive disease and osteomyelitis. His gut didn’t handle it well and he still has regular medications he takes to function. At some point, he was on pen-g and developed an allergy. He went into anaphylactic shock. So no more penicillin!

calcium deficiency (maybe from disease or maybe genetic?) caused his bones to be very brittle. I have UVB lights I keep that helped decrease how bad they were getting. He is very fragile however and broke his jaw on something unknown. Seems to have recovered okay but I have to be very careful with him.

He won’t eat hay. My guess is that it wasn’t provided when he was used for breeding and so he never became accustomed to it. Regardless, he’s had so many teeth pulled, it’s impossible to eat a lot even if he wanted to.

in July, he developed pneumonia. He had been mostly off of antibiotics for nearly a year but of course went back on them to clear the pneumonia. It took until probably mid-September, but we cleared the pneumonia. However, one antibiotic he was on (metronidazole) caused GI issues every time he started titration to get off. We finally got him fully off about 2 weeks ago by adding azithromycin to Enrofloxacin. He’s still on both.

At some point over the past 5-6 weeks (I’ve lost track), he developed breathing issues. He started choking on nothing, sneezing and coughing a lot. Doctor thinks it’s post-nasal drip. It hasn’t improved no matter what we do.

he’s on azithromycin, Enrofloxacin, Metoclopramide, Meloxicam, gabapentin, cisapride, acidophilus, simethicone, and medicated eye drops. Those aren’t helping. He’s in a large room to himself with 2 litter boxes with crumbled paper litter. He had a large fluffy area rug but we thought the high pile may be causing issues so I bought a new low pile rug. That didn’t help. We used a nebulizer 2x a day for a few days, that also didn’t help. Room humidity is around 40%. I got a humidifier to try to increase it and that didn’t help. I got one of those tubes to get snot out thinking that might help his sinuses – nope.

main issues are wheezing , breathing extremely rattly, sneezing, and periodically choking on nothing at all. He’s eating but not as much as he should so he’s losing weight. I can’t syringe feed because he also chokes on the medicine he happily takes – syringe feeding will be worse.

I don’t get it. He’s going back to his vet in the morning but I’m really worried they won’t know what else to do. Has anyone experienced something similar? Any thoughts?