A few days ago my beloved bunny, Brenda died during her spay. She was almost exactly one year old and appeared perfectly healthy and super active. The vet did a bunch of blood tests before the spay and they came back normal except for a ‘mild increase in LE’s’, which the vet said was common and not an issue. Right after the surgery, the vet called us and said that she had a lot of hemorrhaging, which they stopped by ligating vessels but that blood was not perfusing her back end and she was ‘paralyzed’ back there after the surgery. They gave us the choice to go back in and try to get blood flowing again. They went back in and they could not get it flowing so we made the painful decision to have her euthanized.

Yesterday we spoke to the vet to try to understand exactly what happened. She seemed to want to leave the level of detail at- she hemorrhaged and blood stopped flowing to her back end. We pressed her and said that we were confused because the only major blood supply to the back of the body is the dorsal aorta. She said- yes, she hemorrhaged from the doral aorta. I asked how that was possible because I didn’t think they would be anywhere near that deep (dorsal) in her body. She said that Brenda’s blood vessels were extremely ‘friable’. A touch with a blunt probe caused multiple vessels to rupture and that she had not seen anything like it in her 25 years as a small animal vet.

We received her surgical records right around the same time as the phone call with the vet (so she had completed them before she spoke to us). In the records, it says that when they went back in to try to get blood flowing to her back end they “Identified the ligated vessel, caudal vena cava”. It also said that in the spay, massive hemorrhaging started when they ‘maneuvered’ a clamp.

Our vet seems to be suggesting that the vena cava, one of the biggest veins in the body, just burst at the slightest touch. Does anyone know if this makes sense? I’ve done small mammal dissections before and I remember those large arteries and veins being quite rubbery. If my bunny was weird and had extremely fragile veins, wouldn’t it have manifested in some illness before this? She was extremely active- frequently jumping feet in the air and it was a full-on wrestling match to ever pick her up. I’m also a little suspicious that when I said ‘dorsal aorta’ she just agreed with me that that was the blood vessel in question even though she had just written vena cava in her report. Perhaps she was just flustered and didn’t expect to be asked for this detail of what happened.

I am not interested in any form of retribution if this vet screwed up. I just want to know what happened to my bunny. I suspect that they slipped or misidentified the vena cava as something they should have cut and then there was no fixing it and she just doesn’t want to tell us this. But could Brenda have just had ‘extremely friable’ blood vessels? I know that rabbits are delicate and spays are riskier, and perhaps moreso on a one year old bunny but this doesn’t make that much sense to me. Would anyone have insight into this?

Thank you for your time,

Coreen