Ear infection seen on xray?

[FrankieBun]

This is my first post on the forum, but here goes —

I was recently out of town for about two and a half days to attend my boyfriend’s graduation from college and I left my rescue mini lop Frank (who a previous vet aged 1-3 years old this past December) with my roommates (one of whom is a great rabbit momma, so I know she’d take good care of him).  The morning after I got back, I noticed that Frank wasn’t putting any weight on his back right leg when would hop around, and he was very clearly in pain.  I rushed him to a nearby emergency vet to see what had happened, and none of my roommates knew what had caused this injury to his leg.  After a physical exam, the vet told me that he was likely 6-7 years old rather than 1-3, and that the hip and leg pain was likely due to arthritis.  (This seemed strange to me since just a few days before he had been running around and jumping up on the couch completely pain-free).  Additionally, she said he was severely dehydrated (even though he had been drinking lots of water — more than my roommate’s bun — and was still urinating), so she thought he might’ve had some kind of kidney issues.  

They did bloodwork to make sure his kidneys were functioning properly and an x-ray for his leg.  The blood work showed his kidneys were fine but his liver values were a little off, and they said that the x-ray showed some slight arthritis in his right side (so it was likely some kind of soft tissue injury that he sustained while I was away), an inflamed liver, and severe inner ear infections in both ears!!!  These things do not just happen over the course of two days, so he must have been ill for a long time.

At this point I was SHOCKED. His last check-up was in mid-December and that vet didn’t see any of these issues at that time.  He was so energetic and outgoing before the leg injury, and he’s never shown any symptoms of  an ear infection before (no head tilt, no obvious signs of pain, no discharge or smell, no excessive head shaking).  Has anyone ever heard of severe but symptomless ear infections being diagnosed via x-ray??  He’s currently on antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory (and I fully intend to keep him on his medication for the duration of the prescription to be safe), but this whole situation just seems so strange and scary.  I’m so concerned and confused — I just want Frank to be ok!

[Bam]

I didn’t know middle ear infections could e diagnosed by x-ray, but I looked it up and it seems to be a good method: http://www.medirabbit.com/EN/Neurology/Otit/otitis.htm

(Medirabbit is a good and trusted source of rabbit medical info).

The symptomlessness is of course unusual, although it could perhaps be more common than we’d think – “silent” ear infections could go undetected because owners (quite obviously) wouldn’t take their buns in to have the ears checked when there are no symptoms.

A middle or inner ear infection doesn’t cause discharge because the infection is contained inside of the tympanic membrane. In such a case you can’t take a samle for culture without piercing the eardrum, so instead the vet has to choose antibiotics that target the most likely causative bacteria. Hopefully the one you got will do the trick. (There is some info about common causative pathogens in the article I linked to). The antiinflammatory gives pain relief as well as helping the inflammation calm down, so that’s good too.

Many good healing vibes for (((((Frank)))))

[Author]

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