I know I might have complained a few times about having to share with Maple Bunny (okay, maybe more than just a few times), but I take it all back now. Poor little Maple is very sick.

The photo above was taken earlier this month when I was having a little chat with Maple about not eating quite so much of my lettuce. Now I wish I had never said that.

But let me explain what happened.

Last Friday, August 24rd, Melly went out to the front porch to pet me and Maple and maybe even Oakley although she is a bit standoffish. She immediately noticed that Maple’s right eye was all messed up. It was almost sealed closed with goop and under the goop, the eye was white. Melly called Maple’s vet right away! She got an appointment that day and took little Maple in.

The diagnosis wasn’t good. The vet said the problem wasn’t her eye at all, it was her teeth. She told Melly that Maple had an abscess, a kind of infection, in her upper right teeth. The abscess caused swelling and the swelling caused Maple’s eye to bulge out. When Maple’s eye bulged out, she couldn’t close her eyelid all the way anymore. That caused her eye to dry out and made sores on it called ulcers. The ulcers was what Melly saw.

That is really a long, terrible sequence of bad things that happened to Maple, but there is more to come.

The vet said that Maple would have to have surgery to remove her teeth but that couldn’t be done until Monday. The surgery was going to cost anywhere from $600 – $1,000. Melly says she thought about that for a long time but I don’t think she did. I think she knew all along that she would have to get the surgery for Maple. That’s good to know, just in case. Only now she calls Maple, Maple WoMER and says it stands for World’s Most Expensive Rabbit. I wonder if that is true.

So Monday morning, Maple went into the vet for a long, terrible surgery. She had 6.5 teeth removed. The vet couldn’t get out the last .5 of a tooth because she said there was too much bleeding. She also told Melly that she wasn’t able to get all the infection out and that it was very extensive and probably involves the bone. On the positive side, she said Maple might be able to beat the infection off on her own with the help of antibiotics that she is getting.

Maple is pretty miserable now. Her eye looks worse, although the vet said to expect that. She doesn’t hop around much and Melly has to feed her special food using a syringe four times every day.

Maple did manage to sneak out of the house today and onto the front porch. She even met briefly with Oakley, whom I think she really misses. Hopefully she will get better and be able to come outside with me, Oakley and the chickens soon so we can have food fights again.

I’m going to close with a couple of photos of Maple WoMER from happier days, although in the photo above she is not particularly happy.