Thistle almost got out of his annual vet exam yesterday with the cleanest bill of health of any member of this household, until we asked the vet about the strange dead skin on one of his toes. It looked almost like dandruff, or a hangnail: a whitish, sebaceous-looking crust around the base of the nail.
The doc poked at it, clucked a low note of concern, and whisked Thistle into those mysterious veterinarians’ back rooms for x-ray and skin scraping. When the pictures were ready to read, they showed some bad news: two of the toes on Thistle’s right hind foot needed to come off ASAP.
It looks like a progressive osteomyelitis: the distal phalanges on the outer two toes are completely gone, and there is every likelihood that the infection — if it is an infection — could work its way up the bone and require amputation of the foot.
As it is now, Wednesday’s surgery will essentially be a partial declawing — a procedure that some people (wrong-headedly) have done to their rabbits for convenience’s sake, and which is thus as routine as any rabbit surgery save neutering. His pad is in good shape, and if he can make it through post-op without gnawing at the site he should be fine in no time.
This often happens, the vet says, when rabbits get a toe snagged on something. Where a dog or cat in such a situation will turn around to investigate whatever it is ensnaring them, a rabbit’s first impulse is to flee, often dislocating the toe and setting a stage for infection.
Thistle doesn’t seem to be in much pain, and he’s cooperating with our little twice-daily oral administration of liquid antibiotic much more patiently than either of us could have hoped. And his foot should look basically the same post-surgery as it does now, I’m thinking. But yikes just the same.
I don’t even want to think about how much time I’ve spent at vets in the last decade and a half. Between my rat Fraida (last name Katz) and her tumors; Zeke and his constellation of gastrointestinal complaints, pancreatitis, skin tags, and minor injuries; guinea pigs with bad teeth; frogs with eye infections; and — in one memorable case — a snake with a rat bite; I think I’m ready for that sad day in the not-too-distant future when we have an animal-free household for a while. I’m not in a hurry, you understand. The boys are the second brightest spot in my average day.
But I think Thistle is the last new pet for a while. I’m tired of fallling in love with things with much shorter life spans than mine. I can almost understand why the ignorant reject the notion of evolution: it would be oddly comforting to think that this parade of suffering that we call life had some purpose grander than making another litter of rabbits.
