Smeag's ruptured eye - she's dead

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T

twitch

Well-Known Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2008
Messages
1,485
Location
Dartmouth, NS
i greet everyone this morning, and smeag's eye looks infected. its not larger then the other but its milky with what looks like yellow crust in the center. my reg vet is closed today, i'm going to take her to my other vet for the time being, but her experience level in rats is very low. any experience or advice you can offer on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

to dahlas and theratlady, this will put me a bit behind schedule in leaving, i may be a bit later then 4:30 getting there, but i am coming.
 
I seem to remember we had a rat here with a white discharge. She was brought to the vet and got special cream. I'll have to ask Nic, I think it was one of hers.
 
i got her to the less experienced vet and she gave me an ointment to put on 4-5 times a day. its called BNP and it has bacitracin zinc, neomycycin sulfate, and polymyxin b. sulfate in it.

the thing is, it hasn't gotten any better. in fact it even looks worse. the eye is now enlarged, almost 2x larger then it should be, and it looks like there may be bleeding in the eyeball, its a dark red. the vet that saw her said that she had somehow damaged her eye. i've checked the cage thoroughly but i haven't found anything that could have caused the problem so i'm guessing it was the luck of the draw and it was either a cagemate or herself scratching her eye or something foolish. she is a hairless, i'm not sure if that makes any difference though

tomorrow i'm booking an appointment with her reg vet to get a look at it and see what she has to say on the matter. i'm worried that they may need to take the eye, i hear it can be very dangerous.

but what is worse, is that i think smeag is in pain. she's much quieter then she ever has been and when disturbed she breathes heavy, no sounds of congestion, just heavy breathing. she's also been bruxxing for no apparent positive cause, so i suspect that that is pain bruxxing. i don't have any metacam but i do have infant's motrin from when stew broke his foot. can i use that? how much would she need? she weighs 300grams.
 
A pain reliever/anti-inflammatory would be a good idea. Many years ago I had a cat whose eye was injured. There was blood all through the eye, and I thought it was hopeless. They saved her eye, and part of the treatment was a corticosteroid. Do you have any Prednisone?

Debbie Ducommun's book says that you can give 15-60 mg/lb of ibuprofen (Motrin), 2-4 times a day. the lower dose is for pain, the higher one for inflammation. If Smeag is not too old (and therefore at risk of heart or kidney problems) you might want to try at least a mid-range dose. Her eye must be swelling fast, poor baby.

My vet said that when dogs or cats have an injured eye they can give something to reduce the scar tissue formation.
 
if your Motrin is 40 mg/ml you can give your girl...

ratguide suggests 10-30 mg/kg (I always have to convert to mg from lb)

300 gram girl, at 30 mg/kg (go for the anti-inflammatory) would be .22 cc, if your Motrin is 20 mg/ml then double the dose.

Is there bleeding into the ocular bulb?

Mayasbloodyeye.jpg
 
that eye looks much better then poor smeags, its gone even more milky then it was just this morning even. i've got a vet appointment in a half hour with her reg vet.

but here is a picture of it just from a few minutes ago.
100_1892.jpg
 
bella?



just got back home. the more experienced rat vet says its not infected, rather it is completely ruptured. the white film that you see in the picture above came off (it was the corenea) at the vet and smeag started bleeding. it now looks much more like an enlarged red blood ball with a hole in the middle... so more like the picture that shelagh posted, except the eyeball is enlarged and it has the hole in the middle.

the proceedure is to isolate from the others for a couple weeks and watch the eye as it shrivels up. during that time i'm to adminster the infant's motrin as needed for pain and to keep up on the BNP cream to ward off any infection. we may or may not need to take the eye at the end of two weeks, depending on the condition of the eye at that time. if it has shriveled up properly we may or may not need to close the eye, again depending on the condition of the eye at that time. regardless, the eye is dead. thankfully rats don't rely much on their eyes.
 
smeag never had the completely coulded eye, she looked at first like bella's pictures on page 2 saturday morning but at the right size for a normal eye. the next day it was doubled in size and there was all this gunk and more yellow crusty crud. then today, this morning, well that's the picture of it up there. now its just red, the center is black and clariflowery looking. the vet says that's the innards of the eye coming out... yum...

so yes, same thing that bella had likely but presenting slightly different in the beginning. i haven't yet read past page 2 on bella's thread so i don't know how that ends yet or how the eye progressed, but so far it seems quite similar.
 
Poor little girl. I'm glad that the worst is over for her. I got Tia's eye taken out because I was afraid of it bursting. It had swollen very gradually. The sudden swelling that Smeag experienced must have been painful.

Lots of kisses to her! :heart:
 
we've been using motrin on max dose for the last while and it doesn't seem to be doing much. just barely taking the edge off. i couldn't get metacam from my reg vet for another 5 days when they got in another order and my other vet only had what she used at the clinic so i was considering just having the eye removed. thankfully though my other vet filled me a little bottle with 1ml of metacam to 2ml of water. i'm hopeful that this will help. she is to get one drop, about 0.03ml once a day.

the eye itself is looking really good today. it has gone down in size from double what a normal eye should be to only about half more then it should be. the color on it is greatly improved though. it is the same color as her normal eye now except that there is a pinprick of yellow just off from center. if you look really close you can still see the hole in her eye though.

i had to take some of the others in for a check to the other vet and magi for his shot so i took smeag with me as well as it was this vet that first saw her on saturday when her eye only looked possibly infected. we decided to give her a shot of convenia as well just to be on the safe side and get any infection that might crop up on the inside during all this. so she's extra covered there, the convenia shot and the cream. now if we can keep control of the pain with this metacam we'll be set to wait it out instead of having to operate.


ETA: lilspaz has helped me correct the dose on the diluted metacam
 
smeag is getting her eye removed this afternoon. we were never able to keep ahead of the pain. i have had a lot of rats go under the knife, my grandmother had to go under the knife on more then one occasion and with her severe asthma it was extra dangerous, even had my human son have to have his ears operated on, heck i've been under the knife a couple times myself, and it may be bad to say this, but this is the most nervous i've ever been for an operation. normally i can stay pretty calm and collected about it all, but this time i'm beside myself with worry. i had to leave her at the vet's overnight and all the way home last night i was fighting myself from turning around and taking her home instead. i know she needs the operation, which is why i didn't give in but it was so hard to leave her there and today its so hard to concentrate on anything, thoughts of little smeag keeps getting in the way... i have 2 tests today before i will know how she did, somehow i don't think they are going to be stellar performances...

so please, keep smeag in your thoughts today and help me send positive energy her way for a easy operation and quick recovery.
 
Awww Smeag,

YOu will have to UP that dose of metacam a lot to keep on top of the pain after the surgery. Find out exactly what pain meds your vet does during surgery and when you can safely give her the next dose of metacam.

Keep upping the dose until she seems more comfortable, you will know when that is.

Good luck!
 

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