Day 14

6-10-10

Early this morning, some good Samaritans brought in two fawns that had obviously been abandoned.

Sometimes people get confused as to whether the doe was just “parking” her fawn, or actually abandoning it. A doe will regularly park her fawn (or fawns) in an open field, bedded down in the tall grass so that she can find better forage without risking her baby being seen by a predator. Fawns have almost no odor, so unless a predator stumbles across them while walking through an open field, they won’t be detected. The problem is that people will stumble across them and assume they’ve been abandoned because they don’t see the mother anywhere. In the case of a parked fawn, it will be bright and alert, clean, healthy, and very still.

An abandoned fawn will be obviously sick, dirty, and possibly even be covered in maggots, as was the case with the two we got this morning. Dr. Dan and I started IV catheters of 5% dextrose, gave them subcutaneous fluids (LRS), cleaned their wounds, flushed their navels with dilute chlorhexidine, and packed their wounds and navels with SSD. We then placed them into a large incubator together and tube fed them with our newly engineered baby fawn formula.

After we finished caring for the fawns, we tended to Dr. Dan’s appointments, because they were really beginning to pile up. He sent me in to take care of a simple appointment to recheck a wound on a guinea pig. Dr. Leo and Dr. E had removed an abscessed lymph node from this guinea pig’s neck about a week ago, and the client was not comfortable caring for the wound herself. Therefore, for a small fee, we do it for her! Kelsey and I flushed the wound and packed it with an herbal antibiotic powder called Golden Yellow. The client was pleased to learn that the wound was healing well and that she only needed a few more treatments.

Also this morning, we had another appointment with the rabbit belonging to the lady-with-the-seven-year-itch. It still wasn’t back to normal so Dr. Dan decided to do a barium study to see if we could visualize anything abnormal with her digestive tract. We had to take radiographs at time zero, thirty minutes, one hour, three hours, four and a half hours, and six hours after we administered the barium. It took all day! By the end of the day, the barium study showed us nothing more than a bunch of what Dr. Dan calls “doo-doo balls” in her digestive tract that were larger than they should be. He decided to try a method called transfaunation. It’s pretty gross, but it’s the best way to introduce good bacteria into a rabbit’s digestive tract. Dr. Dan collected fresh “doo-doo balls” from one of our healthy donor rabbits, and mushed them up with some water. He then added the mixture to some herbivore critical care hand-feeding formula, and drew it up into two 10cc syringes, and fed it to the sick rabbit. Hopefully he will be able to form regular-sized “doo-doo balls” in the next day or two.

Near the end of the day, we tube fed the fawns for the third time, cleaned their wounds, and disconnected their IV pumps. They seemed to be doing much better now because they could finally hold their heads up and were responsive to touch, sight, sound etc. I was a little uneasy about letting them go the whole night without a feeding, but the last fawn did fine overnight and Dr. Dan didn’t seem concerned, so I guess they’ll be okay.