My Velvet Elvis

I've been uncharacteristically quiet about a health scare Paddington has been going through, but now I feel comfortable enough to share it with all of you.

About a month ago, Paddington started pulling back one side of his face. You can see how it looks in the picture above - although adorable, it's definitely not natural. I took him to the vet in late December, who ran a blood culture and didn't see any problems. He thought perhaps it was a palsy and sent him home with Metacam, which didn't seem to improve the situation - although I discovered that Pad LOVES the taste of Metacam and will suck it right out of the syringe.

Last weekend, he started drooling A LOT and it was quite foul-smelling. I got the vet on the phone first thing Monday morning and got him in for an appointment. This time, the vet (Paddington's regular vet, who wasn't available last time - I'm kicking myself for not insisting that we see him back in December!) ran a series of skull X-rays and saw that the root of a tooth was inflamed and pushing on a facial nerve. This is what was causing him to pull one side of his face back (the vet agreed that the expression was endearing and labeled him "Velvet Elvis"). This uncomfortable facial position was causing the teeth on one side of his mouth to dig into his tongue, causing some painful lesions and an infection (hence the bad breath).

The vet put Pad under anesthesia and filed down the teeth that were digging into his tongue. He also performed a laser treatment to help ease the inflammation around his mouth and gave him an injection of a pain med. When they brought Pad back to me, he was awake, but high as a kite. "He was asking us for Funyuns," the vet tech joked. We played with him a bit to get him more awake and then I took him home, along with Metacam, Baytril and a homeopathic remedy similar to St. John's Wort that is supposed to help ease the tension in his face.

When we got home, he was still a bit glassy-eyed from his painkillers and flopped over by the couch. That went on until I opened the refrigerator door - then he was right there and ready to beg for food. I gave him a baby carrot, but in his "altered" state, perhaps he would have preferred Taco Bell takeout!

That was Monday. Two days later, I'm happy to report that the drooling has stopped. It's hard to tell what else has improved because through all of this, Paddington has been his normal, happy-go-lucky self. Even when he was drooling, he was doing binkies and begging me for a piece of the Papa John's pizza that my boyfriend and I were enjoying. Those buggers do such a great job of hiding sicknesses, don't they? When I lost Hemingway, I had no idea anything was wrong until the day before he died, and apparently his system had been shutting down for months.

Pad is going back to the vet next Thursday for a check-up. If he hasn't progressed, the next discussion we're going to have is about pulling the tooth that is pushing on the nerve. The vet doesn't think it's progressed to being an abscess, thank God. I warned him that I didn't want to hear the "A word," and thankfully he didn't have to use it.

Paddington has this uncanny knack for getting sick whenever my finances are finally looking up a bit. Last year, the process of diagnosing him with a severe iron deficiency wiped out all of the money that I had been saving up for a new couch. This time, he wiped out the money I had saved up to spend on a cruise next month. Que sera, sera. In my mind, there was no question that I was going to spend the money to get my boy healthy.

I have to send a shout-out to the wonderful people at the Red Door Shelter for offering up suggestions on what might be troubling Pad, and for talking me down off the ledge I always climb on whenever one of the bunnies is sick.

I'll keep you posted on Velvet Elvis's progress. I'd be really grateful if you could spare a thought for him.