Hello from Paddington

After a few episodes of neurological illness last year, in December my Dusty became very ill indeed, and her illness appeared like an inflammation in the brain and was attributed to a brain infection - either parasitic, viral, or fungal. EC was ruled out. Three weeks later, in January, I lost my Dusty. I was having her symptoms too, and on the same day, I found that one of the other bunnies from our rescue group passed away with the same symptoms. Thankfully, it was not too late to do a full postmortem, and we quickly found a vet who could do it, and we found that Dusty didn't have EC indeed, neither did she have any brain condition, and all her neurological symptoms were caused by oxygen starvation in the brain, which was caused by a congenital heart failure. Her illness was called DCM - dilated cardiomyopathy - and she had lots of fluid on her lungs and heart. You can read my posts with more details here and here.

I came from a place that was really quite bad for us bunnies to live: Dusty and I were born in captivity and had so many problems, we never really had a chance for long, healthy lives. For the whole of our childhoods and our first nine months or a year, we lived inside plastic carrier crates, the ones that are used for brief journeys - we actually lived in those. It stunk in there. We had to learn to eat wood shavings in which we lived because there was no hay at our breeding facility. Our water was always green - that's if we were lucky to even have water. Thank you for supporting Helicopter Ears so that we can retire here, in luxury, and so that some of us can find new homes to call our own.

My friends Marmalade, Rusty, Dumpling and Friday were all also checked, and two of them (Dumpling and Friday) have this condition too.

We are not managing to get enough money to for our treatments, and we desperately need all of your help that we can get. Our treatment and checks cost us about £150 a month, and we have also run up a large vet bill with our all diagnoses, so I'm fundraising to cover our bill and this month's medications.

Please donate here, or to avoid Fundrazr fees, send funds to us directly via PayPal's friends and family option, to fundraising@helicopter-ears.org, or to our bank account (Name on the account: HELICOPTER EARS, UK sort code: 09-01-28, UK account number: 30222693). You can also ring our vet, Nine Lives, on 01582763265 and pay towards our bill, quoting Helicopter Ears.

Please donate! We really need your help!

Paddington XOXO