abscess

Question
Hi,

My two and a half year old rat templeton developed a large lump behind his eye around two weeks ago, within 3 days the lumpy/swelling had completely gone down and a large amount of stinky pus came out of his eye which i flushed and wiped out best i could with homemade saline.

Within a week his face started to swell again, 4 days ago his cheek had two openings from which the green pus came out again and his skin formed into a big scab and fell away yesterday leaving the abscess opening. The wound extends into a tunnel like hole that goes behind his eye and has what seems to be congealed pus in it. My vet has got out a large amount of the pus with surgical forceps yesterday (couldnt get it all out because templeton was getting very annoyed and upset) but today the hole is once again filled with congealed pus which is so difficult to clean out! i have even tried using small tweezers to pluck out whats very close to the opening and it simply slips out of the grip! cotton buds dont seem to do the trick either.

Templeton is currently on baytril to keep infection at bay, i have been flushing the wound with the homemade saline twice daily and applying diluted (1:5)  betadine to the wound after flushing.

Im worried about this tunnel behind the eye healing over and trapping the pus inside and he got very stressed and squeaky (unlike himself to make a fuss)  at my vet when the forceps were being used to pick it out. any tips for how i can better clean this stuff out?

Other than that his wound already looked alot better throughout the day today and new skin is already starting to grow from what i can see.

any advice at all would be great help!

Answer
It sounds as though he may need an enucleation (eye removed) in order for this to ever heal. I had a rat (Santana, one of my favorite rats ever!) that had his eye removed after an on going battle that we could never win with infection.  The vet removed his eye, sealed the eye lid shut and he was as good as gold for a few more years.  Never bothered him that he only had one eye.  This of course takes a skilled vet that knows how to work on small exotic companion mammals.  From how it sounds, I cant see any other solution unless I am getting the wrong idea which is very possible since its hard to truly understand a situation through the internet.