Bunny Bon Bon

Question
Hi!  First, I have to thank you for your help in the past.  It was the difference between lifesaving treatment and death of one of my bunnies.  Another time, it led to my getting the proper care for my other one.
My Bon Bon has dental problems.  She went through very difficult dental procedures in the past, part of which was an extremely bad abscess.  This resulted in a broken jaw but after 3 months of hand feeding and antibiotics, she healed.  Unfortunately, her jaw bone healed slightly uneven leaving her unable to chew greens.  She is able to chew pellets, apples, anything hard.  She tries to eat greens but only manages to chew out the juice. leaving the leaf flattened.  We have her at the vets every 1 1/2 months to have her teeth filed and to prevent any more problems.
The problem is that every time we have her teeth done, she is put under.  It's been about 6 or 7 times, now.  She does not do well after, taking from 3 to 4 days to recover.  My other bunny a male, recovers within a few hours.  I have to feed her critical care and pain meds.  After each procedure, I have noticed that her eye above where the abscess was, gets a bit more cloudy.  Now, after her last dental work, the other eye has started to become cloudy.  The vet has confirmed cataracts.  Do you know of anything I can do to stop this from happening?  She has gone through so much, now I dread she will eventually become blind in both eyes.  She is an older bunny about 8 years old but still there must be something I can do to help.  Vitamins maybe?
I appreciate any help you can give me.  Thank you!

Answer
Dear Katherine,

I might want to have a good veterinary ophthalmologist have a look at bunny's eyes, to be sure she's not nursing intraocular abscesses due to molar root infections that have breached the back of the eyes.  If the vet just looked into the eyes without using proper ophthalmological tools, s/he might find it difficult to know the difference between a cataract and an incipient intraocular infection.

If it is her molars that are misaligned, then the only way to continue keeping them from getting spurs is to continue putting her under and filing them.  However, if it's just her incisors, you could ask the vet if it's possible to just sedate her and use a Dremel tool to cut the teeth short.  We do this with several of our rabbits, and it does work, as long as they are generally not wiggly or high strung.

A final option would be to actually extract the problematic teeth (upper and lower), and this can be done even if they are molars.  If all the molars are bad, and all would need to be extracted, this might be better than continually putting her under until she doesn't recover.  I know of several people who have had toothless bunnies.  They are fed pellet "fluff" (you cover morning pellets with a bit of warm chamomile tea or water, allow them to sit for about 10 minutes, and then fluff them with a fork into a fine powder that doesn't need to be chewed) and finely minced vegetables--just as you would feed a toothless human or other animal.

Vitamins are not going to help here.  But a bit of creative treatment might.

I hope this helps.

Dana