I promised an update for how Roy was doing with his head tilt, and well here it is. As you can see in the video above, he’s recovering remarkably well, considering this is only day three. The doctor gave me 14 days worth of medicine, so if this is any indication of how treatment is going, Roy the bunny is well on his way to a full recovery!

His appetite is great, he seems to have boundless energy, and he’s happily munching away on his pellets again (he didn’t want to eat them when we first diagnosed him with wry neck, only eating timothy hay from time to time). I’m much relieved.

And if you’re wondering, he’s still in love with smushed up banana, so administering his Baytril medication (pill) is no problem whatsoever.

I remember several months ago when I tried applying to ReviewMe (aff) to no avail. Apparently, Beyond the Rhetoric wasn’t nearly popular enough to be worth their while at the time. After all, ReviewMe has much more stringent demands on which blogs they accept compared to PayPerPost (aff), who will take on just about any comer. Well, after John Chow went out and did his Technorati pinging scheme, I got a huge boost to my Technorati ranking which currently sits at 78,469. That’s quite a bit better than the number I had before (well north of 100k). You can further help my cause by adding my blog to your Technorati favorites.

Anyways, seeing this good news, I decided to try my luck again with ReviewMe. Posts done for them tend to pay a lot better (Chow’s rate is $250) than PayPerPost, so I figured it’s definitely worth a shot. Bang, poof, wham-o: immediately upon telling them about Beyond the Rhetoric, I got accepted and am now in their marketplace, ready to accept reviews from advertisers. They determine the rate on your behalf and I got appointed with a rate of $40.

I know that it’s really short notice, but if you order up a review from me by the end of February (meaning the end of today), you get 50% off of that price. And it’s not like I’m new to ReviewMe either, having done a few for John Chow already.

One step closer to dot com mogul status for me. Anyways, here’s my ReviewMe profile page. Click on the ReviewMe widget guy in the sidebar to order a review from me.

P.S. On a side note, I’ve also noticed that my Feedburner RSS subscriber count is up into the double digits! Triple digits can’t be far behind, right? Help me out and subscribe to my RSS feed.

When I showed my previous post to Susanne, she said that it didn’t clearly show the definite tilt to Roy’s head. Other people said that it just looked like he was a little groggy and was just turning his head to munch on some timothy hay. So, I thought I’d make another video to show you how Roy is doing (this was taken last night).

As you can see, my poor little bunny’s head is askew by about 20 degrees or so. I gave him his first dose of Baytril this morning by cutting up the pill into tiny pieces and mashing it together with a piece of banana. Roy very happily lapped that up and asked for more. I wonder if he’ll grow tired of banana over the next couple of weeks. (Maybe that’ll be my next vid, Roy eating Baytril-infused banana.)

Anyways, here’s the vid. Sorry about the dim lighting.

As many of you already know, I have a pet bunny named Roy. Generally speaking, he’s been a pretty healthy rabbit. I got him neutered when he was still quite young, but while at the vet’s, he suffered a mild infection on his rear foot. That healed up without too much trouble. This little bunny is also missing a toe on his front left paw because of an unfortunate accident. Other than those two little things, he’s always been in tip top condition with a healthy appetite, lots of energy, and a whimsical, curious personality. Imagine my shock last Friday evening when I saw him in the corner of his cage, a little lethargic, with his head cocked to one side.

Upon further research by Susanne, we discovered that this was a very common condition among pet bunnies, particularly those who are lightweight and live indoors (because they stay closer to the litter pan). Head tilt, also known as Torticollis or wry neck, can be caused by all sorts of things, but the most common are inner ear infections, head trauma, strokes, tumors, and cerebral problems. Symptoms include a lack of appetite, loss of balance, discharges from the eyes, circling, and the tendency to lean on the sides of the cage. Naturally, we were very concerned for our poor little rabbit.

I haven’t had the best of experiences at Atlas Animal Hospital on 41st and Fraser, despite the fact that they are supposed to be known for providing world class care at a price that average people can actually afford. I’m not going to get into details, but it seems that their facilities (and care) are far from “world class.” As such, for this rather serious problem, we sought out a different veterinarian. Based on the recommendations from the House Rabbit Society and a couple of REVscene members, we decided to take Roy to Anderson Animal Hospital near 70th Avenue and Granville in Vancouver.

My initial impression was that the office itself was cleaner and more organized than at Atlas. The doctor (Dr. Anderson) was very kind and explained everything very well. You might even say that he explained a little too well, telling me things that I already knew about the inner ear affecting balance and so forth. Anyways, we had to leave Roy there for about five hours as they sedated him, did up a bunch of x-rays, and looked at his half-asleep body from just about every angle.

When I went to pick up Roy, the doctor told me that his suspicions appeared to be true. Some resident bacteria (Pasteurella) from the back of the throat had migrated to the middle and/or inner ear and caused an infection. The resulting inflammation (seen from the x-rays) was what was causing Roy’s loss of balance (and head tilt). They had shot him up with some antibiotics and provided me with some Baytril in pill form to administer to our little bunny over the course of the next two weeks. Obviously, Roy won’t want to pop these on his own, so I’ll need to mash it up with some yogurt, banana, or diluted apple juice to get him interested. After all was said and done, Susanne and I had paid over $400 to the Anderson Animal Hospital for their help. This covered the sedative, the radiographs, the patient care, the shot of antibiotics, and the take-home medicine. Not exactly cheap, but I wasn’t about to go frugal over Roy’s health and well-being.

As you can see from the video above, Roy was pretty hungry when he got home, but he had not yet fully recovered from the anesthetic (they needed to sedate him in order to take the x-rays). Even as I write this (five hours after taking Roy home), he’s still a little groggy. I’ll keep you posted on Roy’s progress.

I recently went out for another dot com pho adventure, but this time around there were far fewer people at the table. Anyways, Stephen Fung brought up a PayPerPost sponsored entry I did on UK credit cards, asking if I felt dirty for doing blog posts like that. After all, I don’t have very much to do with UK credit cards, so why would I be writing about it?

Well, I don’t really have any excuse or shame associated with doing posts like that, because even John Chow said that PayPerPost is the most profitable ad network for low traffic blogs, considering that we lowly beginnners can’t get in on the IntelliTXT, TTZ Media Network, Text Link Ads or ReviewMe gravy trains. I like PayPerPost because it also helps inspire me to write about things I may not otherwise think about… like UK credit cards.

In any case, I thought I’d repost a comment I made on Stephen Fung’s blog, replying to the question of whether “PayPerPost Posts Make You Feel Dirty.”

How did I know that my UK credit card post was going to show up on this blog?

Sorry for the long-winded comment, but without my blog working, I have nowhere else to say this (I’ll probably repost this comment there when it’s running again).

Yup, I’m more than just a Google whore (as John Chow once called himself). I do the AGLOCO (aff), Text Link Ads (aff), and PayPerPost (aff) thing(s) too.

On a side note, I’m happy that my blog is up and running again. It’s been down for the majority of today, but it seems to be fully functional again. The main freelance writing site is working too, but there are still some strange kinks that need to be ironed out. I suspect it has something to do with domain registar transfer.

Is there any denying that John Chow is the root of all evil? He’s been known to kill baby pandas and to instigate unsolicited rock fights in China, after all. The self-proclaimed dot com mogul recently made his way to an affiliate marketing dinner here in Vancouver, and that is where the above picture was taken (by the proudly unemployed Stephen Fung). That’s pretty close to Exorcist material, John. We all knew that you were possessed by the devil; now we have proof.

Update: Thanks again to Stephen Fung, we have also discovered that John Chow has come out of the closet with Ian Lee of the Affiliate Marketers Alliance. How else can you explain why Ian would be sitting on John’s lap… Mr. Chow looks pretty happy too.