On the edge of life and death…

Sorry that it has been so long since our last post. Its been a difficult few months.  Ash is in her busy season at the accounting firm working 50-60+ hours a week. And I have been pulling in normal to heavy hours myself. On top of this we live in the suburbs of NJ, so my daily commute is roughly 3 to 3.5 hours a day. This takes a toll on us in particular times when you have to care for: feed/clean/provide out time for your animals. This is not even mentioning time to just socialize with your pets, if such a thing exists with reptiles. Similar to our cats most of our reptiles could care less, but then again, just sometimes…there’s a strange glimmer of awareness that we are who were are as humans and they are ok with that.

Looking into the eyes and third eyes of our animals sometimes feels like looking into a whole other dimension.

With this said working our hours makes it even worse when we have a sick animal on hand, even worse is a gravely sick animal.  One of our shelter cats (he’s the smaller white one in my avatar) had a bad case of allergies or a resp. infection and the doctor treated him with ten days of antibiotics.  It cleared up Cali’s wheeze in three days. We will finish the dosage of antibiotics though. This happens almost every winter with that one.

Our King Rat Snake Elaphe Carinata was diagnosed with septicemia and is/was gravely ill.  We are roughly into our 5th week of daily treatment. This has been hard since Ash has late hours, we treat the snake for up to an hour a day and as of current we are doing this at odd hours like 11PM – midnight every day.

At first all it looked like was red blotches lightly pink and barely noticeable (I’m describing coloration changes on the snakes belly and tail end), then it turned into a dark brick red from the snake’s tail all the way up to halfway up the snakes bottom.

That brick red was infection. The sepsis / septicemia is a blood born infection. The body fights it by swelling up cells in its tissue, this has a bad side effect of cutting off the circulation ergo oxygen supply to tissue and organs and that part of the body dies on the snake leading ultimately to death. When nature is merciful septicemia kills in days not weeks and a few weeks at most if left untreated. The treatment for sepsis / septicemia is very aggresive and not for the feint of heart. Monetarily we have spent close to $1,00o on drugs minor surgery to cut off a tail and rechecks at the vet  and other treatment thus far.

The snakes skin is peeling off

The picture that I am including is of the snakes scales and skin falling off literally and this is what the doctor said looked like a huge improvement over the black dead tissue that is on other parts of the snake right now. I’m going to post a sepsis / septicemia post at another time as well as a sequential picture progression of the disease no matter what the outcome is with our King Rat. I think its important  for others to be able to recognize this disease which would never have happened if we were more vigilant with its care and husbrandry. I will explain more about this later. With snakes, temp, cleanliness and food and water have almost everything to do with its health.

For the King Rat Snake, half of his body looked awful, the brick red color on the underbelly of his body turned to black. The black tissue then became yellow and clear puslike both  swollen and shrunken at the same time if that is even possible.  This is in the areas where the tissue was in the process of dying and drying up. This dead tissue will need to be removed ultimately.  In cases such as this, left untreated a snake can catch sepsis and then die in under two weeks. It’s a fast and aggressive ailment.

I would say in nearly all cases it was due to poor husbandry. This fact was/is particularly hard to swallow for Ash and myself – being animal lovers.  It was our fault and ours alone that this snake is dying.  To this end I am starting to catalog the sequence of events since there is not nearly enough information about reptile septicemia and more importantly pictures so that owners can recognize the symptoms. I am at a conference in California right now and can’t post the pics but I will soon.  I think the reason that there aren’t more pics are many: people don’t care enough, they feel too guilty that it was their fault, they were too shaken up over the death of their pet, the disease lays waste and a path of destruction so quickly that no one is thinking about how the pics may help others in the same situation.

Where we went wrong was in the snakes husbandry. For winter we were checking his temps above his heat pad and they were proper but the overall ambient temp of the cage must have been in ‘the low to mid 70s and dropped further into the 60s at night. I had read that sometimes a cool down period is ok for snakes around wintertime and a must for reptiles when they will breed in the spring. So I didn’t think much that the ambient temps were cooler than the 88-90 degree heat spot that it had.  For a sub tropical snake though,  these ambient temps were too low for him to digest properly.  Also we switched his bedding from aspen to cypress mulch which looked better in the cage.

The problem with cypress mulch is that it is pricey and its dark like the color of fecal waste. Often times it makes it impossible for you to tell where and if the snake pooped and urated  this is the worst since the snakes cage is dirty and you don’t know it. Right now he is on just plain paper towels. Clean and easy and quick to replace out. I wish that we never switched him to cypress mulch and put a heat bulb over his cage during the winter months. These two things are what led to him getting sepsis I’m almost certain.  I had noticed that our jungle carpet python (JCP) had a wheeze and some scale rot on his underside around the same time. I immediately upped his ceramic heat bulb and put in some flex watt on the wall of his cage in addition to a fogger. The JCP was as good as new two weeks later after a clean shed.

We brought the snake into the doctor as soon as Ashe’s “sick pet spidey  sense” went off as it normally does when one of ours is sick – the doctor confirmedthe problem as sepsis.  This was 5 weeks ago. The doctor gave us an oral pain killer to administer  daily,  a first line of defense broad spectrum antibiotic (baytril) and a second broad spectrum antibiotic (ceftazideme) that specifically fights pseudomomonas aeruginosa as well.  Pseudomonas is often the cause of sepsis in reptiles. The broad spectrum antibiotics fight both gram negative and gram positive bacteria. In this case the doctor said it was useless to do a bloodwork / culture on the snake as it would be dead before the results came back. Which is why he used the two broad spectrum antibiotics to cover all bases.

The treatment is very aggressive and both antibiotics require subcutaneous injections every other day and every third day for the second line antibiotic. This is coupled with 20 minute soaks in warm water and a second soak in povodone  iodine  wash (diluted with water to a light tea color) , this is finished with a coating of silver sulfadine (silvadene) topical antibiotic on the afflicted skin. We’ve seen the doctor almost weekly for rechecks and he said the snakes condition waxes and wanes like the tides. He didn’t know if the snake would make it but that if we follow this guideline and treatment it would give the snake the best fighting chance at survival.

Two weeks ago the snake seemed lifeless, his shrivelled damaged skin mangled black and discolored, his anus opening pussing, then a week ago he ate a mouse and managed to poop. Btw the weeks prior to the snake taking a mouse, we gave him carnovore care mixture which comes from oxbow to make sure he had calories to keep going.  Last night the snakes skin began to peel. We have been waiting for the pink to go away so that the doctor can debride the dead tissue this is the process of surgically  removing the dead tissue from the snakes body.

Last night the snakes dead tissue began to debride itself and Ash panicked. The reason she panicked was because if the skin debrides and is peeled off, in some cases the tissue damage near the stomach cavity is so severe all the muscle tissue is destroyed as well. When this happens if you debride a snake the contents of its stomach cavity will fall out.  Its skin in that area can be sewn up if there is enough tissue, if there isn’t enough skin, the only humane procedure would be to not wake the snake up from surgery and put it down. When the skin begin to debride itself, I think that thought passed through Ashes mind and she panicked.

It was midnight when she came home from work and I was in California. She called me. I called the doctor and his reception person said he wasn’t available. I told her what was happening and she spoke with the doctor and he said to bring him in anytime. This is Dr. Boren from Oradell Animal Hospital in NJ. Dr. Boren is the doctor for the Bergen County Zoo as well. http://oradell.com/services-staff/ Dr. Siracuse-Parker is the other exotic vet and she is equally good. I think a great majority of vets suck. But I don’t think that about these folks.

This morning the snake went to see the doctor and the doctor said he was really surprised. The snake looked much better and he is much more optimistic about its survival. And was really shocked at the recovery.

Truth be told it was our fault and we just wanted to let you know that if your animal is sick but has a sheer will to live, if you give it a fighting chance, even when on the edge of life and death, sometimes, just sometimes the fates may throw you a bone and let your pet live.

We’re not out of the woods yet but are ever hopeful that the King Rat Snake which remains nameless right now might make a full recovery.  It was a lesson learned the hard way.

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For an update and more photos on this story, see R.I.P Mean Snake and Snake Septicemia: How Our Experience with Elaphe Carinata Can Help You