Respiratory Infection!

Ever since I brought Shiva home in October, she'd been making odd popping noises every once in a while when she was working really hard to climb. Naturally, since snakes are prone to Respiratory Infections, I took her to the vet.

Originally, I took her to the vet at Banfield Vet Clinic (part of Petsmart) since they told me they did reptiles. They gave her a series of three Betrol(sp?) shots over a few weeks, and the popping seemed to minimize, if not disappear. However, one night in March she took a turn for the worse.

I had settled down with Shiva curled up on my chest to watch a movie. Suddenly, I found myself wet and sticky and smelling a horrible smell that was similar to canned mushrooms. At first, I thought that Shiva had maybe regurged on me... that was until I turned on the lights to see her blowing bubbles out of her nose. I was about to put her back in her cage so I could do some research to see if there was anything I could do at 11:00 at night when I saw a lump form in her throat. I rubbed it towards her mouth and a mass ammount of sticky mucous poured out of her mouth.

Instead of putting her back in her cage, I took a towel and layed it in my lap and let her coil up in my lap while I went online to find help. All of the vet clinics that handled reptiles were closed. There was an emergency animal hospital open at night, but they didn't handle reptiles at all. I ended up turning to my trusty friend, David.

He advised me to clean out her cage entirely of substrate (I was using cocoanut mulch at the time) and get as much humidity out as possible. He also reccomended that I use paper towels for the time being in her cage for bedding instead. So I set Shiva up on the couch with a blanket to curl up in and went to work cleaning her cage out. When I was done, I put the hydrometer back inside and the readings for humidity were still a little high, so I curled up with Shiva on the couch and there we slept, curled up together until morning.

Poor little Shiva looked miserable when I woke up. I rubbed her throat again to make sure there was no more mucous and instantly called the vet and set up an emergency appointment. I heated up some rice in a sock and put it in a box with Shiva's baby blanket and packed her up for the drive.

Shiva seemed to be feeling a little better by the time we got to the vet. Unfortunately, we ended up sitting in an absolutely freezing waiting room for a while... and then an even colder examination room (with the air conditioning blowing). But the vet gave Shiva a physical and told me that if I hadn't said that she was blowing bubbles the previous night, he'd think she was a perfectly healthy snake. He perscribed some other medication that starts with a C (but I don't remember what it was called at the momment) and showed me how to give her shots every other day.


When we went to check out we found the office visit bill was $75 and the medication was $50! Whooo... pricey. The nurse handed the medication to me and said "Be sure you give her the shot in the shoulder muscle of one of her forearms." I couldn't help but stare at her and raise an eyebrow. "Arms? She doesn't have any arms." The nurse looked bewildered. "She doesn't have arms?!" "She's a snake." "..... Oh.... right..."

Anyway, Shiva was really good about getting her shots, although I could tell that after a month of them she was starting to get a little annoyed by getting stuck with a needle. Needless to say, Shiva has fully recovered and hasn't had any rebouts of her RI.

After this whole incident, however, I switched all my bedding to newspaper and I don't worry about humidity levels unless the snakes are shedding. I also ditched Shiva's humid-hide.

What I learned:

• Newspaper bedding is better than substrate - substrate holds too much moisture, mold, and dust particles that can aggrivate a snake's respiratory system.
• Betrol isn't very strong - find a vet that knows what they're doing
• Humidity can do more harm than good and snakes with high-humidity environments are more prone to Respiratory Infections... but don't let the snake get too dry because that can cause other problems. But a good rule of thumb is that as long as they are in a cage that is not an open-screen top you only need to spray the cages durring sheds and not any other time.
• Snake mucous smells like canned mushrooms.
  

The Little Things...

Now, I found that as a new snake owner I couldn't help but become obsessed with the welfare of my snakeling. Not that it's a bad thing to be obsessed with the welfare of my baby, but I did what most new snake owners do - I checked the heat and humidity of my cage constantly. I found that a glass screen-topped cage was very very difficult to keep heat and humidity in (especially humidity) and so I misted down my baby's cage several times a day.

Unfortunately, misting alone was not enough. The lid let too much moisture escape. I followed someone's suggestion to place a damp towel on top of the cage and cover half the top with tin-foil to hold the moisture in, and it helped a little, but not much.

Regardless of my obsessive misting of Shiva's cage, her first shed with me was an absolute mess. She managed to get the head piece off but patches of her body still had shed stuck all over. I filled a bowl with warm water and placed her in it to soak and loosen the stuck on skin. I sat with her for an hour, watching TV while she soaked and I gently rubbed the shed off into the water. It took a while, but I eventually managed to get every piece off.

Naturally, after that horrible shed, I went to the forums and asked about what to do to make her next shed easier. "Make her a Humid Hide", they told me. So I ran off to the store, bought some Tupperware and some moss, brought it home, cut a hole in the Tupperware for Shiva to slither in and out of, placed the moss in the bottom, and filled the hide with water. Shiva loved it and after I first showed her the humid hide she spent several hours a day curled up inside of it.

The day before Thanksgiving day, 2006, I was playing with Shiva when I noticed one of her neck scales looked a little strange - shrunken and discolored. Upon further inspection I found that she had about 10 scales total that had a similar shrunken and dry appearance. My first reaction was to panic. My second, call the vet and make an appointment. The vet had no openings that day, and they were closed from Thanksgiving day through the weekend so the soonest I could get Shiva into the vet was Monday. I hoped it would be soon enough and consulted the internet. I found no helpful information on the internet, and nobody on the forum I posted on seemed to have any suggestions, so I turned to The Boa Constrictor Manual.

From reading the listings and descriptions of diseases, the only thing that seemed similar to what I was seeing was Bacterial Dermititis. According to the manual, I should treat the disease with Neosporin. I obsessively slathered Shiva with Neosporin several times a day, and by the time we were able to go to the vet she was already starting to go into shed again and the vet told me she should shed out the skin problem fine since I had caught it while it was in the first stages. Sure enough, Shiva not only had a great shed, but she shed out the dried up scales with no problems at all!

(Photos: Top Right- Shiva in her humid hide, bottom three- the dried patches of scales)