My vet is very good; he sees the most reptiles in my area.

Anyway, I took in a boa this winter, and I knew it had a RI, so I brought him in for a check up and some meds.

My vet did the same types of checks that your vet did, and to my surprise he said he is in good health, but skinny.

I'm not a vet but I knew this was wrong. I thought to myself, I deal with the snake daily, he sees it for ten minutes, maybe he missed something???

Well about two weeks later he started to blow bubbles out of his mouth, so I cranked up the heat and made another appointment to see the vet.

Here is the good part of the story.

So the snakes symptoms start to get a little better from the increased heat, and the bubbling wasn’t constant. Get this, my vet checks him over and says he is in good health. We both looked in his mouth and it was clear, so now I’m saying to myself “am I losing my mind??? This snake has a RI you know it does”. I was the Dr.’s last appointment for the day, so we stood around and BS’ed for a 15 min. or so. I was holding the snake the whole time, and after about ten minutes of the snake climbing on me he started to wheeze and blow bubbles. I showed the vet, and we looked in the mouth, and it wasn’t clear anymore.

The conclusion of the story, 1) vets can make mistakes based on severity of the symptoms (even good ones). 2) Symptoms can hide themselves so I always take my snakes out and handle them for about ten minutes before I look in the mouth and check them out.



Sorry for the long post, hope it helps with your situation.

TomChambers

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