NORTHWEST HERALD (Crystal Lake, Illinois) 06 February 06 Snake struggles with cancer
Ingleside: Jackie's overlapping scales spread as she coasts slowly to a ceramic dog bowl, tipping her brown face to the water and drinking with her hummingbird-quick slip of a tongue.
Volo Bog State Natural Area's fox snake moves more slowly than most four-legged pets, but movement isn't the only thing that her lack of legs prohibit. Veterinarians can't find veins thick enough to allow chemotherapy, so Jackie's high-grade melanoma cancer can't be treated through an IV.
"If you get it outside the vein, it usually damages the tissue and causes big, huge sores," said veterinarian Steve Barten of Vernon Hills Animal Hospital in Mundelein.
Barten removed three tumors that were confirmed cancerous from Jackie in November. Friends of Volo Bog covered the bill. Thousands of people have handled Jackie during the 12 years she's lived in the visitor center's lobby, helping many overcome fears of snakes, naturalist Stacy Iwanicki said.
Radiation and chemotherapy have not been studied as much in snakes as it has been in cats and dogs, so determining doses provides another difficulty. Snakes' slower metabolism means that cancer will spread more slowly than it does in humans, but Jackie's illness likely will be fatal.
"Because it's a high-grade tumor, it's likely to come back," Barten said. "But to say it's going to come back in two months, six month or a year – it's just a flat-out guess."
Meanwhile, the snake's sutures have healed, leaving only slight distortions in her scales. Iwanicki kept Jackie in a special reptile tank at her house in December so no rough edges or bacteria interrupted the healing process. She returned to Volo Bog last month.
Jackie is approaching the record age for a fox snake. Barten, who has a 23-year-old corn snake, said the longest a fox snake has lived is 17 years. Jackie was hatched in captivity from captive parents two or three years before she was donated to Volo Bog in 1993. Since then, she's grown a foot-and-a-half, reaching nearly 4 feet inside a 40-gallon terrarium.
Jackie's still active, moving among slate rocks, pebbles and a wide tube. And she's getting a little more than her usual two or three mice a month during the winter.
"I'm going to start feeding her a little more, because Dr. Barten wants us to fatten her up," Iwanicki said. "If she had a little more [weight], she'll do better when the cancer sets in and she doesn't want to eat too much."
Snake struggles with cancer