SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, on Wednesday I awoke to find one of our 2 year old 100% het for albinos with her head looking funny in her cage. Mind you the only things in our boaphile cages are corrugated cardboard beading and large terracotta pot and a plastic water dish. The first two shots are prior to surgery as I found her. Pep had in a sense "swallowed" half of her bottom jaw. She had eaten 7 days prior and was in shed at the time this happened. Being a surgical Vet tech I had access to a surgeon within 1/2 an hour after I found her. The lower right jaw had disarticulated from her lower right jaw and inverted down her tracia. The teeth on her lower jaw where actually holding her esophagus in a kink which was causing trouble intibating Pep during surgery and actually caused a hematoma (blood clot) inside the jaw and made the inversion of the jaw unable to un-articulation and right itself. My Vet was more than happy to help and pull the jaw out of her mouth with out slitting cutting Pep’s skin. She drained the fluid out of the hematoma and flipped the jaw into place and then sutured the two lower half’s of the jaw together with dissolvable sutures. As of right now Pep is doing great! She is on a strong course of antibiotics and is on a strict no eating for three weeks diet to allow the jaw and muscles to heal a bit. I thought this was the most unusual thing I have ever seen and I am thankful that I have access to a wonderful reptile surgeon at my beckon call and thought I would share these pictures and stories with you. We have never seen anything so weird in our entire time owning snakes and to top it all off my Vet had never seen anything even close to this before in her 15 years of practice or in her 38 years of reptile owning. As far as we can tell what happened was that during the beginning of the shed cycle Pep had rubbed or pulled the jaw which caused the inversion.
Just wanted to share and see what everyone thought. In the pictures the bottom of the jaw is actually visible down the throat by looking at the red marks which is blood from where the teeth are digging into the throat skin and pushing through to the other side. The side view shows you the extent of the issue. And the third picture is during surgery while the doctor is inverting the jaw.
We are very lucky to have such a great vet!
Sincerely,
Rose Aguilar
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www.srsnakes.com
