Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Followup to my post below.
My Honduran layed five good eggs between Wednesday night and noon on Thursday. By Saturday morning it was clearly apparent that she had at least two more in her and couldn't or wouldn't lay them. The eggs were all the way down near the cloaca and her body was -very- distended looking. Not wanting to take any chances, I took her to the vet at 11 on saturday. The Vet lubed her up a bit and gave her an injection of Oxytocin (informing me that not all snakes respond to it, as suggested by Terry and others..) At any rate, she gave me another dose to inject after an hour or so if nothing happened. Which it didn't. Second dose administered and still no action. So we need to go back to the vet tomorrow and probably have the eggs drained. Gah!
Not a pleasant way to have my first clutch! How in the world could I have prevented this?!?
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-Paul

Not sure how you could have prevented it.

I have an eastern king egg bound for no apparent reason (far as I know no one has mixed her up with the male king to have gotten her preggers). It started out with the first egg prolapsing the oviduct which meant a trip to the vet to have the egg aspirated, teased out and the oviduct pushed back up. After that we though a 'wait and see' period to see if she would pass the rest of the eggs naturally. Many days later she finally gets around to laying...gets one egg out and blocks up on the others..very distended body now, but the eggs are not even close to the vent at all like one would expect. So another emergency trip to the vet. Xrays showed 8 eggs. The vet could not manually remove the eggs due to their placement so it meant surgery. Two incisions and 9 eggs later, she's good to go (ie she's alive and breathing). I get to pick her up tomorrow. The vet did say he took a culture swab to send off to be tested to see if maybe she had some kind of infection inside that ultimately led to the dystocia problem....long shot theory, but we'll see.

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Wyvern

Here is my theory based on a few experiences.

Give female milks larger cages, give them an adequate laying box(es), and don't overfeed during most of the year (but you can still feed heavily in Spring before the mating).

There may be other factors, and it is possible that certain females may retain eggs no matter what, but doing the above will definitely help matters. I had a female sinaloan have stuck eggs (I was lucky and got them out.) After moving her to a larger cage the following season and keeping her more fit and trim, she didn't have problems again.
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Mark

Went to the vet and had the eggs aspirated today. The vet was worried that the eggs may have begun to harden and we wouldn't get much out of them, but we actually drained them pretty fully. Poor girl had three more eggs in her. Now, hopefully, she'll pass the deflated eggs sometime soon (nothing yet.) Failing that, we go back to the Dr. tomorrow and try to pull the eggs out if possible. Failing THAT, we talk surgery.
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-Paul

Well, we managed to get two of the three eggs out pretty easily today. She didn't pass them on her own, so we had to gently pull them out with forceps. Those first two were stuck together and actually came out fairly easily. Now we wait a few days to see if that last one moves down towards the cloaca at all and then try the same procedure with that.
Of the two that came out, the second one sort of looked like you'd expect a deflated normal egg to look like, but the first one was very discoloured and really oddly shaped. It might have been the cause of all this in the first place.
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-Paul