Hi CornSnakeBabe, thank you for your kind words. Many people thought of me a fool, for trying to nurse my pet snake back to health. One even called me obsessive for calling the biggest reptile shelter in the Netherlands and asking their top-3 list of reptile vets.
I’ll try and writer her whole story down, and knowing me it’s gonna be a long piece of writing, so I hope you don’t mind.
This snake, my first, is a Pantherophis guttatus, or cornsnake. She’s a snow, meaning white with a little yellow, she’s female and 7 years old at the moment. September last year she suddenly regurgitated her mouse, so I separated her from the rest immediately. I placed her in a separate tank, watched the temperature and gave her a hideout and big water bowl she could soak in if she wanted to. I decided to watch her a few days, if she would eat again and digest her food, I’d place her back. She ate, digested her food, I brought in a sample of her faeces, it got checked by the vet, she got clearance and I placed her back with the 5 younger snakes. (note: experienced people often tell to house your snakes separate, this is completely correct and should be done especially when you have multiple snakes, as my story will support later on cause some diseases are VERY contagious) But nonetheless I still house some snakes together due to food refusing snakes when they’re housed separate (especially Ball Pythons), or young snakes (Pantherophis)
Everything went well for a few weeks, then she regurgitated her food again mid November. I separated her again and called the vet to run some tests, but he told me this wasn’t necessary, for the faecal tests told she was fine. Cause my vet never misjudged anything before I didn’t persist. Then my 1 year old striped female suddenly lost weight rapidly, and within 6 weeks she had been to the vet 4 times, they ran (faecal) tests, told me to force-feed her with liquid-food to get her weight back up, gave her medication so she wouldn’t regurgitate, but couldn’t find what was wrong. She died at New years eve, a few hours after I had picked her up from her box, looked at her and saw her eyes telling me she couldn’t go any further, so I didn’t force-feed her, gave her some fresh water and made her a small dark sheltered hideout for her to spend her last hours in. She was just over 40/45 cm in length and weighed 63 grams when she was ok, after six weeks she only weighed 26 grams.
I brought her in for dissecting and tensely waited for the vet to tell me what was wrong cause the 7-year-old female also dropped in weight. Several days went by, I phoned, they told me I had to wait a little longer. Days became weeks, and finally the vet told me he didn’t find anything. I couldn’t believe it.
In the meanwhile the 7-year-old kept regurgitating and I got Metocloral drops and Kaopectate, which I had to administer her every other day. (0,2 ml each) Because her stomach and guts didn’t work the way they should and her faeces contained parts of her insides she got this medication to calm her insides down and stop her from regurgitating everything she ate. It helped for a while, she ate 2 preys during the treatment and digested them, too. But the moment I stopped her meds, she rapidly lost weight again, regurgitated even her liquid food and looked like she dehydrated by the hour. I called the vet again, asked him if I could get another faecal test for her, but he told me he didn’t find anything during the last 4 or 5 tests and as long as she didn’t digest anything he couldn’t test her again.
At 31-12-05 I got another prescription for her meds, again Metacloral and Kaopectate. I administered it to her every other day and noticed she continued to regurgitate even while she was on medication. I called the vet again, cause she kept dropping weight and looked worse by the day. He suggested continuing the medication, but something told me 1) he just didn’t know what was wrong with her and 2) the meds wouldn’t work. So I asked a second opinion. He told me he was discussing the matter with another vet and a second opinion was already made; the other vet ALSO didn’t know what was wrong with her?! I couldn’t believe this, how could this happen? What did I do wrong, did I make her sick? Doubt and guilt haunted me during these days. I asked what to do now, and he told me again to continue the medication, but he didn’t even ask if he should re-dose the meds! I told him her weight had dropped till a mere 159 grams and after that he told me to administer 0,1 ml of both meds daily.
I got frustrated and even my search on the Internet didn’t provide any answers. I wrote to reptile keepers, shelters, hobbyists, and nobody could tell me what was wrong with her. I also visited a lot of forums on the net but they all started telling me I didn’t house her the right way! I know that if they can find anything wrong inside the animal, the problem should be in the housing, but I answered every single question and they discovered nothing was wrong. The humidity, the temperature, her hideouts, a large water bowl, everything was all right. Her tank measured 2.00/50/70 btw, and I used to keep her together with 5 younger cornsnakes, all faecal-tested before put together. Her quarantine-tank measured 60/40/40 and there wasn’t anything wrong with her housing in that tank, too. But cause nobody could find anything they all told me I handled her wrong, I housed her wrong, gave her the wrong food, etc. I even restarted 2 new colonies of mice when she first got sick, just to give her higher quality food and smaller prey items than the large mice she used to eat, so that couldn’t have been the problem either, but as I ruled out all their options they got offended or something and started discussing everything I did wrong in their eyes on the forum, and I left cause I was actually hurt by it. I tried to find anything that could possibly save my snake I’d kept for 5 years now, and the only thing they could do is telling me I didn’t take good enough care for her.
At January 19 I got the results from the 1-year-old snake telling me there was nothing wrong with her, only thing visible was she was very skinny and had a little fluid in the lungs. (she died on the side of her water bowl and slipped in it with her head, it only measured 1cm deep) But then the vet told me if he didn’t have known me as the owner, it would look like I had let her starve to death! I couldn’t believe it, he actually told me with the look of his eyes he partly believed I mistreated her! That was the final straw.
I called the largest registered reptile shelter (Serpo) in the Netherlands and asked for their top-3 of best reptile vets of the country, and called number one. She asked me how I housed her, what I fed her, what the tests told, what she was tested for, and what the results of the autopsy on the younger snake were. Because I never got the papers of the dissection, I called my own vet. But when he heard I had contacted this very highly recommended vet he sounded like he didn’t want to help me. So I gave the new vet his number so she could ask him the questions she had. She found out the dissection wasn’t done properly and he should have tested on Parrot’s Disease and Cryptosporidia too. But it was too late for that, cause the corpse had been thrown away already.
I was told by the woman-vet to test the snake on Parrot’s Disease at my own vet, cause she is a very busy person. (gives colleges at the university and is a reptile vet and even does surgery on koi carps) I phoned my own vet again, but only got the assistant telling me they didn’t have time for me the next 10 days, if it was important I should find myself another vet for they really didn’t have the time to take a faecal test in less than 10 minutes. (!!!)
I was desperate, and called back the 2nd vet. I asked her if she could please test my snake, for my own vet practically told me to ‘take a hike’. Guess he couldn’t live with the thought he didn’t know what was wrong with the snake and I asked too much questions he couldn’t answer or something. I was almost in tears cause she really was my last hope.
I could come visit her the next day and she took 6 different tests, told me to quit the medication I gave her, immediately (I did so already, cause she seemed to get more sick from it, and got stable as soon as I stopped it) and give her a mixture of Waltham (supplemental food for nursing back cats) easy to digest food like baby food (thanks for the tip Kathy Love!) water and NutriBAC.
The next day I got her medication: Bactrimel 48mg/ml. She told me the odds where against the snake and the chance of her recovering where almost zero. She would be very lucky if she made it till half the treatment. This was for the Cryptosporidia. Someone on this forum told me to check her for cryptosporidia, which is visible by a large swelling at the stomach. Unfortunately, the medication suppressed the swelling so the Cryptosporidia wasn’t diagnosed until I had stopped the medication for 2 or 3 days.
After 5 days the results were in, the snake suffered from Cryptosporida (which we knew already, only waited for the test results confirming it) Parrot’s Disease and a kind of fungal disease also causing her to not be able to digest her food. I got 0,13 ml Vibravet and 0,13 ml Nystatine a day for 10 days, after that, test again which resulted in another 10 days of treatment. Next to this she got 0,17ml Bactrimel a day for 60 days in a row, and a de-worming treatment (Panacur 2,5%, 0,26ml, repeat after 10 days) just in case. Next to this I had to give her water (at least 2,5 ml a day) and the Waltham/NutriBAC/Babyfood mixture every other day (I made her a new mixture every time and sometimes saved some in the cooler but never more than 2 days)
With this treatment, she stayed in a critical condition for the first 10 days, not moving unless it was really necessary and making a real ill impression. It was almost bad enough to make me decide to put her down humanely if it wasn’t for that spark still present in her eyes and my best friend telling me if I thought she’d still wanted to live, to give her the best possible treatment available. She measured 1,14 m in length and weighed 127 grams at the moment I brought her in at the second vet. Within 15 days she gained 10 grams in weight and I couldn’t be more proud at her.
After all this she’s still looking skinny, but she never weighed more than 250 grams so she’s been underweight since the moment I got her (got her from a pet-store 5 years ago that couldn’t find her in her cage, she turned out the be pregnant, dehydrated (pale mouth, weird eyes, looked like someone poked in them), had respiratory problems, was too small for her age, had mites, couldn’t eat on her own anymore, etc)
But at the moment she’s looking skinny, but healthy again. I restarted my mouse colonies and breed my own mice especially for her (I’ve got a lot more snakes, I run a small reptile shelter myself, (boa constrictors, ball pythons, hognose, horsfieldii tortoise, leopard/fat-tailed gecko’s, common house gecko’s, cornsnakes, ratsnakes, etc) but buy their food at a breeder cause it’s good food and not expensive, 0,40/0,60 cents (euro’s) for a hopper/adult mouse, 0,70/1,50 cents for a hopper/adult rat) but because I want her to regain her strength I feed her crawler and hopper mice so she can eat/digest more easy.
I hope if someone ever gets in a situation like this, he can use some of the information from my story and save his/her snake. If you don’t trust your own vet: find another one for a second opinion as soon as possible. Diseases can spread very rapidly and are most of the times serious enough to be lethal to your snake, or any other reptile. Every second counts. So if you house your snakes together, check them annually for diseases or separate them to prevent diseases from spreading through your animal collection. If someone wants to ask me a question considering this whole story you can send me an E-mail
Greetz,
HellSing.
ops: Yes, I meant 1.14 m, haha. But she's still very small, always been. She never weighed more than 250 or 300 grams the most, but I'm SO glad she made it. Don't laugh, but at the moment the vet asked me (by phone) what my decision was, I looked her (the snake) in the eyes and thought to still see a spark of light in her telling me she wanted to keep living, and at that exact moment a song from Evanescence (Bring me to life) played, and there's a clear line in it that I never noticed before, saying: 'don't let me die here...' So I tried, and I'm VERY glad I did. Cause all the vets told me she wouldn't make it, and she DID make it. Oops, sorry for the story, still so glad she's almost completely ok again. I just brought the final tests to the vet today, and if everything went ok, she's tested completely healthy in a few days 
