Emergency Help Needed

a23cham

New Member
on saturday I brought my 10 month old female panther to the vet for treatment on a bacterial infection in her mouth she got probabley from puncturing her mouth on a cricket or something like that. He prescribed me with baytryl to give her orally 1x a day along with a solution to put on q-tips to clean her mouth, since her visit to the vet her health has quickly detoriorated, she is completely dehydrated and refuses to eat and to top it off egg-bound at only 45 grams. she has little to no grip and I am worried I might lose her. please help!
 
I really think you need to take her to a vet again. We can only "guess" at what may be going on....she needs to have some tests run, etc. to see the real story.

What's the solution to put on her lips?

Did the vet clean out the infection?

Do you have a picture of her lips? All of her?

How do you know she's eggbound?
 
have you tried a steam room? what i am trying to say is you turn the shower to hot and run it full power until the room is very steamy. the extra humidity may help for the moment. is it possible to move her cage in there - or better yet, you could use a smaller screen enclosure to keep her in for the time while she is ill. what do you have for a sand box?

i hope she will be ok, but i think another vet visit is a must.
 
I really think you need to take her to a vet again. We can only "guess" at what may be going on....she needs to have some tests run, etc. to see the real story.

What's the solution to put on her lips?

Did the vet clean out the infection?

Do you have a picture of her lips? All of her?

How do you know she's eggbound?

Kinyonga,
I am at A23cham's house right now. I have know him for some time, and he has kept some animals for me in the past. The one thing he hadnt experienced was older females. He saw this girl as being skinny, and thought there was NO chance about her carrying eggs.

I came over to take a look, and she is so filled with her eggs, that you can see the protruding ball shapes on her belly (and feel the eggs), I have delt with many gravid panthers. I suggested to him that if she passes he should take a look for him self (home autopsy). At this point I dont believe another vet trip should be sceduled because in my opinion there is little chance.


The solution is called Nolvasan. The vet drained the pus from the wound also. The inside of the front lips are swollen do to the infection, pictures of the entire animal are coming soon.


Hope it helps,
Jake Bernstein
 
have you tried a steam room? what i am trying to say is you turn the shower to hot and run it full power until the room is very steamy. the extra humidity may help for the moment. is it possible to move her cage in there - or better yet, you could use a smaller screen enclosure to keep her in for the time while she is ill. what do you have for a sand box?

i hope she will be ok, but i think another vet visit is a must.

Hi there,
I recommended a hot shower for her. We put her in with a ficus, her grip is quite weak and she fell. The humidity however seemed to help, she started to try and open her eyes a bit.

The owner didnt suspect her being gravid, so there is no egg laying area for this girl.


Jake
 
 
here are the pics

I guess I'll say it because no one else will. The chameleon appears to be at the end. If it were mine, I would mix up a liquid slurry of food and pedialyte and force-feed. Based on her weight and palpable eggs, she was too thin to go gravid and the eggs are robbing her body of nutrition. I am basing this on her weight at the time that eggs are palpable. Not your fault...a freak timing issue. Your only hope is to try to put in nutrition faster than the eggs can pull it out, but it gets harder in the latter stages.

If you were injecting baytril subcutaneously, you might think about using those needles to inject clean distilled water under her skin instead to rehydrate her. Saw my vet do that once, but thats all I know about that technique of rehydration. If anyone can expound on that, please step in. A few shots on each side, with a pea-sized volume of water is what I would try based on what I saw my vet do. Alternately, load up the syringes with the right dose of baytril, and then combine it with a pea sized volume of water. Be sure and get out all the air bubbles.

In the short run, adding some emergency nutrition (though unlikely) could get her to perk up enough so that you could consider having the eggs removed either surgically, or with oxytocin...I think the eggs are her worst enemy right now. They will likely rob the nutrition faster than you can put it in, unless they are going septic or something which is worse. I don't think you could add enough nutrition now to get her all the way through the egg laying process. But to be honest, its likely too late regardless of what you do. If the eggs are viable and she is near term, you may consider sacrificing her for the eggs.

I wish you good luck,

Steve
 
when I saw her as I came home from school the result was unsurprising but still upsetting that she had passed. Thank you to all that helped me in this time of need for me. Unfortunatley I was too slow to see the signs of her distress
 
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I'm so sorry. Don't be too hard on yourself. We've lost chams, too, and it's always heartbreaking. But we take with us the things we've learned, and it makes us better keepers.
 
Sorry for your loss. Its never easy. Hope you won't give up on chams. It was bad luck for her to go gravid when she was down like that.
 
Aside from the injury, was she showing severe distress before the baytril?

Or did she start to go downhill fast AFTER being put on the antibiotics?
 
i am so sorry to hear about your loss dont give up even the best cham keepers loose some somtimes it is just uncontrolable. i am sorry.:(
 
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