Snakewoman
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- May 23, 2009
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I haven’t been around the forum much for a long time, not sure if many here would remember me.
Prince was my favourite python out of all that I’d owned through the last 13 years. He was my second snake; a Murray Darling. He was 7 months old and I brought him home on Halloween in 2009. He changed several people’s minds about pythons through the years, including my mother’s. She didn’t like snakes to begin with, but Prince’s calm and placid nature is what changed her mind.
I offered him a feed towards the end of August and he didn’t seem interested so I left it there for him. This was unusual for him since he’d always been a great feeder. The next morning, the rat was still there. I threw it out, and Prince had gone and coiled up on top of his hide rock. He stayed there for quite a while and then showed the signs of entering a shed cycle. He hadn’t moved much for a fair while, and I felt like something wasn’t right. Because of where he’d been sitting, I couldn’t see his head. I opened the enclosure and moved him so I could see, and I was horrified to find that his head was significantly swollen. He was drooling, and lethargic, and his tongue flicking was slow. I filled a glass of water and he drank from it. I got him an appointment with the vet. The swelling around his head started to go down pretty fast after he started moving around; and had almost dissipated completely a couple of hours later. He got quite active after I moved him.
He had a lump on his belly and the scales around it were quite red. He was given an antibiotic injection and I was given another 8 syringes with antibiotics to give him every 3 days along with an iodine bath for 5 minutes each day. He’d had trouble shedding his skin for the first time in his life, but the first bath helped greatly with that and he let me help him get the skin off. Sadly, the lump in his belly grew quite fast and the scales around it started to die. He was great with his injections, not liking them, of course, but took them well. An x-Ray showed a fair bit of gas around the lump which they said was unusual. He wasn’t showing typical signs of constipation, so they didn’t think it was that. The lump was around where his kidneys would be. It grew devastatingly fast, and I realised on Halloween this year, exactly 13 years after I got him, that he’d need to go to sleep. The vet said that exploratory surgery could be done, but that they could open him up and realise it’s something they can’t fix,and if a lump grows in a snake quickly, it’s usually not a good outcome. It was a hard decision to make. I had him cremated and picked up his urn on Friday. I miss having him around, and for the first time in 13 years, I don’t have any pythons.
The last pics together the day he went to sleep:
Prince was my favourite python out of all that I’d owned through the last 13 years. He was my second snake; a Murray Darling. He was 7 months old and I brought him home on Halloween in 2009. He changed several people’s minds about pythons through the years, including my mother’s. She didn’t like snakes to begin with, but Prince’s calm and placid nature is what changed her mind.
I offered him a feed towards the end of August and he didn’t seem interested so I left it there for him. This was unusual for him since he’d always been a great feeder. The next morning, the rat was still there. I threw it out, and Prince had gone and coiled up on top of his hide rock. He stayed there for quite a while and then showed the signs of entering a shed cycle. He hadn’t moved much for a fair while, and I felt like something wasn’t right. Because of where he’d been sitting, I couldn’t see his head. I opened the enclosure and moved him so I could see, and I was horrified to find that his head was significantly swollen. He was drooling, and lethargic, and his tongue flicking was slow. I filled a glass of water and he drank from it. I got him an appointment with the vet. The swelling around his head started to go down pretty fast after he started moving around; and had almost dissipated completely a couple of hours later. He got quite active after I moved him.
He had a lump on his belly and the scales around it were quite red. He was given an antibiotic injection and I was given another 8 syringes with antibiotics to give him every 3 days along with an iodine bath for 5 minutes each day. He’d had trouble shedding his skin for the first time in his life, but the first bath helped greatly with that and he let me help him get the skin off. Sadly, the lump in his belly grew quite fast and the scales around it started to die. He was great with his injections, not liking them, of course, but took them well. An x-Ray showed a fair bit of gas around the lump which they said was unusual. He wasn’t showing typical signs of constipation, so they didn’t think it was that. The lump was around where his kidneys would be. It grew devastatingly fast, and I realised on Halloween this year, exactly 13 years after I got him, that he’d need to go to sleep. The vet said that exploratory surgery could be done, but that they could open him up and realise it’s something they can’t fix,and if a lump grows in a snake quickly, it’s usually not a good outcome. It was a hard decision to make. I had him cremated and picked up his urn on Friday. I miss having him around, and for the first time in 13 years, I don’t have any pythons.
The last pics together the day he went to sleep:
