Day 2

May 25, 2010

This morning we had an endoscopic exam for the Blue and Gold Macaw scheduled for 8 am. We put her under anesthesia to scope her cloaca to check for any abnormalities that might cause her diarrhea. Since her fecal came back negative, and the antibiotics were almost totally ineffective, Dr. Leo decided that the next step in discovering her problem, and making a diagnosis, is endoscopy. However, when we scoped her cloaca, we found nothing remarkable aside from her papillomas. Dr. Leo cauterized the papillomas with silver nitrate to eliminate any possibility of them causing some unforeseen irritation to her GI tract.

After the endoscopy, UPS brought three large boxes to the clinic, which I assumed were medical supplies that Ms. Sandy had ordered. However, when Will and Dr. Leo went rushing out the door to meet the UPS guy, I realized something else was arriving. Then I noticed that each of the boxes had words like “perishable” and “this side up” and “handle with care” written on the sides. Within minutes, it was like Christmas morning at the clinic! Everyone on staff rushed into the treatment room where Will immediately sliced through the tape on the smallest box, rummaged through the newspaper packing material, and pulled out a cheesecloth bag that moved on its own! When he opened it, out crawled a lime-green prehensile-tailed (or “monkey-tailed”) skink. Will informed me that monkey-tailed skinks are originally from New Zealand, and run about $2000 to buy. These animals were obtained by a reliable source who was trying to find the animals a good home after rescuing them.

Then came Dr. Leo’s present! Will took the initiative to begin opening the medium-sized box, while Dr. Leo stood by with anticipation. Once again, he pulled out a ridiculous amount of newspaper from around another cheesecloth bag, and opened it. This one, he opened a little more carefully. When he was ready, he released the beast into one of the large bathtub-like sinks in the treatment area. A beautiful grey-blue colored iguana with silvery scales came lunging out into the tank. She was surprisingly feminine in appearance, and even became lighter and more beautiful as she calmed down. Dr. Leo was thrilled! This iguana is called a Blue Hybrid Iguana. It is a hybrid of both a Blue Iguana from the Grand Cayman Islands, and a breed of Cuban Iguana, and is worth about $700.

Then came the largest box. This one was about four feet long and three feet wide. Will continued through the same exciting, almost ridiculous ritual with all the newspaper and the cheesecloth bag (which, I later learned, is the proper way to ship a reptile overnight via UPS!) until he revealed a massive, very dark, strong, handsome iguana with two horns on its nose that made it look extremely prehistoric and mean! This guy was Will’s new prized possession: A Rhinocerous iguana, which can be found on the island of Hispaniola, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, worth about $1000 to buy and even more to house, feed, and properly care for.

Will and Dr. Leo had each spent the last few weeks building cages, adjusting and testing their heat and UVB/UVA lamps, acquiring foodstuffs, and researching their new pets so they would be completely set up and ready for them when they arrived. (If only every person interested in obtaining a new exotic pet would be as diligent as these two… well, then again, we’d all be nearly out of a job if that were the case so… we’ll just concentrate on education) After Dr. Eckerman-Ross, aka Dr. E, got to enjoy the company of the skink, and the rest of us got to take about a million pictures, Will and Dr. Leo packed up their reptiles, and took them home during their lunch breaks.

After lunch, it was back to work! We had a rabbit arrive with a clogged naso-lacrimal duct, which is very common in pet rabbits. We flushed out her ducts using sterile saline and catheter tubing which Dr. Leo inserted into the puncta, or the openings to the lacrimal ducts. In order to know if our flush was successful, we watched the bunny’s nose for dripping saline. This lets us know that the ducts are open, and/or that we removed any debris, mucous, etc. that was blocking them.

After the eye-flush, we did an annual visit with a Serval Cat. A Serval is generally a little over twice the size of an ordinary house cat and looks a little bit like an Ocelot. The owner walked the cat in on a leash with a harness, and it behaved surprisingly well for a wild feline.

Later in the day, we did wing and nail trims on a blue and gold macaw and an African gray, we saw a boa constrictor with a nose lesion and a mild respiratory infection, and a hedgehog with a severe tooth abscess which was euthanized due to the cost of the surgery and supportive care that would be needed afterward.

We also saw a very sick parakeet that was acting lethargic and was constantly puffed up, which is a sign of illness in birds. This particular parakeet, however, was actually eating constantly and losing weight quickly which is a hallmark sign of a disease caused by megabacteria, which is actually a yeast organism, and not bacteria at all. The yeast overgrow in response to stress and other factors, and can be treated with a special formulation of amphotericin B which is added to the bird’s drinking water and labeled especially for the treatment of megabacteria.

At the end of our evening, we saw a leopard gecko with swollen joints. This condition is fairly common in captive leopard geckos because of a couple of reasons (such as metabolic bone disease or a systemic bacterial infection causing abscesses in the joints), but most commonly due to poor husbandry practices. However, this particular gecko was less than a year old, and had been kept correctly, according to the history and the explanation of husbandry practices from the owner. Therefore, it is possible that this gecko had a congenital kidney defect that caused it to be unable to filter uric acid (the metabolic waste product of reptiles) out of the blood. This leads to the accumulation of urate crystals in the joints and sometimes the organs. The treatment for a condition as progressed as this is generally palliative and can include surgery, allopurinol (to reduce further accumulation of urate crystals in the joints by decreasing the uric acid levels in the blood) and pain medication. Dr. Leo lanced one of the swellings for a cytology exam to look for urate crystals to confirm her diagnosis. The view under the microscope was of textbook quality, and definitively diagnostic of gout. Although the disease cannot be cured, the prognosis is grave, and Dr. Leo’s best recommendation was euthanasia, the owner decided to take the gecko home on allopurinol and pain meds to wait out the inevitable. Dr. Leo thinks it will be less than a week before the owner brings it back for euthanasia.