Holly Thompson
New Member
WE NEED HELP! I'm hoping someone on hear might have some insight: She is 3.5 years old and has had by the books husbandry. Tortoise table with all the proper lights, heat and humidity. She gets soaks at least twice a weak. She has a large outdoor enclosure for the summer, It's planted with all edible plants plus a ton of weeds. 3 months ago she stopped eating. I took her to the u of g where they deal with exotics and we did blood work and an cat scan. Her blood work came back and everything seemed fine just a bit dehydrated. The cat scan showed that she was packed full of food! We put her on antibiotics so the food wouldn't start rotting. After a week she was eating again. We kept her on antibiotics for a little while after this. About 3 weeks after this she stopped pooping but was still eating! I started giving her soaks at least once daily and tried some pumpkin, cucumber etc trying to get things moving. It didn't work so back to the vets we went. We did x rays and it showed that she was full of gas and her intestines were extremely inflamed. There was no obvious obstruction. Next we decided to give her barium and track it through x rays for the next couple of days. She was also put on a metecam ( a pain killer ) and more antibiotics in the mean time. ( no batryl ) The next couple of x rays showed that the barium was kind of spotty and not the white type of line that you would expect to see going through the intestines. On day 6 when the barium should definitely have exited it could still be seen just sitting near the large intestine. However the x rays were still not detecting an obstruction like a rock or substrate. We did more blood work and it came back still looking ok but she was very low in protein. She managed to pass a little hard piece of poop and I had them test it for parasites. It came back negative! So here I am with no clear answers and just a poor tortoise who is sleeping all day, eating 40% of what is normal and still not pooping! I feel bad poking her everyday and we are not getting anywhere! Can anyone help???