Zazu
New Member
Hi everyone,
Apologies for skipping the introduction forum and coming straight here. However, my wife and I are quite concerned with our juvenile Hermann's tortoise Zazu, and we'd be truly appreciative if you could kindly help us.
Five years ago, we rescued a 2 years old female Hermann who was in a pretty difficult condition. Over the past 5 years, she fully recovered and was living a happy life. We became particularly attached to her because of our journey together and she became an important part of the family.
About 3 weeks ago, she started displaying mating behaviour for the first time. Despite her many attempts borrow the soil to lay eggs (unfertilised as there are no males in her enclosure) she wasn't succeeding and so we decided to take her to our local exotics vet for an x-ray. Unfortunately, the x-ray revealed that she had three excessively large eggs and she wouldn't be able to pass them through due to their shape. As such, the vet recommended the eggs to be removed via surgery through an incision on her plastron (plastronotomy?), at which point she'd also be spayed.
Fortunately, the surgery went well and over the next 72 hours she seemed to be recovering pretty well. The plastron was sealed using fibreglass and, even though there were some discharges through it (allegedly tissue fluid), the amount of discharged fluid was going down every day. She's been drinking a good amount of water every day (mixed with the prescribed antibiotics). She also started getting more active, stretching, yawning, urinating, and even shy attempts of eating her food.
However, our vet showed concern that Zazu was still not eating much nearly 96 hours after the surgery and he recommended a one-off tube feeding of critical care food and a round of painkillers to help her start re-activating her digestive system. Things started taking a turn for the worse after this.
About five hours after being fed the critical care, she regurgitated it. To help her alleviate the discomfort, we offered her some water and she drank a decent amount. Immediately after this, she started having very runny diarrhea and defecated three times in about 2-3 hours. The main concern, however, is that the liquid discharge through the fibreglass in her plastron now also contains blood.
Zazu is now staying at an indoors enclosure with a padded flooring (kitchen roll) and no objects she could have banged against in order to somehow re-open her wound. We wonder whether this could have been caused by the inner pressure she exerted at the time of regurgitating and / or defecating. Over the past few days, we've been offering her water from a bowl but today we also started soaking her in warm water (our vet said it should be safe to do after 24 hours but we waited 72 hours just to make sure). We don't think this is necessarily the cause but wanted to bring it up just in case.
Please see a picture of Zazu's plastron from this morning (the paper strips got stuck to her on day 1 while the fibreglass glue was still not fully dry and easily go away with water). Also attached a picture showing the blood discharge (size of a coin) and the diarrhea.
Any advice would be extremely helpful. We are UK based so access to reptile or animal meds in general is difficult. For now, we've bought Tamodine, which we'll use to clean the plastron, although we understand its effect might be limited due to the fibreglass covering. Our vet doesn't re-open until tomorrow morning but we are really concerned about our little one.
Thank you very much for all your help in advance. We sincerely appreciate it.
Apologies for skipping the introduction forum and coming straight here. However, my wife and I are quite concerned with our juvenile Hermann's tortoise Zazu, and we'd be truly appreciative if you could kindly help us.
Five years ago, we rescued a 2 years old female Hermann who was in a pretty difficult condition. Over the past 5 years, she fully recovered and was living a happy life. We became particularly attached to her because of our journey together and she became an important part of the family.
About 3 weeks ago, she started displaying mating behaviour for the first time. Despite her many attempts borrow the soil to lay eggs (unfertilised as there are no males in her enclosure) she wasn't succeeding and so we decided to take her to our local exotics vet for an x-ray. Unfortunately, the x-ray revealed that she had three excessively large eggs and she wouldn't be able to pass them through due to their shape. As such, the vet recommended the eggs to be removed via surgery through an incision on her plastron (plastronotomy?), at which point she'd also be spayed.
Fortunately, the surgery went well and over the next 72 hours she seemed to be recovering pretty well. The plastron was sealed using fibreglass and, even though there were some discharges through it (allegedly tissue fluid), the amount of discharged fluid was going down every day. She's been drinking a good amount of water every day (mixed with the prescribed antibiotics). She also started getting more active, stretching, yawning, urinating, and even shy attempts of eating her food.
However, our vet showed concern that Zazu was still not eating much nearly 96 hours after the surgery and he recommended a one-off tube feeding of critical care food and a round of painkillers to help her start re-activating her digestive system. Things started taking a turn for the worse after this.
About five hours after being fed the critical care, she regurgitated it. To help her alleviate the discomfort, we offered her some water and she drank a decent amount. Immediately after this, she started having very runny diarrhea and defecated three times in about 2-3 hours. The main concern, however, is that the liquid discharge through the fibreglass in her plastron now also contains blood.
Zazu is now staying at an indoors enclosure with a padded flooring (kitchen roll) and no objects she could have banged against in order to somehow re-open her wound. We wonder whether this could have been caused by the inner pressure she exerted at the time of regurgitating and / or defecating. Over the past few days, we've been offering her water from a bowl but today we also started soaking her in warm water (our vet said it should be safe to do after 24 hours but we waited 72 hours just to make sure). We don't think this is necessarily the cause but wanted to bring it up just in case.
Please see a picture of Zazu's plastron from this morning (the paper strips got stuck to her on day 1 while the fibreglass glue was still not fully dry and easily go away with water). Also attached a picture showing the blood discharge (size of a coin) and the diarrhea.
Any advice would be extremely helpful. We are UK based so access to reptile or animal meds in general is difficult. For now, we've bought Tamodine, which we'll use to clean the plastron, although we understand its effect might be limited due to the fibreglass covering. Our vet doesn't re-open until tomorrow morning but we are really concerned about our little one.
Thank you very much for all your help in advance. We sincerely appreciate it.
