Autopsy news
May. 24th, 2007 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mad_andyWell, we did the autopsy - which is to say that A__ (new lady vet, german, very interested in exotics medicine, yay!)did it while I watched very very closely.
It was fascinating, if rather frustrating.
Why frustrating? because he was in excellent body condition. Pads of fat where there were supposed to be pads of fat, plenty of skeletal muscle, no wasting away or anything like that. No parasites that were immediately obvious.
Into the body cavity and it struck me how damn neat snakes are inside. Everything is laid out tidily with no wasted space - unlike mammals, whose autopsy's can be gruesome things due to lots of space, fluid and squashy bits. (Technical term ;) ) But I digress.
Lungs, look fine. Opened up, no haemorrhage or evidence of lung disease, which shot down in flames my initial suspicion - fungal pneumonia. No fluid, nice and pink and the most amazing structure. Heart, fine. (It was incredible to actually see the heart - I've read a lot about the three chambered heart, and seeing it was awesome.)
Liver, fine. Kidneys, fine. Gall bladder, smelly but fine. testes, pancreas, all the organs we could find? All looked just ticketyboo.
Then we got onto the gut, and that was where things got interesting. When the stomach was opened we found lots of the hemp substrate that he'd been kept on; clearly, he'd last been fed (always been fed?) in the same enclosure he lived in and had swallowed some. And although he'd digested his meal, the chunks of hemp had remained...
Small intestine, empty. Rectum - again, jammed with substrate.
So - although we hadn't done lab tests, sent off any samples or any of that malarkey - it appears that he'd swallowed some substrate (god alone knows when) and eventually suffered a fatal impaction. Why hadn't the material passed through? Could have been the shape, could have been any one of lots of reasons but from what we could see, that was the cause of death.
Poor George. He was dying long before I ever came across the poor little mite; I just hope that his last week wasn't too uncomfortable.
And shoudl I ever keep this species again? Feeding will most definitely be done in a separate container!
It was fascinating, if rather frustrating.
Why frustrating? because he was in excellent body condition. Pads of fat where there were supposed to be pads of fat, plenty of skeletal muscle, no wasting away or anything like that. No parasites that were immediately obvious.
Into the body cavity and it struck me how damn neat snakes are inside. Everything is laid out tidily with no wasted space - unlike mammals, whose autopsy's can be gruesome things due to lots of space, fluid and squashy bits. (Technical term ;) ) But I digress.
Lungs, look fine. Opened up, no haemorrhage or evidence of lung disease, which shot down in flames my initial suspicion - fungal pneumonia. No fluid, nice and pink and the most amazing structure. Heart, fine. (It was incredible to actually see the heart - I've read a lot about the three chambered heart, and seeing it was awesome.)
Liver, fine. Kidneys, fine. Gall bladder, smelly but fine. testes, pancreas, all the organs we could find? All looked just ticketyboo.
Then we got onto the gut, and that was where things got interesting. When the stomach was opened we found lots of the hemp substrate that he'd been kept on; clearly, he'd last been fed (always been fed?) in the same enclosure he lived in and had swallowed some. And although he'd digested his meal, the chunks of hemp had remained...
Small intestine, empty. Rectum - again, jammed with substrate.
So - although we hadn't done lab tests, sent off any samples or any of that malarkey - it appears that he'd swallowed some substrate (god alone knows when) and eventually suffered a fatal impaction. Why hadn't the material passed through? Could have been the shape, could have been any one of lots of reasons but from what we could see, that was the cause of death.
Poor George. He was dying long before I ever came across the poor little mite; I just hope that his last week wasn't too uncomfortable.
And shoudl I ever keep this species again? Feeding will most definitely be done in a separate container!
