MegF.
That's for sale???
I took my watersnake into the vet a couple of weeks ago as I found a swelling on his body down near the cloaca and thought he might be obstructed.....We x-rayed him DP view.....didn't see much except for some calcifications, some gas below that and a bit of an outline of something above that. I asked for a lateral view to see if the calcification was large or small...you could see the swelling clearly and the outline of whatever it was.....We tried an enema but nothing but a few urates came out so we ended up doing a barium enema....who knew after 10 years of doing it to humans I'd get to do it to my snake!?? The barium clearly outlined the "obstruction" and the vet decided it was a tumor. We discussed the probability of surgery with a poor outcome or euthanasia. I opted for euthanasia.....the next problem...how to euthanize. I told the vet I would guess we'd either need to do intercardiac (harder on a smaller snake like this where figuring out WHERE the heart is is more difficult) or caudally. Fortunately, I'd been up at my other reptile vet with an Amazon tree boa just weeks before with ANOTHER snake that turned out to have cancer (completely different form though) and when we drew blood the vet explained how she was doing it. I told my vet how and we successfully put him to sleep. We did a necropsy following and found a large tumor where the swelling was as well as numerous other smaller tumors all up the body involving the kidneys, liver etc. He would not have survived surgery. It was sad to lose him, but very interesting on the flip side...This was a wild caught specimen that I had had for almost a year. I'm not sure how old he was since he was w/c and the guy that caught him had him for about 6-8 month prior to me getting him. He was fed either scented f/t rats or f/t bluegill from a local fish farm that bred pond fish for people's ponds.
X-rays:
Tumor:
X-rays:
Tumor: