Are these symptoms of a dieing or sick bearded dragon?!!!!?

[LJean]

That is good that he is basking some and eating a little. It may take some time to get him fully well.
You can temporarily use some non adhesive shelf liner as substrate until you can buy some tiles. I try to find tiles in the clearance section of hardware stores.

 

[dna14]

We haven't gotten tiles for the bottom yet, either though we want to. We got shelf liner at wal-mart and it was just a couple of bucks though. It's made a big difference for our beardies, since they lick EVERYTHING they were ingesting lots of sand...

 

[Embee]

Funnily enough, I was quite surprised when I went to buy tiles as they ended up being less expensive than the repti-carpet we'd had previously that needed to be replaced every now and again. And, they were certainly less expensive than that useless bag of calci-sand we had in the viv for all of one day, way back when.

We spent all of $10 for a permanent (AND LOVELY) substrate at Lowe's hardware: 3 - sq ft tiles, and 6 - 4" x 4" covered our 40 breeder nicely. I just made sure to get a tile with some texture, and a sandy feel for gripping to keep those nails down, aye yaye yaye! And it's helped tremendously. I have fewer beardie scratches these days!

Good luck!

Em

 

[A7X899]

ok thank you. the vet thinks that he had calcium deficiency. he put him on this calcium liquid. he is all ready doing better. he ate 7 worms today and moves better. we asked the vet about the walnut and he said he didn't think that it was like that. he said most impactions are on sand. with the tiles how hard is it to clean it. and thank you all so much. i will post a picture so you can see his cage and how he is doing. thank you

 

[Embee]

I think the general wisdom is that loose substrates of any kind are a possible impaction risk, and they tend to harbor more bacteria. It's a "why take the risk" sort of thing.

For cleaning the tiles, I just spray them with a vinegar and water solution and wipe. Once a week/everyten days or so, I remove them from the enclosure and either sweep or vacuum out debris (skin, particles of bark from the basking log, etc.) out of the bottom of the enclosure, and then wipe the tiles clean as mentioned above and place back in the viv.

Em