Yeah -- baths only work for
hydration if your beardie drinks water while he's in the
bath. We dribble water on Puff's nose with an eyedropper when he's in his
bath, and sometimes he drinks it, and if he doesn't it just runs down in the
bath with the rest of the water so we don't get everything else all wet. It's pretty convenient to do it that way. And then he poops in his
bath sometimes too -- and then we take him right out (before he splashes around and gets it all over himself) and dump it down the drain, so it makes it easy to clean up after him. So it works for us to give him a
bath almost every day, but I realize that wouldn't work for everyone. It depends on your beardie and your circumstances.
15 years is a pretty good run for a corn snake, although they have been known to live longer, so I was hoping that Squirmles would be with us for maybe at least another 5 years or so, but no such luck. His death was sudden and unexpected -- one day he seemed just fine, and the next day he was gone. We don't know for sure if the nodules the vet found when she did the necropsy were malignant or not -- we didn't have lab tests done because it no longer mattered at that point, so we'll never know. He'd had a benign lipoma removed a few years ago, so he may have had a tendency to develop tumors, maybe something genetic, and it may have finally caught up with him.
Sorry to hear that you lost your snail. I guess it wasn't a good week for either one of us. But I hope the meds will help with whatever's going on in your stomach.
I've also heard about a number of cancer cases with beardies. Now that there are so many of them around, we're probably going to see more of these kinds of things that are usually thought of as rare.