Please excuse spelling and grammar i am typing fast.-I need advice. Me and my bf came home from vacation. His mom was watching our beardie Joanie,Today my boyfriend notices the metal hook on one of the suction cups of her hammock was gone.We dont know for how long it has been gone as we just got back.We combed her entire cage and cannot find it and are worried she may have ate it. Besides the obvious thing of taking her to the vet ,is there anything we can to to try and see if she can pass it if she ate it?- or some how tell if she did?
Info on Joanie
Age-1 year
Length is around 16 inches
The hook would be from the zoo-med large repti-Hammock
If she did eat it, it should hopefully pass as long as the hook part doesnt hook on any kinks in the digestive track. Even if it does it might be able to pass. Just keep the diet normal.
The metal hook will really show up on xray, so you could have an xray done. Bit there is only really 1 option besides it passing naturally, and that would be surgery.
Youd be surprised what they can pass, but the hook does make this more of a complicated object.
Hopefully she didnt eat it!
Good luck, let us know what you decide.
Definitely going to call vets around tomorrow and see if any around us even take reptiles. As previously mentioned we don't know when she ate it if she did but as of right now shes acting normal.
Thanks for the reply--
That's good!
Any vet should be able to take the x ray for you. You dont really need any special training to see a metal object in an x ray. Trust me, it will be bright as a lightbulb lol. So as long as you can find someone willing to do it, you'll know whether or not the hook was ingested.
From there you can decide whether or not to do surgery, or see if it will pass on it's own.
I would definitely only let an experienced reptile vet do the surgery. The surgery is tricky enough to an experienced reptile vet, dont let a regular exotics or cat and dog vet do it.
Update: We found the hook so she didn’t eat it!!! Have no idea how it got out of the cage but as long as she didn’t eat it. We will be replacing the suction cups w/hooks with command strips.