This is the same place that we took Rygel to on Tuesday. But the doctor we saw was different. With it being a teaching hospital, what happens is that you get assigned a student, who will take a history with the owner, and then the student will take the animal to a different room (away from the owner) where they present the case to an intern. The intern will then make a treatment plan with the student, and then a supervising exotics vet will go over everything they decided and make any recommendations and authorise medications and such. On Tuesday. The dr we saw wasn’t the proper exotics intern - I think she was just filling on, or getting in a bit of exotic experience.
The problem with that was that she really didn’t make it clear to me how sick they thought Rygel was, and she failed to ask a lot of questions about the progression of his condition and the symptoms they had noticed. So when they gave him that antibiotic shot, it was because they were concerned by how ill he seemed and felt that the risks of not doing anything whilst waiting on results was greater than giving the shot.
The vet that handled his care on Thursday onwards was a proper exotics intern, and she was very thorough about explaining why and how they had ruled out many other common causes. In the end, I was practically begging them to find some other test that would tell us what was going on, but the dr explained that the outcome (putting him to sleep) would still be the same. The necropsy will give us answers without Rygel having to suffer .
Yes, I think it was West Nile virus. How would Rygel, have gotten that? I didn’t think mosquitos bite reptiles because of their scales? Was it because he ate one that was affected with the virus?
