Possible Impaction

[LucisAbsentia]

Well, I may have come across my first serious concern with Gabriel, but I wanted to come here for some advice.

I've been feeding him large crickets for a while, with no problem, until this week. He went to the bathroom on Sunday and, although I fed him crickets Sunday and Monday, he had not gone again by Wednesday, which concerned me. Now, he's not an every day goer, but two large meals and no poop by Wednesday was a bit unusual. He finally went today, but he had to push very hard, and I believe he's still not done, I think I can feel a bit of excrement still close to his vent.

I haven't been /too/ worried: there's no signs of paralysis, no tremors, no laziness. He acts exactly as he did before this, he's been active and eating some greens (I didn't want to take away all of his food, but I wouldn't give him more crickets). The only difference is he had a difficult poo and I can feel a little bit more still. Is there anything in particular I should do? I was intending on giving him a warm bath and massaging his belly, hopefully he'll pass the last of it today or tomorrow, but is there anything else I can do?

 

[CooperDragon]

I'd give him some extra water by dropping it on his nose and seeing if he'll lick it up. Extra hydration may help him pass everything along.

 

[LucisAbsentia]

Just wanted to say that he passed the last of it today! I'm not super positive what beardie stool should look like after impaction, but this mostly just looked normal except for a lot larger. It wasn't watery, and the urates were normal. There were no particularly large undigested pieces of cricket in either stool (Thursday and today). However, I'm going to be a lot more careful inspecting what crickets I feed him. There's nothing wrong with his basking temperature and he's housed on slate tile, so the only thing I can think of that would have impacted him would be cricket size, although there is also a slight possibility that while hunting, he may have chewed off a small bit of the wrapping paper that covers his walls (he didn't like seeing his reflection, so the wall of his enclosure have wrapping paper on them).

So as I said, I'm going to be careful about the cricket size and I was actually going to take the wrapping paper off soon anyways, so I'm just going to follow through on that.