Very Sick Little Figment

[NeosMom]

Thank you for the input everyone. I don't know what I would do without this board. I just ran to the drug store for an eyedropper type medicine doser so I can give him the apple juice, water & liquid calcium mixture better. Calling the vet now to cancel all my appointments. Going to spend the day babying Figment and waiting to see what Tracie says. Might order my fecal kit this afternoon if Tracie agrees with my plan. I will let ya'll know what happens.

 

[NeosMom]

Evening update... Figment seems much better this evening. We have been giving him an apple juice / water / liquid calcium mixture all day. He only takes a few drops of it each time, but is taking some 2 to 3 times each hour. I also gave him a good soak this evening and he is drying himself on his basking spot. His colors look MUCH better and he seems to be feeling a bit more like himself. Fluffy got a bath after him and when I was going to put her back into her viv, Figment caught sight of her. He puffed his beard out for her. I'm sure if I hadn't moved her out of sight right away he would have been head bobbing and stomping his foot at her.

I offered him a hornworm which he turned his nose up at. And then a bit later in the afternoon I offered him a superworm. He looked at it very intently and seemed to seriously consider eating it. Finally he decided that wasn't a good plan and turned away. But honestly, that little bit of interest is more than I have seen from him in days. I think tomorrow I may get him eating for us. He has really developed a bad attitude towards the syringe. So, I have worked very hard today to get him hydrated well and comfortable with the dropper. Hopefully tomorrow when I bring the syringe back with yummy baby food he will give it a fair chance.

I also placed an order tonight for a DIY fecal testing setup. I spent the extra money to have 8 test kits so that I can do a check on everyone and still have some on hand in case anyone needs more meds and a recheck. Along with the kit I got some bee pollen and critical and carnivore care than Deb has been recommending. Once I have my kit, I plan to work with Tracie and make sure everyone gets well cared for and I don't have any future overdose situations.

I will also be searching for a new vet in the near future. I can't tell you how disappointed I was after liking this vet so much to have such a complete disaster come from Figment's medications.

I will post another update tomorrow to let everyone know how he is coming along.

 

[Irwinshealth]

Glad to hear there is some change. Looking forward to tomorrows update as well. I hope Figment does indeed go for the yummy baby food

 

[sweetiepie9]

Glad to hear he's feeling better, I know he'll recover well now that he's on the upswing. I'm disappointed in your vet, too, should know better! But I"m so glad you have Tracie to help you, she's as knowledgeable as good vets & knows her stuff. She'll get Figment back on the road to recovery!
Keep us updated as you go,
Deb

 

[ShannyBeard]

Ok... Here is where we stand. Tracie says that Figment was given too much panacur and I should not give him anymore. I should also work on getting more fluids in him orally. I can deal with all of that. As for my vet... he isn't returning my phone calls. Yesterday I talked to his assistant and asked if I should bring the bottle of meds with me or Figment with me or what today. She said the vet would return my call. He didn't. I called back in the afternoon and they were closed so I left a message on their machine. They have been open since 8 today (It's 10:40 now) and no call. They close at noon. I am so mad I could spit nails.

So I'm thinking I call the vet now and cancel my appointments for June 24 for both Figment recheck and Fluffy well visit. I talk to Tracie more and get a mega crash course in bearded dragon parasites, meds, fecal checks, etc. I order my own fecal check kit from beardeddragon.co. And I take care of my three dragons via home fecal checks and Tracie. Everyone here trusts her and that is good enough for me. I also need to find myself a new vet so I have someone to see in case of an emergency.

If Figment wasn't so dark colored and sad looking I would be going on a rampage right about now. But what I need to do is focus on making him feel better and getting my other two checked out so I know everyone is healthy.

I hate to say it but our vet, who has 26 years experience with reptiles and is a member of arav, tried to kill Chief with Panacur, too. He told us to give him a dose every day for 7 days, take 5 days off, then give him a dose a day for another 7 days. I don't think Chief ate food for over a month after those medications, and the vet refused to let us give AcidolphiLiz because he said it would mess up the results when he did another fecal. WOW well, we know better now, don't we??? My husband spent hundreds on a microscope and all the stuff to do fecals and he does ours now.

I hope Figment feels better soon. I just know he will because of what happened to Chief. I just hope he gets to feeling better faster than Chief did, because what happened to Chief really knocked him back a lot, for several months, and honestly he is just really putting on weight now, and that was back before the Holidays even.

 

[NeosMom]

Wow Shanny! I am so sorry to hear that. Sounds much worse than what is happening to Figment. The setup I ordered is pretty basic. But right now I just need to see with my own eyeballs what his poop looks like after all this. Talk about a fast way to develop trust issues! I'm glad Chief is ok now. How is Papa Smurf doing?

 

[ShannyBeard]

Wow Shanny! I am so sorry to hear that. Sounds much worse than what is happening to Figment. The setup I ordered is pretty basic. But right now I just need to see with my own eyeballs what his poop looks like after all this. Talk about a fast way to develop trust issues! I'm glad Chief is ok now. How is Papa Smurf doing?

I know what you mean. We were really disappointed in our vet for the way he prescribed the Panacur. It was for roundworms (Ascarids). There was really no reason to give as much medication as we gave Chief and it made him feel really bad. At one point he was depressed and barely moving for several weeks, maybe even a month. It was so hard to watch. I'm really proud of my husband for taking the initiative to learn what to look for in a fecal. Our microscope takes picture of the screen so it can be saved and looked at later on, which is really handy.

Papa Smurf seems fine...so far. We had company yesterday and I didn't give him the coccidia meds yesterday, so he will get them tomorrow morning. Nothing happens Monday mornings at my house, LOL. I can barely convince myself to get up and get to work on Mondays. :| He seems to be back on his feeders a little and ate 3 supers yesterday, but he looked at his silkworms like they were crap, so maybe tonight he will want them. LOL!!!!!

 

[NeosMom]

Good luck & keep me posted. It has helped a ton reading on here what other people are dealing with and how its going.

 

[ShannyBeard]

Yes, it really does help to read what other people are doing. Thank goodness for this website.

 

[Drache613]

Hello!

I PM'd you also with regards to your vet's remarks.
The amount of Panacur was too much, in my opinion. These are small creatures who do not need massive amounts of a drug in their systems.
Worms dying in his system would not make him feel ill in that way. The drugs were what was making him feel ill from being overrun in his body.
I don't think he needs a pain killer, either, as that is just more drugs in his system right now.

If he is doing well today, continue to do what you are doing with respect to your syringe feeding. Are you bathing him also to help with hydration?

Keep us posted on him!

Tracie

 

[NeosMom]

Yup Tracie! This is exactly what hubby and I decided. All of your advice and everyone else here is working. We don't want to add anymore drugs either. He got a good soak last night and we are going to keep going with this plan. I will pm you as soon as my package arrives.

 

[NeosMom]

Yay! Good Figment evening! I came home and he is on his basking spot looking all bright and perky! He drank his apple juice mix terrific and then ate 5 supers! He went to his basking spot where he sat with his nose up in the air basking like his old self. He does this odd thing with his head where he kinda cocks it to the side, but he does it rather quickly. Any Star Trek TNG fans out there? It sort of reminds me of Data! Ha! Ha! So, he was doing that again tonight. I hadn't realized he had stopped until I saw it tonight.

I don't think I posted everything about this today... Most of my daytime posting is done from my cell phone while I am at work. So my posts tend to be a bit more limited. Anyway, the vet called me this morning. Back peddling and apologizing like mad. Honestly, if you want my guess on the whole situation, I think his assistants haven't been giving him the messages that I have been calling. Every time I called up until Saturday afternoon I had talked to one of the ladies in the office. Well, Saturday I got a voicemail and left a message about that I had been expecting a return call to find out what to do Sunday and to please call me. Then Sunday I left a message saying to simply cancel all of my future appointments. Well, talking to him this morning it sounded like he had no clue that there had even been any problems with Figment. He was really playing 20 questions about the super diarrhea on Friday and I had already given all that info to his office. There were a number of other things he was asking and seeming worried about Figment's well-being. He gave me suggestions about some of the problems Figment is experiencing and wanted to give him a very mild painkiller that would help his tummy stop hurting so that he could get past this easier. But, the bottom line is that he was quite insistent that the dosage he gave to Figment was on the LOW end of what could be given. :shock: Ummmmm... now I'm really confused. So, I gave my hubby all of the information I had. He got the actual medicine bottles, access to all of my PM's with Tracie, beautiful dragons dosage calculator, dosing information from beardeddragon.co, plus he found information on a university website. Yeah.... The university, both calculator info pages, and Tracie all agree that the dosage was too high. It seems pretty cut and dry when you research that info. So, we decided that Figment is improving on his own and adding one more medicine to this situation is not a good plan. The way I left it with the vet was that I appreciate all he tried to do today, but we want to keep things going the way we are.

Hopefully we will have more good news tomorrow. I will keep posting...

 

[sweetiepie9]

Well isn't that all good news. I'll tell you what the dose for panacur was for Gabriel 0.15 mg per week. It was a bit on the low side because he was in such bad shape when I got him. As a result he still has some parasites, but nothing near the load he was carrying before. So now I give him .3 mg per week for 4 weeks. I still have the probiotics in case he stops eating, but he ate 2 tablespoons of babyfood this am (more than double the usual) and ate about 10 small pieces of collard greens, which he hasn't done since I got him. I didn't have time for supers this am, but will try them tomorrow. So even though the dose is double what he was getting, it's not affecting his tummy at all. So having him eat first, before the meds, is working really well. His urates are runny, so he's getting lots of hydration, having a bath daily is also helping, as he now poops every am in the tub. He likes to be on my hand to eat from the syringe, but anything that works is fine with me.

I'm so glad to hear that you're not putting up with that vet. I swear Tracie is a better vet than most out there. I've always followed her advice & am always grateful when she agrees with what my vet is doing.

So looks like Figment is getting better every day, glad you got the fecal checker (for lack of a better word), as you can keep track yourself on how he's doing. Isn't it always great when they get over what was bugging them & start to get back to normal? I'm so glad to hear the good news. That vet can back pedal all he wants, but obviously he's not used to dragons. Too bad he's lost a customer, but it would be better if he did some research on dragons instead of just guessing!

 

[NeosMom]

I have to admit that I still don't understand the whole dosing thing, but Figment's panacur bottle says 60 mg in 3cc of pina colada mix. The vet had me giving him one whole cc per dose. He was supposed to get three doses! :shock: Even though I don't get really understand dosing, it sounds to me like he got in a single dose about what Gabriel has had total (maybe more).

Off to work. Thanks for checking on him.

 

[ShannyBeard]

I have to admit that I still don't understand the whole dosing thing, but Figment's panacur bottle says 60 mg in 3cc of pina colada mix. The vet had me giving him one whole cc per dose. He was supposed to get three doses! :shock: Even though I don't get really understand dosing, it sounds to me like he got in a single dose about what Gabriel has had total (maybe more).

Off to work. Thanks for checking on him.

With these medications, there is a 'high' dose and a 'low' dose option. Deb got the low dose option for Gabriel because a stronger dose might have been too much for his system. It's like in people medications there is an antibiotic that comes in 500mg and it comes in 250mg. High dose and low dose. So the vet chooses one and then it is given in cc or mL by weight of the dragon. The vets seem to get the strength right as far as I can tell. The can figure out the strength/dosage, but for some reason it's the frequency that they mess up. Our dragons don't need the same dose 3, 5, 7 days in a row. They need it once, and then a repeat a week later, something like that. Our vet gave Chief that medicine for 7 days straight. The frequency was too much. I wish we would have known back then what we know now. By the time my husband was asking Tracie, Chief had already been given so much medication.

I'm glad to hear Figment is doing better now and enjoying basking. That's pretty much what they do, bask, and when they aren't even happy doing that it's pretty sad. But nothing says they feel good like eating their food. 8) That's the best thing to see.