Marnie's Snakes

[PINJOHN]

Way to go Seeley. Worms are good.

I am such a keen angler....I only married my wife because she has worms

[EasternGirl]

Well...it's off to the vet today! I will post back later this afternoon or this evening and let everyone know how things turn out!

[Bart]

And I can't lay my hands on nightcrawlers. :[ Mysteriously, I can't get them in fish bait shops nowadays.

[EasternGirl]

Hmm...that's no good. Can't get them shipped to you? Getting ready to leave for the vet in a few...

[EasternGirl]

I am very excited to tell you all about Cee Cee and Seeley's visit to the vet. I really liked the vet a lot...I was very impressed with him. His name was Tom Wilkerson and the hospital was Windcrest Animal Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. He had an extensive knowledge of reptiles and has been keeping reptiles himself since he was a child. He knew a great deal about garters. He was very nice and enjoyed discussing the snakes with me for a long time. He was very thorough. He was even laughing when Cee Cee musked him so bad the entire room smelled and then tried to bite him because she did not like having her lungs listened too. He talked to Cee Cee and Seeley and was very gentle with them. He said Cee Cee has what is probably a chronic respiratory problem that will come and go. It can happen with wild caught garters. At this point we will just monitor her because treating her will involve injections that I will have to administer and she may be gravid. He was uncertain about that without an x-ray or ultrasound...which I did not want to pay for. She does have a little bit of discharge that he could see when he opened her mouth...but nothing too bad at this point. He wants me to continue with the increased heat and lower humidity and call him if she gets worse. Seeley is fine...his off-food phase probably had to do with the winter time. He recommends a varied diet of pinkies, fish and worms like we do...although he says repcal is good to give additional calcium because pinkies don't actually provide that much because the bones do not have a lot of calcium because of the age of the pinkies. He does say it is difficult to give many snakes supplements because they do not like them though and a varied diet should be good enough. He said you have to be careful with multivitamins because you could give too many vitamins and cause vitamin toxicity. He does not recommend whole live fish bought in pet stores because you can not trust the fish. He said he worked in a pet store when he was younger and he would never feed fish from a pet store to any of his reptiles. He also talked about problems with getting humidity up...needing to mist often, being careful not to get the substrate moist, not feeding live prey...all the things we discuss on here. Like I said, he knew his stuff! I would highly recommend him. He will be my garter vet from now on. The visit wasn't cheap of course...but I only take the snakes in if I feel it is necessary. They did give me a discount since I brought in two snakes.

[guidofatherof5]

Thanks for reporting back Marnie.
Sounds like all in all it was a very good visit.
I hope Cee Cee gets on the mend soon.

[EasternGirl]

Thanks! She seems to be doing a lot better than she was...she was full of spit and vinegar at the vet today!

[mikem]

thanks for the update! good to hear everything is going well

[angrygamer]

I am very excited to tell you all about Cee Cee and Seeley's visit to the vet...

I'm glad you had a good experience at the vet. My vet experience wasn't so good. The vet was nice, but I got a bit of misinformation from her and her communication skills left something to be desired. First off, she said goldfish were OK if they were from a reputable source and recommended a local pet store. Then she didn't like the aspen and suggested newspaper.

I was trying to get an answer as to the proper humidity, and she went into this story about how she lived in Oregon when she was a kid and she was riding her bike when it was raining or something, and she found this ditch where there were a bunch of garter snakes, blah blah blah, she went into it for so long that the subject was changed in the middle of it. I don't know, it was weird. By then I really lost focus on the questions I was trying to ask. We got back to her story somehow, the point she was trying to make was that, in her opinion, Garters can handle a lot of humidity. That didn't completely answer the question I was trying to ask pertaining to the highs and the lows but got so distracted by all of this lost my train of thought.

I tried to talk to her about a few of these points, but in the middle of talking to her I felt sort of stupid by saying, "...well I heard from the internet that...". In fact I brought up the issue of parasites in goldfish and she just said that if they were from a reputable source it was fine.

She also said snakes need a UVB light for their D3, which is sort of unheard of but I bought one anyway.

So I am just now putting all of this together upon reflecting about my experience after reading yours, and I am going to find another vet next week. She is listed as an exotic animal vet but somehow pretty much ALL of her advice CONTRACTS proper care for Garter snakes.

I mean, I knew I was going to have some questions on the way home. My stepmom was with me, and we talked about it and she said that I can always call the vet if I had more questions.

heh, sorry Marnie I don't mean to derail your thread. I hope people learn from this though.

I was just so intimidated, and I was sitting there thinking, "well what is more credible sounding? A licensed vet or "people from the internet"?"

She also sexed Glyph by visualization alone and classified him as a Radix, and I still wonder about that.

[BUSHSNAKE]

Im curious, was she correct on the sex and species of your snake?