Can anyone please help?!?

[thamneil]

Never had something this drastic happen with stuck shed. Hope everything went alright.

[SnakeDoctor]

Update...she's doing good, fed a rat pup on Saturday & Sunday. Will proceed with removing retained shed tonight under running warm water. I will update again after this. Thank you all again for the much appreciated tips and your personal experiences with this particular issue.

Thanks
SnakeDoctor Jay Weaver

[BLUESIRTALIS]

I have also heard of people using pencil erasers. I have always just used my finger with no problems.

What I like to do for removing retained eye caps is to take a rubber thumb (see below), the type cashiers use for counting money, and rub that over the snake's eye. Soak the snake in lukewarm water first, to help loosen it up a bit. Please do this gently, remember, you are working with the snake's EYE, anyone (if not most people) who wear contact lenses will tell you that it is best to remove the contact lens GENTLY. Same thing goes for the snake.

Attachment 8169

[BLUESIRTALIS]

Glad to hear she is doing better! I hope you can get the old skin off.

Update...she's doing good, fed a rat pup on Saturday & Sunday. Will proceed with removing retained shed tonight under running warm water. I will update again after this. Thank you all again for the much appreciated tips and your personal experiences with this particular issue.

Thanks
SnakeDoctor Jay Weaver

[guidofatherof5]

I'm not sure you have grasped the severity of this situation. A RETAINED SHED CAN KILL A SNAKE! Get it off NOW. Forget the food or anything else you have going on and attend to the snake.
I'm sorry to be so blunt but this is life or death to this snake.
No disrespect intended.

[SnakeDoctor]

Guidofatherof5 no offence, but I am VERY aware of this situation and in the MANY years of caring and breeding snakes as I have had, (30+ years to be exact), I know what this can lead to. I also know this situation could also be caused internally and not just from simple humidity issue. What YOU are not considering in her current state if she were to regurgitate any of her food it can kill her much faster than the current retained shed issue. I’ve delt with several reptile health issues over the years and there is one thing they ALL have in common, if they don’t have the strength and nutrition they WILL die no matter what you do for them or drug you inject into them. That being said she is doing better and more alert as of this morning. Tonight her food should be digested enough to proceed with methods mentioned to remove the remaining shed. I will however get her to a point so that when the next shed comes she should be able to get it past her heart and lung regions and then I can help her with the remaining 1/3rd of her body to tail.
I will update you guys tomorrow and thank you for keeping up with her progress.

SnakeDoctor Jay Weaver

I'm not sure you have grasped the severity of this situation. A RETAINED SHED CAN KILL A SNAKE! Get it off NOW. Forget the food or anything else you have going on and attend to the snake.
I'm sorry to be so blunt but this is life or death to this snake.
No disrespect intended.

[Spankenstyne]

Hope it all works out.

I'm sure you're well aware, but for anyone inexperienced reading this as a reference later on: Please make sure your snake is well hydrated before feeding. Trying to feed if it's not sufficiently hydrated, especially in a situation like this, can be fatal. Once the immediate danger has been dealt with, analyze the situation and try to address the underlying cause. Every situation is different.

[Stefan-A]

When the snake didn't shed, you waited about a month before showing up here asking for help. We told you what needed to be done and how to do it. Instead of taking action immediately, by which I mean removing the retained shed in its entirety in one sitting that very day, you've delayed the shedding by almost a week and you've fed the snake twice, putting undue stress on it at a time when it for all intents and purposes has an ever-tightening noose around its neck, and yesterday you announced plans to start shedding the snake before the food was even digested. To your credit, you now show some concern that the food didn't yet have time to digest, but this delay was completely unnecessary and in all probability counterproductive. You don't have a healthy snake there, you have one that's slowly being shrink-wrapped in its own skin. The proper course of action is not to stuff it and take it slow. Are you now telling us that you don't even intend to completely remove the shed, or did I misread?

[d_virginiana]

Feeding a severely dehydrated snake, weakened from a month of having a retained shed, and likely with internal organ damage because of this (in all seriousness, even if you get that off I don't see this girl bouncing back 100%) with the most difficult-to-digest food item garters can eat is probably the worst thing you can do. Especially since it means ignoring an immediate problem for several more days.
If you have over thirty years of experience, why did you let it get this bad before even attempting to remove it? I'm not trying to be offensive here, but if you have enough experience that you can disregard all the advice given to you by multiple people (which was unanimously to IMMEDIATELY remove the shed) then why bother posting in the first place if you had no intention of heeding the advice?

It's always nicer to be working with an otherwise healthy snake, but for pretty much any in-home medical procedure, not just this, the snake being fed is NOT necessary, and is sometimes even a bad thing (such as for a healing injury). If a snake is so far gone that holding it under running luke-warm water and rubbing its skin for an hour or two is going to kill it, then you are probably working with a lost cause.

[ConcinusMan]

Risking that it might look like I'm just "jumping on the bandwagon" here, I gotta agree with that.^^^

Shouldn't even be feeding, given that this is obviously a retained shed. That skin is already strangling the snake. Feeding can only make it worse. We did say you should try to remove the old skin IMMEDIATELY yet here it is nearly a week later and you haven't even tried. Those days that passed can make the difference between being able to get it off, and it being hopelessly stuck. At this point I don't even think you should try. It's been way too long and trying to peel now will only injure the snake.


But in all honesty, I think that by the time the picture was taken, the skin was already hopelessly stuck. A troubled shed is one thing, but delaying allows the skin to become permanently stuck and once that happens, the snake takes on that wrinkled look. I think it was a lost cause already before the thread even started. Like I said, I've never had one survive once it got to that point. Once it's permenently stuck and the snake wrinkles like that, you can't get it off without literally skinning the snake alive. Once it is stuck, the only thing you can do is watch while the snake is slowly killed via strangulation by it's own skin.

This is pretty much what I said the first time, only I said it in a little "softer"way because there might have been a small chance of getting the skin off if you had acted immediately. At this point, my 30 plus years experience, and having seen this before, tells me that the snake is probably a lost cause. It can take just a week or two, or several months, but the condition of a full body permanently stuck shed is 100% fatal. It's just a matter of time.

Also have to consider that when this happens, it's usually a symptom of a much bigger underlying health problem and not necessarily caused by improper husbandry. I hope you understand that I'm not trying to blame you here. I think it was already too late to get the skin off, and the stuck shed thing just happens sometimes even if you do everything right. I've lost a few this way too. Sometimes it just goes unnoticed until it's too late. Totally understandable.