My Experience with a Septic Ball Python

[lmeleshkewich]

Hi everyone,

Recently, my ivory ball python passed due to a septic infection. I have found little to no posts about ball pythons being septic so I decided to document my own experience in the hopes that it could help someone else who might be experiencing the same thing. I also have a few ideas as to why this could have possibly happened.

A little backstory, my ball python Geb was an ivory python who I bought from a breeder in Oct 2017. Right off the bat I had issues feeding him. I tried f/t for a few months until he started to look too skinny. As soon as I gave him live he ate it right away. I found out then that the breeder I bought from was giving their snakes live. For the whole 2.5 years of me owning Geb his feeding schedule was always a pain. He would go off feed for months at a time. He got bigger so I wanted to transition to rats, but live rats were not very accessible to me. I was attempting to have him eat f/t as it would be more safe for him and less of a drive for me to get him food weekly. I finally got him to eat his first frozen rat back in February. Since then I tried multiple other times to give him a frozen rat as I had hope he would eat one again. I didn’t want to give him a live mouse as I didn’t want to disrupt the progress we had made, and he wasn’t getting extremely skinny so I decided to just keep trying.

On July 26th this year, he shed. I noticed after he shed his skin was pink which was strange for him. The pics below are the first time I noticed something was wrong.












As you can see from the pictures, the most alarming part is his belly. In this bottom picture there’s nothing more than a red spot on his back. Because there’s so little information on bps being septic I mistakingly assumed he had scale rot and immediately started to give him iodine baths. According to everything I read online, you didn’t have to keep doing the iodine baths to help with scale rot, you just need to keep them dry and clean. So I stupidly stopped doing the iodine baths, made his enclosure less humid and left him alone for a few days. This was the worst mistake.



This picture shows that his skin was calming down and looking slightly better. This is why I left him alone to heal thinking I had a case of scale rot, no biggie. When I checked on him the next time, August 2nd, he looked like this:



Reasonably, I freaked out and drove to the 24/7 animal hospital (where their exotic vet of course wasn’t in because why would they be??) where the regular vet told me his “body condition looks good.” I’m sorry, do you see him???? They gave him antibiotics to help whatever was going on even though I at that point had done more research to realize, scarily, that he was probably septic. They wanted to keep him overnight and charge me a grand (I’m a college student) ((and they didn’t know wtf they were doing)). I took him home and made an appointment with an amazing local exotic vet who was able to get me in that day. I took him in and they tube fed him, gave him IVs, and tried to draw blood. He was so dehydrated at this point they couldn’t get any blood out of him . This is why keeping his tank drier thinking it was scale rot screwed me.

They asked me to bathe him every night and keep his humidity to his normal levels and hopefully he would be more hydrated to get blood drawn and maybe take a blood graft so they would know exactly what kind of bacteria was causing this. They also gave me a general antibiotic, fortaz to give by injection every 48 hours. So I went home and started to bathe him every night to rehydrate him. He was starting to look better on the top but his belly was slowly declining.



This is directly after they poked and prodded at him at the vet. He seemed like he was getting flare-ups after these traumatic experiences for him at the vet .



This is on Tuesday the 4th. Here we seem to be making progress. The red has relaxed a little bit, he was being more active. There was never a point he was lethargic he was always moving around and sticking his tongue out so I had hope he would pull through.



Here is the next day, the 5th. As you can see he’s still a little pink but significantly less so than previous days. This is the closest to normal he looked before he passed.

This next part is where things get a little gross so bare with me. I come home from work and I notice a horrible smell from his cage. He’s all red, splotchy and irritated looking.



All of that orange is from his “poop” or his urates as the vet believes.



I have literally never seen bp feces look like this before. And apparently, no one on the internet has either. I thought it was his antibiotics causing this, maybe the tube feeding, I’m not sure. I was worried so I made another vet appt. I couldn’t decide if it was a good thing he was going, maybe that meant his organs were hopefully still functioning. I put him in the bath to rehydrate him again and obviously cleaned his whole cage. This was the 6th.



As you can see in this picture, he’s blotchy. Before, his skin was concentrated in some areas but not others. He’s never looked like this in the stages of the infection before. I brought him and his poop to the vet on Friday the 7th.

When I got to the vet, he looked almost normal in color again, at least on the top of his body. They gave him more fluids and checked out his belly and were concerned but they didn’t give me a death sentence right then and there. They still believed it was 50/50. She sent me home with a medicated bath to give to him to help his brown belly.





The bubbly areas are from where the vet injected him with IVs. Has anyone else noticed that vets are extremely rough with their pets? This isn’t just bashing this vet, all of my other animals they always seem so rough and it bothered me because he was literally on his deathbed. Anyways as you can see here, his skin is back to its white color but it’s almost devoid of life if that makes sense. His mouth area was more pale and his tongue was really pale. I drove home, I have a forty minute drive from the vet and when I got home he wasn’t moving. I thought maybe he just got too cold in the car or the stress of everything put him in shock so I tried to warm him up. I waited a few hours until I realized he was gone. It sucked. He was only 2 1/2. We were gonna grow old together .

Unfortunately, I don’t have many pictures of his belly. I’ll try to describe it as best as I can. The area around his head and his butt were very brown. It almost looked as if the iodine has stained those areas that’s the rusty brown color it was. In the first few pictures there’s one scale that is more brown than the rest. I believe this indicates that the infection was already present in his internal organs even all the way back then when I first noticed there was an issue. From that area, his belly was more and more brown. There were a few scales that were black almost which I can only assume were dead scales. His belly was also very flaky. Every time I gave him a bath, his scales would flake off one at a time. That’s why when I noticed it was just poop and not his literal organs hanging out I was relieved lol (((. When he died, underneath his head and on his nose was a little blotchy, brown and red.

When I was looking for help on this subject, I only found two other forum posts on here about septic snakes.

https://ball-pythons.net/forums/show...deceased-snake

https://ball-pythons.net/forums/show...ghlight=sepsis

What was interesting to me is that these snakes were both white variations, one being blue-eyed and the other a pinto snake. They were also both Gebs age or around his age, 2-3 years old. This makes me wonder; are white snakes more predisposed to this kind of infection? I know that Geb must have been bred a lot to look like he did and lose his natural coloring. I have been thinking of it similarly to dogs; pugs are predisposed to not being able to breathe bc of their short snouts for example. I also have thought of spider bps and how there are so many negative health conditions of those snakes; who’s to say there isn’t with other morphs as well?

This is where I ask for help. If there is anyone on this forum who is educated on this topic, anyone who has done research/would be interested in doing research on this topic please reach out to me through PM. There is not nearly enough information on these guys in terms of sepsis, and I think more research would really help the bp community as a whole.

Thank you for sitting through this long post, I hope this may have helped someone suffering with the same horrible infection and that everyone’s pythons are well and healthy. Please PM if you have any other questions, and if you notice anything off about your snake at any point please don’t self diagnose and just take it to the vet.

- Lili

[bcr229]

This makes me wonder; are white snakes more predisposed to this kind of infection? I know that Geb must have been bred a lot to look like he did and lose his natural coloring. I have been thinking of it similarly to dogs; pugs are predisposed to not being able to breathe bc of their short snouts for example. I also have thought of spider bps and how there are so many negative health conditions of those snakes; who’s to say there isn’t with other morphs as well?

I don't think so. I think with white snakes it's much more noticeable because the pink shows through and can be easily seen, where darker snakes it wouldn't be noticed.

I have had two snakes go septic. One was Matilda. You can read about her here:
https://ball-pythons.net/forums/show...ks-Just-don-t!

The other was a male Tarahumara. I had taken him to the vet for what presented as swollen eyes, and he was being treated with a topical ophthalmic ointment for them. It turns out that he had a scratch in his throat/esophagus just behind his head, the wound site had gotten infected, and the internal infection was causing his eyes to swell up. Since we didn't know what the underlying issue was, he also went septic and passed. He never looked pink but Taras are pretty dark-colored boas with orange/apricot bellies so it wouldn't have been obvious.

[lmeleshkewich]

So with these situations, what caused the second one to be septic? Anything that I can learn if I choose to get another one to help take better care of them I would appreciate. Thank you

[Bogertophis]

I appreciate that you shared your full experience here so that others may learn also, despite your obviously painful memories. Again, I'm sorry for your loss...

I suspect that it's just a coincidence that the other 2 posts you found about septic snakes were also about white/variations too...diagnosing snakes is a challenge in the first place, & sepsis is more obvious with the visual cues.

For what it's worth, I too find virtually all vets to be very "heavy-handed" when treating snakes, adding to the snake's stress & trauma, & working against their getting well.Perhaps it's because they're used to handling larger animals that require more forceful restraint, & they're understandably trying to avoid being bitten, but still... They're also generally pressed for time...

I've found myself wondering if they just don't really understand snakes, or if they subconsciously don't like them. In any case, injected medications are also very rough on a snake's body...having a snake that's ill enough to need a vet's care is basically putting their owner "between a rock & a hard place". Either way, you may lose... In my experience, snakes are delicate creatures & the decision to take your pet to the vet is a very tough call, especially if there is any question about their expertise.

In a perfect world, going thru all that with the vet visits & aftercare would result in your snake getting well again. Part of the problem with snakes is also that they're stoic, so by the time you notice something may be wrong, the odds of them being able to recover may already be stacked against them. As I've always said, it's far easier to keep a snake healthy, than it is to help them get well again. We all learn more with experience. May all your future pets have happier outcomes.

[bcr229]

So with these situations, what caused the second one to be septic? Anything that I can learn if I choose to get another one to help take better care of them I would appreciate. Thank you

He needed injected abx for the internal infection. He was only being treated topically with eye ointment. It wasn't until I had him necropsied that we found what the real problem was.

[Namea]

Poor baby. Thank you for sharing your experiences with him. While I have found that we see more of the white/light variations for treatment of sepsis or even severe scale rot I think it's more likely because it's just easier to see on them than others.