buffy vs snake

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:48:31 GMT

My dogs are both afraid of snakes. They avoid them. When there is a snake in the yard, they whine and complain and fidget around until we go and fix it for them. We generally fix it by chasing the snake away or throwing it over the fence; don't worry, we're pro-snake and don't kill 'em. It's almost always a big ole black racer, totally harmless. We should in theory only have copperheads around here, as far as venomous goes, and we haven't seen one of those in a couple of years. So it is a mystery to me how Buffy wound up with this nasty snake bite on Saturday. We think he was working on one of his diggin' holes and stuck a paw in, unaware that the hole was occupied.

We were at the vet within 25 minutes of the bite, and they gave him a steroid shot, lasix, and sent us home with antibiotics and torb. Around here the snakebites usually aren't serious. Three hours after the bite, just after we returned from the first vet visit, not looking so bad:

Well, things became much worse from there, and the rest is behind the cut.

So the next day, about 22 hours after the bite, we started to worry a little bit because there was some darkness spreading above the bite, and the bite itself was starting to ooze quite a bit:

A couple of hours after that, we noticed that not only was the skin sloughing already, but there was a lot of bruising spreading up his leg and even into his chest. Emailed pic to on-call vet at local clinic, she is worried his blood is not clotting but cannot do the right tests without sending the blood off to the lab which will take too long. She says to go to the vet school where they have a good emergency service:

We get there, and they very nice on-duty vet says that they'll check a clotting time and a cbc just to be sure everything is OK, but again mentions that snakebites in this area are usually not a big deal. She comes back out and says he's in serious trouble, has a slow blood clotting time, possibly is in early DIC, and needs to be admitted for a plasma transfusion so he can clot better. And the skin is sloughing like crazy when she just tries to clip the hair a bit. He stayed there for four days, two in the ICU and two in the general ward. But he's home now. And things are looking better. From last night's bandage change:

Bonus - look at Eric's legs, with his feet in his awesome slippers:

We will be very glad when this is healed and we can stop changing that big-ass bandage all the time. I have searched every day for the snake, so I can relocate it away from the house, to no avail. My ferret vet called a local herpetologist she knows, and he thinks it might have been a migrating cane brake rattlesnake. I hope he migrated right on out of the yard. The vet school thinks it was a copperhead, and that this bite just happened to get bad for reasons unknown. If it was a copperhead, it is probably still around. I hope I find it before Buffy does again.

Cricket and Nana

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 21:20:11 GMT

sleeping weasels... aw...

Pumpkin when he was orange

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 21:00:02 GMT

and this is why he was named Pumpkin:

Yeah, he turned white after he had a chance to grow in a new coat. He was an intact hob from a nasty back yard breeder and was stained from musk and pee. I miss the old man.

Yetti digs up my plants

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 00:46:47 GMT

another one, bigger, is behind the cut (tryin' to figure this stuff out, ya know):

weasels, dogs, life

buffy vs snake

Cricket and Nana

Pumpkin when he was orange

Yetti digs up my plants