Post by jr on May 28, 2016 22:46:23 GMT
Good evening all!
I'll try and be brief... last night (about 25 hours ago) while shuffling along in an attempt NOT to step on my 2 year old degu who was running around the room, I managed to in fact step directly on her as she shot under my foot at crazy degu speed. The only good thing is that she ran under the ball of my foot and so the weight was not fully transferred off my heal. What felt like eternity was probably only 3-4 seconds as I regained my balance and stepped off her. She shot off after jumping up in the air and growling.
I was pretty distraught... I thought for sure I'd find her badly wounded at best... maybe even dead. I'm 190lbs and so it's not the best thing to step on an animal weighing all of 250 grams. I've had degus for a few years and I do know them to be extremely tough to trauma type damage/falls etc, but even so. Anyway she was hiding from me for a bit, but about 10 minutes later I managed to check her out. She had no major breaks, ribs, legs, tail, spine, neck all fine. She was acting generally normally (though afraid of me of course). She had no balance issues and was taking food from me. Her head and body had ful range of motion and she was drinking from the bottle. One thing she seemed to be experiencing was ear discomfort - her ears were twitching often at random intervals and she'd scratch at them when they did. They were obviously painful because she was crying out quietly as she scratched at them - heartbreaking.
I called the emergency vet and explained what had happened. He asked me to go over her condition and I told him the above. He said that if she had no balance issues he wasn't particularly concerned about the ear thing, and that likely they were bruised and probably throbbing from the trauma/friction, causing her to scratch at them. Possibly even some cartilage damage. I confirmed to him there was no blood in or around the ears. He said to take her in on Tuesday morning if she was still having trouble and said I could give her the 0.1 ml daily dose of metacam I had for a previous degu.
She didn't sleep very well because the twitching ears were keeping her awake, but I think she dozed while sat upright.
Anyway - a day later she's not gone downhill or anything and the ears are slowly improving. Still acting within norms, but a lot less jolly and interactive, mainly out of fear of me (trying to improve relations with oats...). The twitch frequency is going down, but it's still every 5 minutes or so and if I touch them she immediately reacts with displeasure and furious scratching on both sides. I'm wondering if anyone has ever observed this ear thing before from trauma and not from infection/sickness? I feel both extremely guilty and lucky at the same time. It feels almost like she SHOULD have more damage than just her ears and so I think I'm finding it hard to be objective about this. I should count my lucky stars and just monitor her, but she was squished sufficiently to be completely trapped under my foot... just managing to hurt her ears is the minimum you could expect and I'm not normally that lucky in life!
Thanks very much.
I'll try and be brief... last night (about 25 hours ago) while shuffling along in an attempt NOT to step on my 2 year old degu who was running around the room, I managed to in fact step directly on her as she shot under my foot at crazy degu speed. The only good thing is that she ran under the ball of my foot and so the weight was not fully transferred off my heal. What felt like eternity was probably only 3-4 seconds as I regained my balance and stepped off her. She shot off after jumping up in the air and growling.
I was pretty distraught... I thought for sure I'd find her badly wounded at best... maybe even dead. I'm 190lbs and so it's not the best thing to step on an animal weighing all of 250 grams. I've had degus for a few years and I do know them to be extremely tough to trauma type damage/falls etc, but even so. Anyway she was hiding from me for a bit, but about 10 minutes later I managed to check her out. She had no major breaks, ribs, legs, tail, spine, neck all fine. She was acting generally normally (though afraid of me of course). She had no balance issues and was taking food from me. Her head and body had ful range of motion and she was drinking from the bottle. One thing she seemed to be experiencing was ear discomfort - her ears were twitching often at random intervals and she'd scratch at them when they did. They were obviously painful because she was crying out quietly as she scratched at them - heartbreaking.
I called the emergency vet and explained what had happened. He asked me to go over her condition and I told him the above. He said that if she had no balance issues he wasn't particularly concerned about the ear thing, and that likely they were bruised and probably throbbing from the trauma/friction, causing her to scratch at them. Possibly even some cartilage damage. I confirmed to him there was no blood in or around the ears. He said to take her in on Tuesday morning if she was still having trouble and said I could give her the 0.1 ml daily dose of metacam I had for a previous degu.
She didn't sleep very well because the twitching ears were keeping her awake, but I think she dozed while sat upright.
Anyway - a day later she's not gone downhill or anything and the ears are slowly improving. Still acting within norms, but a lot less jolly and interactive, mainly out of fear of me (trying to improve relations with oats...). The twitch frequency is going down, but it's still every 5 minutes or so and if I touch them she immediately reacts with displeasure and furious scratching on both sides. I'm wondering if anyone has ever observed this ear thing before from trauma and not from infection/sickness? I feel both extremely guilty and lucky at the same time. It feels almost like she SHOULD have more damage than just her ears and so I think I'm finding it hard to be objective about this. I should count my lucky stars and just monitor her, but she was squished sufficiently to be completely trapped under my foot... just managing to hurt her ears is the minimum you could expect and I'm not normally that lucky in life!
Thanks very much.
