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We have had something odd happen, and I want to see
if anyone else out there has experienced this.
Gabriel, a nearly three year old male gerbil,
passed away the other day. He grew ill rather suddenly (over the course of
2 days), spending a lot of time just sitting and breathing rather heavily.
The vet even took an x-ray and was unable to find anything other than his colon
was rather full. Gabby's heart was fine, his lungs were fine, no obvious
growths or lumps anywhere. His bones even looked so good on the x-ray that
the vet mistook him for a much younger gerbil! The vet gave me some
medicine to try for constipation, but we never had a chance to use it beyond one
dose. Gabby passed away the next morning. Shortly before he died I
noticed he was doubling over rather like a human with a stomachache. The
autopsy revealed nothing other than what the vet described as a sandy-looking
substance with a salt-and-pepper coloration in his stomach. My husband
says (now that he thinks about it) he recalls seeing something like that in the
tank when he emptied it out for me, but he didn't think much about it at the
time. I cannot figure out what it would have been. Certainly
nothing in his food. I mix my own food so I know exactly what's in
it. As far as litter goes, we keep all our gerbs on Carefresh. I
can't imagine if he swallowed any of it that it would have caused a problem,
since it's recycled paper. I would think it would be fairly easy to
digest. Besides, it's a rather uniform gray, not salt-and-pepper, and
certainly not sandy. I haven't even been using sand for baths for quite
awhile now, as we now are up 2 flights of stairs and neither of us wants to haul
up a 50 lb bag of play sand!
I am very perplexed. The only thing I can
think of is perhaps there was something in that particular bag of Carefresh that
shouldn't have been? I did change his tank out shortly before he became
ill, and used the last of a bag of Carefresh doing it. I haven't seen this
in any of my other tanks, but I can see how a sandy substance could settle to
the bottom of a bag and only come out at the last use. As I've been ill a
lot lately, I can also see me not noticing it at the time. It seems a
stretch but I can't come up with anything else.
Any ideas? Anybody else out there experience
this or something similar??
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