Max

[BarelyBreathing]

When I woke up this morning, everything seemed fine. When I came back in the house I notice Max (Varanus doreanus) was sitting in an odd position on his favorite branch and kind of waving his hand at me. I opened his enclosure to see what was going on, and he normally comes charging at the door with his mouth open looking to kill something. He didn't do that. He hobbled slowly on three legs about six inches and gave up. I noticed that the fingers on his front left hand were extremely swollen and bleeding, so I grabbed a towel to cover him with, put him in the crate, and we left for the vet.

Being at the vet's was awful. He kept thrashing, hissing, and trying to bite. I have no idea how, but he was restrained long enough to get a few x-rays. The bones in two of his fingers were twisted and broken, and skinned on the bottom and insides. He also had a minor fracture in his wrist. We're assuming he got stuck on something in his enclosure and the injuries are a result of him trying to escape. It also appeared that infection began to set in in the area that was opened.

The good news is the vet told me he had an otherwise very healthy skeletal structure, so as long as he's limited in mobility, he should heal quickly.


The vet gave him an injection of antibiotics and put some gooey yellow stuff on his toes and covered it with a bandage. The bandage lasted all of four seconds (we counted, because we were taking bets on how long it would stay on).

I have to give him oral antibiotics for seven days, so unfortunately this means I get to make a lovely blender concoction of ground turkey, ground fuzzies, and ground roaches with his medication. I also have to keep him immobile and keep the wound dry. Right now he is in a 30 gallon glass tank. It's in his enclosure, so it's still very much climate controlled. I will put the basking light on him twice a day, once for five minutes and once for ten. He doesn't have any substrate in there so I can assure everything is very clean.

Right now he's very lethargic. I'm not sure if it's from the injury (he wasn't lethargic in the vet's office at all), stress, medication, or just general defeat of being confined in such a small environment.

I'm leaving him alone right now, but tomorrow I will go in and tear up everything in his enclosure to figure out what he got stuck on.

Any tips, guys?