u/Easy_Elevator5637

my boy is 10 and i recently posted that he was not eating and losing weight so the vet prescribed him two meds and critical care. i recently posted asking about the meds and was told that they made sense to be prescribed. i’ve been giving them since and my boy does NOT appreciate oral meds, which is a blessing (that he’s feeling well enough to fight me) and a curse (that it’s REALLY hard to get them in him).

i had a pre planned non refundable trip scheduled for five days after the initial vet visit, so i went back and forth on whether i could leave him home alone for a week and decided that I felt more comfortable boarding him at a vet’s office that boarded exotics. i made sure to triple check that they administer meds, and when i dropped him off I gave them the prescriptions that had the dosage/timings printed on the labels and verbally gave them the same instructions to type out.

i left on my trip and received a photo after landing of him munching mealworms like nothing was wrong, after months of refusing with me. i had switched him from paper towels to top soil/sand a few months ago and switched him back to a quarantine setup for boarding to make things easier. i really thought that it might have just been that he’s a drama queen who was starving himself because he didn’t like the dirt and once he was back on paper towels, he started eating again. it could also have been the meds making him feel well enough to eat though.

omg i was SO relieved! i felt like i had made the right choice, not only for his heath but for my own peace of mind, i wasn’t worried that I would come home to him in worse shape and felt like i could focus on enjoying my trip.

until i received a call on day two of my seven day trip, telling me that they accidentally gave my tiny baby, who was prescribed .06ml of metacam a whopping 10x dose at .6ml, twice. they were pushing some sort of fluids on orders from a vet but that amount could’ve done significant damage to his kidneys or GI tract. they were recommending that I have them transfer him to an emergency exotics hospital where they would put in an IO catheter, which goes into his femur, to give additional fluids, and give him more meds to coat his GI tract. all this while still not exactly knowing if there was a certain reason he wasn’t eating in the first place.

all of this is going on when i’m in locations with spotty signal that has me missing and dropping calls, timezone differences that have me missing the hours that the offices are open, just trying to figure out if he is going to be okay, if moving him is necessary, giving permission to move him and finding out if the boarding vet would cover the medical costs of the hospital (which it seems like they are).

i’m just so worried and i feel like i failed him. i left him somewhere that i thought he would be safe and taken care of and instead he’s with strangers, needing invasive procedures and extra meds with no guarantee that he will be okay or that he will have any longevity of life following this. i know logically that it isn’t my fault, accidents happen, but it hurts so much to know that he’s suffering and could be scared and in pain and i’m not around to know exactly what’s going on. to go from being so elated getting a picture of him eating and feeling like i did the right thing, to feeling like i made a mistake by putting him in the care of strangers that made everything worse.

hi all, i took my 10 year old boy to the vet today because he has been uninterested in food for a few weeks, was visibly losing weight, and seemed to be squinting/keeping his eyes closed a lot (but eyes were clear and not red/cloudy). of course he was his usual curious self at the vet, you’d never think anything was wrong, so of course i started wondering if i was overthinking things.

the vet asked about husbandry, checked him over, and confirmed that he had lost about 15g (he was overweight previously but she was now able to feel his spine). she said she didn’t see anything wrong physically aside from being kind of skinny and dehydrated, but they couldn’t do bloodwork without anesthesia which couldn’t be done today. so they sent me home with critical care carnivore to help get his weight up, and two antibiotics (SMZ-TMP and Metacam) for unknown/possibly nonexistent conditions.

the critical care makes sense to me, but i’m really struggling with the antibiotics. i bought them because im not going to just say no to the vet’s recommendation, but i feel a little uncomfortable giving medication that isn’t needed. my boy fought me over eyedrops he previously needed, i don’t want to be sticking more syringes in his mouth than strictly necessary. does anyone have any thoughts on whether i should or should not give the antibiotics? it seems like overkill for a ‘maybe’ situation. am i wrong to doubt the vet?