Looking for advice on my beardie. Potential respiratory infection or just a drama queen?
So we got our Mushu in May, at which point he was roughly 4 months old, making him 8 months old now.
In June, he had an episode which frankly terrified us… he was fast asleep on my chest (we take him out for a cuddle most evenings) then he woke up rasping and appeared to be choking. He was rolling his head around ‘coughing’ and not visibly breathing. We thought we had lost him at various points because he’d appear to ‘give up’, close his eyes, rest his head and was unresponsive. We attempted to clear his airways but couldn’t see anything visibly stuck, and he hadn’t eaten for 5 hours by this point. We followed all the advice and tilted his head downwards to see if there was anything, and encourage it to naturally fall down.
Nothing seemed to be working and this went on for a couple of hours, while we arranged an emergency vet visit and drove over. By the time we got to the vet, he had stopped choking, and suddenly perked up. The vet said his lungs and heart beat were healthy, so were his behaviours. We talked through husbandry and they said all seemed good. They couldn’t see anything in his airways either. They actually said if we hadn’t described what had happened they would have said he’s the epitome of health…
We are so relieved he is okay, but slightly on edge and hyper aware of small changes in behaviour all the time since we don’t know what caused this.
This didn’t happen again until the other day when he woke up from a sleep again and rasped once, then stopped- no long episode this time. But I stayed up all night with him to watch him.
He doesn’t show any other signs of respiratory problems, no clicking or mucus, he’s very energetic and sociable, eats well etc. But every time I hear a noise and he’s near by I panic now!!!
Has anybody seen anything like this before? Should I be worried or is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening again?