qwigoqwaga
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I've had my leopard gecko for 10 years. A couple months ago, she started losing weight in her tail, and around a month ago it got to the point where it was a lot of weight lost and she was barely eating (still pooping though). She hasn't been especially lethargic, although she sleeps basically all day (not that different from what she did before anyway), but she has plenty of energy to squirm and try to run away from me when I try to dropper feed her). The only behavioral difference really is that she's not eating and losing weight.
I took her to the vet two weeks ago, and they said it could be an infection or something like cancer or kidney disease (leaning toward kidney disease because of the dark belly coloring). Since she's old and this is probably an end-of-life illness, I just want to keep her comfortable for as long as she can be, so I was hoping I could get some weight back on her and keep her as healthy as she can be until the disease progresses to a point that she can't live comfortably anymore.
The vet gave her a dewormer and the next day she ate 5 small calcium-dusted crickets (she was previously getting medium-large with no calcium dust), but since then she's only eaten one cricket every few days and the other days I try to give her some liquid/paste nutrition, but she typically consumes less than 1/2 cc of it. Yesterday, she ate 1 cricket and I managed to get nearly a whole cc into her, but she seemed extremely uncomfortable afterward (I don't force feed, just put drops around her mouth until she licks them). This morning there was the poop on the left in her tank, and sometime between then and this afternoon she did the other watery-looking poop.
I worry that she's going to waste away and die a slow painful death if she doesn't start eating more, but I also worry that maybe it's reached a point where the cure is worse than the disease. So, I'm hoping to get some opinions from more experienced leo owners. Have you experienced anything like this before? What do you think the issue is? How do I tell if she's in pain already and just being stoic since her behavior hasn't changed much?
I took her to the vet two weeks ago, and they said it could be an infection or something like cancer or kidney disease (leaning toward kidney disease because of the dark belly coloring). Since she's old and this is probably an end-of-life illness, I just want to keep her comfortable for as long as she can be, so I was hoping I could get some weight back on her and keep her as healthy as she can be until the disease progresses to a point that she can't live comfortably anymore.
The vet gave her a dewormer and the next day she ate 5 small calcium-dusted crickets (she was previously getting medium-large with no calcium dust), but since then she's only eaten one cricket every few days and the other days I try to give her some liquid/paste nutrition, but she typically consumes less than 1/2 cc of it. Yesterday, she ate 1 cricket and I managed to get nearly a whole cc into her, but she seemed extremely uncomfortable afterward (I don't force feed, just put drops around her mouth until she licks them). This morning there was the poop on the left in her tank, and sometime between then and this afternoon she did the other watery-looking poop.
I worry that she's going to waste away and die a slow painful death if she doesn't start eating more, but I also worry that maybe it's reached a point where the cure is worse than the disease. So, I'm hoping to get some opinions from more experienced leo owners. Have you experienced anything like this before? What do you think the issue is? How do I tell if she's in pain already and just being stoic since her behavior hasn't changed much?
