After noticing odd behavior like muscle spasms, Chuck the bearded dragon was examined and discovered to have a neck injury.
If your pet is exhibiting any of the same symptoms schedule an appointment today with Emerson Animal Hospital in West Point
Dr. karen emerson: good morning sunrisers!
I'm doctor karen emerson and today i have with me, my technician skylar, and this is actually a bearded dragon named chuck.
He is actually 24 months old and chuck has been seeing us on and off his entire life.
He's had some issues with constipation but the major issue that's happened with chuck is he actually got injured.
We don't know exactly what happened but it had to do with him getting in and out of his cage.
He actually has a neck injury and i bet you're thinking, "well, how did you know that a lizard had a neck injury?"
Dr. karen emerson: well, his mom brought him in and he was actually having muscle spasms and paralysis, meaning he was unable to use his legs and when bearded dragons go to get their food, they get up on all fours really high and they can run really fast.
He was avoiding that and he was actually just avoiding being active at all.
So we didn't know, well, is he constipated?
Is this a pain response?
Dr. karen emerson: actually, my associate doctor janzen saw him first and did a really good exam and noticed that he did have some neck pain and he had what we call neurological deficits, meaning he did not respond when we did a neurological exam on some of his limbs.
Dr. karen emerson: now there's a lot of different things that can cause this and reptiles.
One can be a calcium deficiency, a dietary deficiency, which we check with that.
All that was normal.
So when we elicited the pain on the neck response, we knew there had to be something there.
Dr. karen emerson: so we actually did an x-ray just like you would do on a dog or a cat or any other animal eliciting pain and we actually noted that he had a stenotic cervical area and all that means is his vertebral bodies in that area were basically stenotic, meaning they were pressed closer together and he almost had a disc rupture in that area.
Dr. karen emerson: i know a lot of you out there probably familiar with back pain, or you have basically what we call intervertebral disc disease.
Well, lizards can have that too.
They can get injured.
Dr. karen emerson: so what we did is we did an x-ray, which we're going to show you where he had his lesion.
Then we started doing laser treatments.
This is the laser i'm always talking about.
Yes, we use it on exotics too.
Dr. karen emerson: another thing we did, this is just a wonderful thing.
It's the first time we've ever used it, is we started him on gabapentin.
Gabapentin actually is a drug that we use on other animals with disc disease.
I've never used it on reptiles before.
We started it.
We had it specially compounded.
He's doing wonderful.
So if you have a bearded dragon that you notice is not moving around normally, they're not able to catch their crickets, they're acting kind of painful when you pick them up, they may even be trying to bite when you pick them up, that's not normal.
Call and make that appointment is so important and i promise your pets will thank you.
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After noticing odd behavior like muscle spasms, Chuck the bearded dragon was examined and discovered to have a neck injury. If..