MMM Yoda I Am, Mange I Have ...

April the 26th had been tough day and we were in 'crash and burn' mode as we ate dinner. Then, Declan pinged Geri; as he often does in the evening to say "Hi!" However, this time it was to ask if we could take a hoggie that his parents had just found. I told him to tell them to come straight over and so Yoda arrived.

Poor little thing. Brian and Brenda had assumed he was a baby as he was pretty small - just 403gms, but on examination it was apparent he was an adult as he had really big feet and well developed claws. He presented with severe mange - with cracks all over his skin, starvation, dehydration and was hypothermic. 

I'm really hungry and thirsty!

The open wound on Yoda's back caused by Mange cracking.

This little man had been found in the late afternoon, walking along (I have no idea how he was managing to be mobile ...) the foot path looking for a way back into the grass at the top of a gully. Brenda scooped him up and they came right over. The first order of business was to warm him up and then to offer him some food. In cases like this I use a mixture of Hills AD, electrolytes and BabyDog (a puppy formula that Narelle brings in from the UK).


 After Yoda had polished off two bowls full of food, I decided he was strong enough to cope with an oil bath so we warmed some oil up and he got 'the treatment' which is essentially to cover the whole hog in oil to smother the mange mites and ease the itch. It also begins to soften the mange crust and condition the skin. The crust was very thick and had started to cause his skin to crack. The largest crack was on his back and was really nasty.

Once he'd had his bath, I tucked him up on his heat pad in the hospital box I had prepared for him and he went off to sleep.

Day two - and he's getting those feet tucked in a bit more.

When he first arrived, Yoda couldn't roll into a ball properly and his back legs stuck out at weird angles. This was due to a combination of being hypothermic and the mange 'freezing' him due to the crust being thick and hard which restricts the movement of their limbs. He really was just a ball of abject misery.

Day two dawned and Yoda was still with us. He had eaten well overnight and gained a good amount of weight. When I got him up to clean his room and give him his dose of Advocate he managed to curl up more than he had the previous night which was great. The crust was starting to lift off as well and I spent a 'happy' 1/2 hour 'picking scabs of the hedgehog'! Yuck!
I also started him on twomedications - Deprim; an antibiotic and Panacur; a parasite medication.

See my 'V' shaped bum? Not good!

By day six Yoda was looking SO much better. I used HMF honey on his face and ears -  two areas that can be hard to get the crust to shift from, and this had worked really well. He was pretty much clear of his crust, his back; which I was also using the honey on, was healing up nicely and he could roll right up. He was still far too skinny though.

On the afternoon of day 6, Yoda declined dramatically. For the first week I had been waking him up during the day to eat as his weight gain had been sporadic and his appetite wasn't the best. On this day he didn’t eat much during the day when I woke him to have something to eat, refused all food from 3pm and then developed awful diarrhoea that night. He didn’t eat at all that night and dropped 48gm, which was nearly half of what I’d managed to get him to gain in the previous week. By 3 pm Fri he’d had nothing to eat or drink for 24hrs and I made the decision to force feed him. He was surprisingly amenable and managed feed him; up to 20mls at a time, every 2 hours until bed time. That night he actually ate some biscuits and managed to gain a little. The following morning I decided to leave him be other than to give him one syringe feed so that I could give him his morning medication and the Diatomaceous Earth I’ve started him on. I then left him to sleep for the rest of the day. The following morning he had eaten well, had trashed his bedroom and had gained 44gms.

Yoda rockin' his new fat bum!

 Day 10 and Yoda was doing very well. He now weighed 605gms and was rounding out beautifully. I had another critical hoggie coming in so Yoda went off to a new foster Mama. He continues to be a little up and down but in general is doing well. He will come back to me when he is big enough to go into one of my outside hutches - this will be at around 800gms I think.