The following is an excerpt from the new book Unlikely Companions: Adventures of an Exotic Animal Doctor (or, What Friends Feathered, Furred, and Scaled Have Taught Me About Life and Love by Laurie Hess, DVM with Samantha Rose.
“DID I TELL you I found my python?” my intern, Lauren, had asked me.
Lauren’s missing ball python, Cecil, had been the topic of much conversation in the surgery room. Ball pythons are a very popular pet snake, especially in apartments because they rarely grow longer than five or six feet and do not get very wide in girth—except they commonly go missing, often for months or even years at a time. I’d gone over to Lauren’s twenty- two-story high-rise in Midtown Manhattan, where many of the interns lived, to try to help find the brown-and gold-speckled snake, but after a thorough search we conceded that he seemed to have disappeared without a trace. After several months, Lauren had given up on ever seeing him again.
“Where’d you find him?”
“Oh, I didn’t—another tenant did. My neighbor Jill got into the elevator, and there he was. Curled up in a tight little ball in the middle of the elevator floor. Pretty fantastic, right?”
Lauren was beaming, but I couldn’t help wondering if “fantastic” in this situation was a relative term. I doubted that Jill shared Lauren’s enthusiasm when she stepped into the elevator and found a four-foot python at her feet.
As if she’d heard my thoughts, Lauren chortled, “Well, I guess it did freak her out a little bit. She said she felt something touch her foot and ignored it until Cecil uncurled and started crawling up her leg. She screamed, kicked him off, and ran out of the elevator so fast, she said, that she left her strappy sandal behind.” Lauren giggled to herself. “Oh, Cecil, he doesn’t mean any harm.”
I imagined that Cecil must have survived for all those months on the building’s rodent population, but I didn’t share that conclusion with Lauren, since she still lived there. Stumbling upon a food source is the best-case scenario for a lost snake like Cecil, although snakes can survive for long periods without any food at all. They will curl up and go into a sort of shutdown mode, in which they slow their heartbeat, lower their temperature, and stop moving. Their already slow metabolism comes to a near standstill, and they can survive without food much longer than most any other animal I know of. I remembered my client Gus, the owner of a red, brown, and yellow milk snake that was about three inches in girth and went missing for nearly a year. Like Lauren, Gus had thought he’d never see his pet again, but the snake must have been living in the pipes behind his fridge. One morning, he slithered out of his hiding place, and Gus stumbled on him in the middle of the floor. Looking rather emaciated and weak, like a deflated bicycle tire, the snake was in desperate need of emergency care, so Gus gently coiled him up and transported him to our hospital in the bottom of a laundry basket. There I treated him for extreme dehydration with a dose of an electrolyte solution under his skin and some liquid food through a tube passed down to his stomach.
Excerpted from Unlikely Companions: Adventures of an Exotic Animal Doctor (or, What Friends Feathered, Furred, and Scaled Have Taught Me About Life and Love by Laurie Hess, DVM with Samantha Rose. Copyright © 2016. Available from Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Available at Amazon.
