In Memoriam - SnowBall

Snowball. About 3 years. Male ♂

Poor quality pic taken with cellphone/handphone.
We haven't had access to a camera for many years now, and we kept thinking there's still time to get one. Now we have to live with the regret ... 5 years he was with us, and we have only these 4 cellphone pics, plus several cellphone video-clips.

We never saw this coming.
It was quite a shock as it was so unexpected.
From the moment he started going off his food to the time he died was only a period of several days. We rushed him to hospital, he underwent all sorts of blood tests and scans, but slipped into a comatose state, and died while he was hospitalized. We were reeling from the shock. The bad news kept coming and there didn't seem to be time to process each piece of information before the next one hits.

So many things were going on, I will try and remember enough to record them here, as I understood it ...

The first thing the vet did was to open his mouth and smell his breath, and pronouned that it was probably pancreatitis. Initial palpations further confirmed this as he was sensitive in the pancreas region. He was also jaundiced. Urine and blood tests confirmed he had kidney and liver trouble, and was also diabetic. Because the diabetes onset was so sudden, the vet suspects it is transient diabetes and is due to the pancreatitis. And because the liver and pancreas are in the same region, his liver also was infected.

His diabetes was not 'regular' diabetes that you can just treat with insulin ... it was Diabetic Keto Acidotic (DKA). He was very critical and needed to have his insulin level checked every 2-3 hours. He had to be stabilised before he can he discharged and treated as for regular diabetes. That may take about 6 days, and many in that condition don't make it. The vet clinic was a smallish set-up and didn't have 24-hour/overnight facilities nor the scanning equipment required. So he was referred to a hospital ... I rushed him there in a cab, with the IV needle in his arm and the saline bottle held high in my hand.

At the hospital ... more rounds of tests and scanning by ultra-sound. Prognosis very bad. Confirmed DKA, and this vet was also of the opinion that it was transient diabetes brought on by pancreatitis. The scans also showed one kidney was very small and the other very enlarged. This meant that one kidney probably stopped functioning a long time ago, and the other had compensated by taking on the added load. However, the urine concentration was still not too bad, so kidney trouble was probably not the primary cause of his condition.

After that, things all became one hazy whirl and all I can remember is that by evening time, he had already slipped into a comatose state; but his insulin levels were getting better, so we were still hopeful.

Next morning, just before 8am, got a call from the hospital.
His heart had stopped and they had just revived him ... they await my instructions on what to do if he had another heart-arrest. We requested that they put him down immediately so that he need not suffer anymore as there was no chance of him coming out of this.

A few minutes later, another call from the hospital ... when they went to give him the lethal injection, he was already gone.

Died : 0800 hours, March 12, 2011. Age: almost 8 years.

Here are the other 3 cellphone pics of him ...

In Memoriam 2 ...
... MaMa Turtle
Morning has Broken ...