Need advice on constipated Boa

I posted the below in the Boa forum but just now noticed this particular forum and felt it was more appropriate of a question to be asked here. Here is my original post:


[quote=griz]My 4 year old albino dwarf boa is constipated. I noticed a week or two back that there was a slight swell just above her vent. After a few days this swell was bigger so after having a friend come look at her we decided that it was best to get her in. I took her to a local state of the art vet (client of mine) and he sono'd her as well as x-ray'd her. After reviewing the pics and having the University of Illinois exotic animal vet come in, we decided that somehow she was constipated. I keep her on newspaper and only newspaper so she did not ingest anything.

We proceeded to get her an enema which helped lube things and the vet then inserted his finger in and slowly massage a rather large piece of feces to her vent. He then used a very blunt pair of scissors to decrease the size of the feces which worked. 3 very hard pieces of feces came out. These were VERY hard chunks as I could barely make an indentation in them. The xray showed that the other pieces remaining were smaller so we thought it was best to see if she could pass those on her own. I took her home on Friday and soaked her for an hour or so several times a day. As of this morning she has not passed anything.

My question is this, where do we go from here? I do not want to have surgery performed due to the risk of contamination since we are dealing with feces. Is there a stool softener that I can give her orally? My snake room is inbetween 50-60 in humidity and I have her water dish on the flexwatt tape. I have always had great sheds from my animals. I am simply at a loss as how to proceed. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Griz [/griz]

UPDATE: I did, on advice from my vet, load a f/k small rat with 3cc of mineral oil and fed it to her a week ago. Nothing as of yet. She does still pass small bird like droppings but nothing sizeable. She still acts fairly normally and appears healthly other than the noticeable swell above her vent. What should I do from here? A buddy suggested tubing her and administering mineral oil straight to the stomach but I don't know if this is the best result. I could do the enema again and see what happens but what I do know is that if I do nothing she will die. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Griz