Mites!
Welp, it’s been a while!
I got Oscar all set up in a giant, Niteangel Vista cage, only to move him back out again when his started being itchy without a clear cause.
The last few months (Thanksgiving onwards) have been a lot of observing Oscar, trying to figure out what’s going on with him. Was it an allergy? Was his skin dry?
I tried removing the hemp digging areas from his bin, no change in itchiness. I then removed the coconut fiber, again no change. I hadn’t made any changes in his diet other than maybe giving him some mealworms.. but I just didn’t think a mealworm allergy could be the source of this.
We tried putting an antibiotic cream on his itchy sores (provided by my vet of course), but he only overgroomed the area, opened up his scabs and bled all over (so, no more cream for Oscar!).
Oscar has been on prednisone (oral steroid) & baytril (oral antibiotic) on and off for the last few months as we try to solve the problem. The one good thing about all of this is I’ve committed more time to spending with Oscar and slowly (slowly!) he’s come a little bit out of his shell. Oscar used to be the hamster I might not see for week(s) at a time, and only if I got up in the middle of the night.
There was a period when I put his bin at the end of my bed, so as I fell asleep, I could watch him start to get him and quietly observe him. But he definitely wanted nothing to do with me (other than the occasional snack of course).
Yesterday, we headed back to the vet. The next step was a skin scraping or biopsy to figure out what was going on. The vet said that often it was very difficult to do without putting them under, and I worried about the risk of doing so… but if it was the only way forward to get him healthy again, of course it was the right path.
Oscar was SO well behaved yesterday that the vet was able to get the skin scraping without putting him under! The vet saw some microscopic mites on the scraping, so we’ll start a round of ivermectin once we can get some (ugh, thanks COVID conspiracies for taking all the ivermectin!)
The type of mites Oscar has are the kind that normally live on hamsters. They aren’t transferrable to humans or other animals. But, a dip in their immune systems and the mite population can grow out of control. Ivermectin will help get them back into a good place. Then we’ll have to figure out why his immune system was down…. but at least it’s a step in the right direction.
(the good news is this means I don’t have to do a full cage clean & disinfect as these mites don’t live outside his body!)
To distract Oscar from his itchy bod, I got him some nuts-in-shell from Nuts.com to keep him busy. Last night I gave him a cracked open macadamia nut & almond, he seemed pretty excited and did spend quite a bit of time on these! Oscar is still active but hasn’t been running as much the last few days, so I wanted to make sure he had something to occupy his time.
Have you experienced mites on your hamster? How was the recovery process?
