Introducing the emotional support…snake?
Content warnings: This essay discusses mental illness and the death of a pet, features pictures of snakes, and contains references to needles, vomiting, veterinary procedures, and cancer.
All right, folks, let’s talk about animals, and about mental health, and about a very special snake.
If you know me, you probably know that I struggle profoundly with my mental health; I’ve had major depression and generalized anxiety since I was in high school. You may also know that I am absolutely wild about animals. (If you don’t know me, that’s about as good a primer as you could get on The Basics of Nellasaura, honestly.)
Seven or eight years ago, I started receiving professional treatment for my mental health issues. Five years ago, I walked into a Petco and walked out with a ball python (Python regius). It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized how important the latter had become to managing the former.
I’d never had a snake before. Cats and dogs, yes, rodents, yes; my fiancée and I had even been keeping crested geckos for a few years at that point. But the scrawny, underfed little noodle I would name Yigg was my first snake, and caring for him presented a real learning curve.
I had done my research, of course. (Always do your research before committing to a new pet, folks, especially an exotic.) But a few hours of reading online hadn’t prepared me for the reality of owning a ball python. For the first several months of his life with me, Yigg had to endure constant changes: to the bedding he was housed on, to the sources of heat in his cage, to the decor and hides and foliage and just about everything else pertaining to his enclosure. As babies — and at approximately 6 months old, Yigg was definitely still a baby — ball pythons are notoriously shy and sensitive. They have a reputation as picky eaters because they’ll go off their food if they’re too stressed out, and as ‘pet rocks’ because their primary reaction to stress is to hide. As thin as he was and as poor as my initial set-up turned out to be, those first few months could have killed Yigg.
But they didn’t. He ate like a machine. He explored his enclosure. He tolerated being picked up and held. Once those first few months passed and I got things dialed in for him, I was able to start handling him regularly. He grew quickly, and as he grew he became increasingly confident and curious. As I worked with him steadily, he became calm, and eventually even started to seek out handling. He was an absolute joy to work with, a gentle and personable snake who could charm even people who’d never wanted to get anywhere near a snake before in their lives.
After a couple of years, I realized that I was turning to him when I was experiencing particularly severe symptoms of my depression or my anxiety. When I was too exhausted to get out of bed, I could just lay there and let him crawl over and around me. When I couldn’t stop myself from having irrational and intrusive thoughts, he could ground me in the present. When I was upset, or overwhelmed, or having trouble holding on, he gave me something to hold on to, literally and metaphorically. Even his weight was a comfort; he was over two pounds by his third year, hefty enough that his length over my shoulders or resting on my chest could bring me back down to earth when I wanted to vibrate my way into outer space. Watching him move was soothing; caring for him was but a modest demand on my always-limited energy; the way he responded to me with a trust and ease that he didn’t show other people filled my heart.
I started calling him my emotional support animal. At first I felt ridiculous saying it, knowing that that term evokes for many people the image of a proud, well-trained dog in a vest, serving the disabled. After all, I’m not disabled, and he wasn’t trained. (He didn’t have to be. Just being what he was was enough.) But a service animal and an emotional support animal are two very different things. Emotional support animals aren’t expected to perform assistive tasks like service animals are. All an emotional support animal needs to do is be what it is, and help its owner regulate their emotions with its companionship — just like what Yigg did for me.
So yes, I had an emotional support snake. Don’t worry, I knew better than to try to pass him off as a service animal — to bring him someplace he shouldn’t be or demand accommodations for him at the expense of others — but when I was home and I was upset, I could rely on him. When I wasn’t able to handle him for a prolonged period (he got mites once and it took a month to treat him, it was awful), I actually started to miss him and itch to hold him again.
And all this in the company of other animals! My household is exceedingly animal friendly. My fiancée and I have a dog, we have cats, and we’ve had a growing assortment of lizards and, eventually, even other species of snakes. We’ve fostered semi-feral kittens trapped from the hedgerow outside. We kept a trio of ducks found abandoned at a park for a weekend, until we were able to bring them to a sanctuary. There’s currently a jar full of tiny aquatic snails, considered pests by aquarists, bubbling away in the critter room because I couldn’t bring myself to recklessly discard them.
Every pet I’ve had, every animal I’ve cared for brings me joy, but none of them ever brought me peace the way Yigg did. As my mental health issues intensified and then eased, as my ability to get through my days and attend my job and keep my home improved then backslid then improved, as my medication regimen changed and my treatment took twists and turns, he was my most constant, most restful, and most anchoring companion.
A little bit over a month ago, I lost Yigg.
It started at the end of April, when I noticed an unusual swelling in the last third of Yigg’s body. I assumed it was constipation, possibly caused by dehydration, and treated it as such. He got daily soaks in warm water, and massages to convince the mass to move; he got a newer, bigger water bowl so it wouldn’t run dry again. He got a jungle gym to work his muscles and encourage the matter to pass.
Then he started getting oral laxatives. I had to learn to pass a tube down his throat to administer the laxative, so he wouldn’t regurgitate it immediately. Sometimes he did anyway. He would vomit up undigested matter from his most recent meal — which had been in March. I was instructed to tube feed him along with the laxative, to keep his strength up and stimulate his GI tract. Every few days, he would pass a little something — some urine, some urates, some small amount of poop.
The mass never moved. It just kept getting bigger.
We tried antibiotics next. I had to teach myself to give them via injection, because pandemic restrictions prevented me from going into the animal hospital to have a tech show me how it was done. I kept tube feeding him. I started talking to the exotic animal specialist at Blue Pearl, a local specialty veterinary hospital. An ultrasound determined that the mass wasn’t fecal matter, but wasn’t diagnostic otherwise; his bloodwork had her worried about a kidney infection.
Exploratory surgery was on the table. A CT scan was on the table. Euthanasia, the most financially pragmatic option, was on the table.
I wanted to save him. I would have used all of my savings, I would have driven him hours out of town or to another state if that’s what it would have taken. I spent a month tube feeding him and giving him injections and soaking him every night. But as the mass kept growing and he started passing blood instead of feces, Yigg no longer had the luxury of time.
In the beginning of June, we skipped any further diagnostics and went straight to the surgery. Either Dr. Whitehead would be able to identify and remove the mass, or she would find that he was “unrecoverable” — a polite term for “too far gone to be able to survive any medical intervention”. If that ended up being the case, did I want them to euthanize him while he was still under sedation, or did I want them to wake him up so I could say goodbye? By this time, I knew enough about snakes to know that they are difficult to anesthetize and difficult to wake up from sedation. It’s difficult to adequately control their pain, and he would be in pain after the surgery. And as important as Yigg was to me, I was clear-eyed about the limits of our relationship; waking him up just so I could have a last few moments or days with him would mean very little to a snake, even this calm, curious one who knew and trusted me.
And Yigg — Yigg wasn’t really himself anymore anyway. By the end of May I could tell it hurt him to move, dragging that mass around with him. He became increasingly uncooperative with the feedings. He no longer wanted to come out to see me. (In fact, he hadn’t shown his usual increase of activity throughout the spring this year. He’d remained in hiding. Hindsight is 20/20, and I can see clearly now that something was wrong before I ever noticed a swelling.) The confident, inquisitive snake I loved was lost to whatever it was that was going on inside him.
I said my goodbyes when I dropped him off for his surgery.
It wasn’t an infection. It wasn’t even his kidneys. What the veterinarian found inside my snake was cancer: an aggressive adenocarcinoma of his intestinal tract. It was too far advanced for surgical removal to be a viable option. She called me anyway, to make sure, but I didn’t even need to think about my decision. I gave her the go-ahead to euthanize him while he was still sedated. It was the last kindness left that I could give him: releasing him from his pain.
Yigg was five and a half years old when he died. A well-cared for ball python in captivity can live past thirty. I had expected to have him with me for decades; instead, I got five years.
In the month since, I’ve thrown myself into caring for my other pets. My partner and I still have our dog and our cats; we still have an assortment of reptiles. I assumed — naively, or perhaps stubbornly — that one of the other pets might lend itself to providing me the same support Yigg did. Perhaps my dwarf monitor lizard, intelligent and reactive? Perhaps one of our rat snakes, smooth and tactile? I had always handled Yigg the most, because he was so tolerant of it and so restful to handle; maybe I just needed to handle one of these other pets more, to unlock the same kind of relationship?
…Yeah, it turns out there’s more to it than that. All of my animals still bring me joy, and I love to work with them, but only Yigg gave me what I can call emotional support. He was my grounding rod, my comfort, my ambassador, my teacher. From when he first came home to his very last day he taught me things. From Yigg I learned how to determine the needs of an animal and how to provide them; I learned patience; I learned why not to bring an outside animal to a reptile show (and how to treat mites). I learned that ball pythons aren’t the uninteresting lumps people think they are. I learned that I wanted to share him and the pleasure of keeping reptiles with the world at large. And at the end, I learned that I can give an injection, and place an oral tube, and that even a ‘dumb snake’ can have enough of a personality that it changes when he’s in pain.
I learned that you can have an emotional support snake, and that it takes a special snake to be one.
I know I’ll never have another snake like Yigg. He took a bigger piece of my heart than most of my pets when I let him go. I will always cherish the five years we had together, and remember everything he taught me.
But I need that emotional support. I need that restful, grounding pet to help me keep the intrusive thoughts and the suicidal urges, the hammering heart, the hopeless despair at bay. There’s no guarantee that another ball python will do that for me, certainly no snake picked at random or or ordered sight unseen from an online breeder. But perhaps if I start with a snake that shows a touch of the same confidence and curiosity as Yigg did, even when he was a starving little pet-mill python, maybe. Maybe in time, we can grow the same kind of relationship, and a new ball python can bring me that same kind of peace. And so, to that end…
Meet Yukikaze.
