SEbastian......

More when I have time:

Sebastian didn't have an easy start to life. Though he was a healthy happy little wombat when he was put into our hands, and we could see nothing untoward. But things started happening a couple of months after we had him. We have another female wombat with him, her name is Titch and she is about the same size as he is, but much heavier.

They had some kind of problem. Titch was the first to be seen, suddenly having a fit where she became rigid, and glucose was syringed into her mouth in very high concentration, and a few minutes later she was all right but was favouring a front leg. She slowly recovered and never had another seizure that we were aware of.

Sebastian was found favouring a front leg exactly 7 days later. We didn't see him have a seizure, but he may have had while we were sleeping. Though at that time we weren't getting much sleep because we had another two babies in care as well. So were feeding every 3 hours.

Both Titch and Sebastian started to recover, limping less and less over the next few weeks, but they were both starting to suffer from alopecia. Especially Sebastian, and he didn't eat grass well. Chewing the grass into a ball and spitting it out, but eating it again a little later. Double handling the grass so to speak. Both were fed plain muesli, rolled oats, sweet potato, almonds and as much grass as they would eat. They had stopped drinking their bottle earlier than we would have liked, weaning themselves at around the 5 kilogram mark, and that might have been a problem.

The vet was at a loss as to what Sebastian's problem could be. It was obvious that he was only holding his own when he reached 7 kilogram and then, after discussion with the vet, he was put on thyroid tablets, a quarter tablet daily [oroxine thyroxine sodium] We had already been giving him selenium in small quantities and vitamin B in larger doses and this was continued. Only the selenium eased off and finally the thyroid tablets also stopped being administered when it was discovered that none of these things were doing any good.

We started to give Sebastian Nutrigel with milk Biolac M200 milk paste and that allowed him to put on weight. Three syringes a day seemed to be a good balance. But when this was stopped he dropped away in weight again and we brought him back up with the syringe feeding. That's what's happening at the moment, though suddenly he has developed a diarrhoea in the last three days. Being very runny.

Three days ago he weighed 6.1 kilogram now he is back up a bit at 6.3 kilogram.

We don't think that he has dwarfism, but had hoped that Charlie the Peter Pan wombat may have given us some clues. But Charlie died.