08/03/2026
TW: Photos have been included for educational purposes that may be disturbing to some. I have put them at the end so you can choose whether to see them or not.
It’s taken me nearly a week to write this post, and I’m still finding myself at a loss for words.
I had an experience last week with one of our gliders that many of you have had: a facial abscess. We’ve personally dealt with other facial abscesses before, so this was nothing particularly new to us as owners. What was new was that, no matter how hard we advocated for our glider, we couldn’t convince emergency exotic vets that they needed to pursue more aggressive treatment.
Some of you may remember Logan. In fact, there is a section of the sugar glider community who have unknowingly been impacted in a positive way by Logan. Logan was out-of-pouch on Feb. 22, 2021, and when he unlatched, it became very clear that he was a severe failure-to-thrive case. He is one of a few joeys who were the focus and tester for a handful of owners that made up the then-nicknamed “Med Team.”
After unlatching, Logan began showing tremors, wouldn’t gain weight despite eating around the clock, visibly looked ill, and struggled to survive. After a lot of going back and forth with possible diagnoses with our vet and the Med Team, we were able to determine through testing that Logan suffered from a form of dysbiosis known as bacterial gastroenteritis due to an overgrowth of enterobacter species in his gut. My husband and I treated him with antibiotics and fed him by hand for two months around the clock while his mom and dad took care of the rest. After several months, Logan made a full recovery from a disease from which many joeys were dying. If it weren’t for Logan and Drama, the Med Team wouldn’t have been formed and extended help to so many owners with joeys suffering. He is also one of the catalysts of why we created Exotic Medical Supply and the EMS kits. These failure-to-thrive cases also lead to a vet in Texas doing a study on U.S. sugar gliders’ gut microbiome, which was then presented to exotic vets at a national conference in Seattle, Washington, earlier this year. Because Logan lived, so many gliders are alive.
Thanks to incredibly knowledgeable people like Lisa Spence and Stephanie Brazil, who were instrumental in helping mold the treatment plans for future FTT cases based off Logan and Drama, we were able to quickly assist owners in getting their joeys diagnosed and treated to where bacterial gastroenteritis was no longer a death sentence for a freshly out-of-pouch joey.
As I’ve always done, I am using my latest experience with Logan as a teaching moment to hopefully help someone else in the future.
We noticed Logan’s facial abscess the evening of July 19, and we immediately made an appointment with our regular exotics vet on July 20. Our regular vet is currently in the process of finishing opening up his exotics hospital, so he was no longer at the previous clinic we’d used. As a result, we were limited on what we could do to treat Logan at that time, but on that day, he hadn’t had any damage to the globe of his eye. He simply needed a lance, drain and flush of the cheek before being put on pain medication and broad-spectrum antibiotics that have been found to be very effective for tooth root abscesses in case that’s what we were dealing with. I spent the next several days cleaning the area, medicating him, and documenting his progress.
On July 26, it became clear he was not responding to the antibiotics and would need further treatment. We chose to drive 40 minutes away to an emergency vet clinic to have them evaluate him. At this point, it also became obvious that there was damage to the globe of the eye and there would need to be an enucleation. When we were seen, the vet explained that he did, in fact, need the enucleation, but they would prefer to have imaging done prior to a surgery so they could deal with both the enucleation and the potential base problem (whether dental, debridement, etc) all at once instead risking having him put under anesthesia multiple times. However, they did not have the equipment to do the proper imaging for him, and we would have to wait four more days to get into an emergency clinic that did have the correct CT machine. Knowing how quickly he had been declining, and having helped numerous owners in the past with these kinds of cases, we tried to push that we would waive any liability on the clinic, and that we didn’t believe he would make it if we waited. The eyelid tissue was already looking bad, and we didn’t think it would stay healthy the longer we waited. The vets then told us that they thought he would be fine, and unless he started showing systemic signs of infection, they would prefer to wait until imaging came back. At that point, we were sent home with some gabapentin to help sedate him and a different antibiotic.
I was able to call the second clinic and get them to see us two days later instead of four, but they wouldn’t see us same-day. Unfortunately, during that two-day wait, we couldn’t do anything other than watch his condition continue to go downhill. We drove 30 minutes away for the second clinic. When we were seen, the vet let us know that they could do imaging and attempt a surgery, but that (1) the infection had likely spread to the bone after this long, and (2) the eyelid and tissue surrounding the cheek had died. There was no longer enough healthy tissue to do the surgery and properly close it. Our only option was humane euthanasia.
We were absolutely devastated by this, not just because we were losing a glider we had fed and bonded with every 15 to 30 minutes around the clock for a month, but because this was preventable. In the end, Logan survived a disease as a joey that, by all rights, he shouldn’t have just to die of an injury he should have survived. I’ve found myself more angry and frustrated than I have with any other previous death of a pet because of how hard we advocated for him just to be dismissed. I’ve since sent a follow-up email to the initial animal hospital asking them to reconsider treatment options in the future in hopes this can be prevented.
Please never be afraid to advocate for your pets. You are the voice they don’t have. It doesn’t always work out, and when it doesn’t, it’s very hard not to question yourself. But you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
I have included photos of Logan from when he was a joey along with the progression of his facial abscess for educational purposes. His full story can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sugarglidermedicalresearchandfundraising/posts/3324143961206525
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I may not have the answers to all of them, but if I do, I’m happy to answer them.
