!
Right after I noticed the fungus I had to go away for two weeks on prac, but left very specific instructions to the house sitters and talked to them a few times while I was away. He has been in the fridge for 3 weeks now - for the first week he was getting a daily 15 minute salt bath with 20g uniodised rock salt dissolved in 2L water when his water was changed, for the next week he just got a daily water change (as the house sitter
insisted he couldnt see any fungus). When I got home after the second week I found his gills absolutely covered in fungus, I don't know if that appeared suddenly since his morning water change or if he'd actually had it the whole time (but three different house sitters were sure it was gone, and I showed them pictures and everything).
Anyway, I pulled off what I could with a Q-tip and gave him a salt bath and it all came away, BUT other than the fungus coming back, there was another catastrophe. Something in the fridge obviously went haywire, because everything in the top few layers in the fridge was frozen solid. Luckily Barnaby's containers were in the bottom and so didn't freeze, but were sitting at 2 degrees celcius. I fiddled with the fridge's settings and the best I could manage was to keep it to 9 degrees. He was soo still when I came home, I thought he was dead, he has improved dramatically now that I brought the tempurature up to 9, but he is still majorly less active than the other times he's been in the fridge.
So for the past week I've been giving him one salt bath every day, and every day (or at least every second day) a little bit of fungus comes back. A couple of days ago I noticed the temperature of the fridge has dropped to 4 degrees (but it's still on it's warmest setting, stupid fridge), his tail has curled at the tip,
and little bits of his gills are starting to fall off, so I changed to twice daily water changes and salt baths, and thicker towel insulation of his container, in hopes of keeping the water slightly warmer.
Why isn't he getting better! Why does the fungus keep coming back?!
So I thought maybe there was some kind of underlying infection making him vulnerable. I can not afford the $200 minimum consult fee of the only axolotl vet in the state, so I read up on this page:
Axolotls - Health & Diseases and *cough* borrowed some Gentamicin from work (I'm a vet student, and I work at a vet). Except, I work at a horse vet, and this is horse-strength gent, so I feel uneasy about diluting it enough to inject, and decided I feel much safer with the bath option, especially when I don't even know if he has an infection. So instead of a salt bath this evening I gave him a bath in 2L water with 0.8mL 100mg/mL Gentamicin for 10 minutes (that link is a bit vague, but I assume they are referring to the small animal variant of 20mg/mL concentration). Although, the link is still so vague that I don't know how often I should repeat that.
Anyway, so I am getting a new fridge, but not until next Sunday. And basically, does anyone have any advice?? Is it likely that he has an infection along with his fungus, or something else? Does anyone have any experience with the gent? Is there anything I am doing wrong or anything else I could be doing?