Hi all. My name is Emma. I'm 24 and live in Seattle with my husband and our green iguana Fifi (short for Fighter). I'm new to HC, but we've had Fifi for almost 3 years now. We're not exactly sure how old she is, but maybe somewhere between 5 and 9 years old. And she's about 3'3" with part of her tail missing.
We adopted her from a local animal shelter that was unfamiliar with exotics and had her in a 10 gallon tank with just a plain light bulb on the top of her cage. She was severely underweight, her color was horrible, and looked so terrible there. But when we picked her up and saw how sweet she was, we knew we had to bring he home with us that minute.
She was anorexic for a while and had an abcess on one of her left hand toes, which x-rays ended up showing was a bone infection that was working its way up her arm. We tried oral and subcutaneous injections of antibiotics and saline injections, but nothing worked and we ended up needing to have her front left arm amputated at the elbow. She has a big scar on her neck (possibly from a bite, while she was with her previous owners), and when she first shed, it revealed some thermal burns on her rear legs.
We built her a special handicapped iguana accessible enclosure and she gets around very well. She can scale our bookcases like no one's business. She's very gentle and sweet around people, but she is clearly an alpha around other iguanas.
She's had a lot of medical problems so far... Last spring she decided to eat some gravel, and this summer we discovered that she has a poorly functioning heart valve and enlarged liver and kidneys, so she'll be on medicine for that for the rest of her life. And most recently our vet told us that Fifi (who was just skin and bones when we adopted her) is overweight. So she won't be getting as much winter squash as before.
But yeah. That's our story. I only have one reptile but I have my hands more than full with her...
This is what Fifi looked like at the shelter 3 years ago when we adopted her:
And this is what Fifi looks like now... (when she yawns....):
And here is Fifi this past Halloween in her costume... She was the crocodile from Steve Irwin's "the Crocodile hunter".
