So this is Billie.
She's an adult female platypus from Maleny.
She came to us last friday because a member of the public
found her circling in the stream.
When she came in to us, it was obvious
that she had severe neurological signs, so she has some brain damage.
There's a couple of possibilities for the primary cause.
It could be a parasite that is transmitted by rats,
or it could be that she suffered head trauma. So in the streams
they can fall over waterfalls and be dashed against rocks.
Predators can attack them and damage their heads as well.
She could have been dropped from the sky by a bird of prey.
She can't tell us what's wrong
so we have to do a full investigation to try and work it out.
I'll just show you some of her neurological signs.
The first one is that she's way too calm in the presence of a human.
So she's not frightened of me.
You can see that she has nystagmus where her eyes are moving backwards
and forwards, which suggests that there's some cerebellar injury.
She had a quite distinct abrasion on the top of her bill, which is already healing.
And she had rather severe abrasions on the tops of her feet,
which have almost healed in the week that she's been in care.
You can also see that she's got a diminished righting reflex.
Normally you put an animal on their back and they will spin over immediately
because their cerebellum tells them that they are the wrong way up.
And you can see she's very sluggish.
If we put her in water, she swims in circles always to the right.
And I think you can appreciate that her head is tilted to the right as well.
So her whole body is tilted to the right, and she's not using
the right front leg properly.
And you can see a general lack
of normal concern about the proximity of people.
So the procedure
we're going to do today to investigate why she's behaving like this
is we're going to give her a general anesthetic, take a blood sample
to see if the blood parameters have improved since her admission.
And we're going to do a CSF tap, because if she has worms in her
brain, it's a very bad prognosis. So we need to know.
I'm hoping that we'll find evidence of trauma rather than a parasitic disease,
because she has a higher probability of recovering
if it's just head trauma.
Here it is. Here she comes. That's amazing.
Isn't that genius?
So now we've got her comfortably restrained, to be anaesthetised.
So we're taking a sample of cerebrospinal fluid,
which means popping a needle
into the fluid space that goes around the brain and spinal cord.
But I think it's worth the risk to get the diagnostic value.
She has to be straight
Can you just bend her head up and down for me?
Okay, I've got my spot so can you line her up perfect again?
OK, here we go. Everybody be still.
See that beautiful, clear cerebrospinal fluid?
Clear liquid dropping into the tube.
[Dr. Emily] That was pretty sensational.
[Dr. Rosie] It looks really clear, doesn't it?
[Dr. Emily] It does, it looks beautiful.
So if there's no eosinophils,
which is a typical white cell response to parasites,
that will make me very happy.
See she's awake, she's got her little eyes open.
So we've looked at the cerebrospinal fluid tap -
the fluid around her brain - and it looks completely normal,
so there are no inflammatory cells and no evidence of parasites in that fluid.
So that's fantastic news that suggests that she's far
more likely to have trauma than a disease of the brain.
So she's far more likely to recover.
And then we're just looking at her blood smear and the blood results
that we've taken today and everything is pointing towards trauma
and a general improvement compared to her starting blood results.
So very encouraging.