Rescued Brazilian Rainbow Q's

[dtocher]

I am a college student who keeps reptiles. I have a ball, an albino kingsnake, B&W tegu. My friends all know this. I see a friend while eating lunch out one day and he says that a mutual friend of ours found a snake under his house. He describes it, and I say it must be a Brazilian Rainbow Boa.

I went over to see it, and I was right. We've had heavy rains in my part of Southern California, and his house got partially flooded. He went under the house to the basement to see if his stuff there got damaged, and found the snake curled up, near death. He had it in a plastic fish aquarium with no heat and two fuzzy mice (one dead from the cold, one near dead). I was the first person not afraid to pick it up. He said it tried to strike two other people, but missed. He said I should take it and I agreed. I took it home and set it up in a k-mart 60+ quarter tupperware type thing.

This was about a week ago. The first 24 hour it had a real heavy wheez. I thought respiratory infection. After I heated him up, though. The wheez went away. He also had a few cuts. I think he was someone's pet that escaped, and just didn't know what to do when winter came. He had one small cut over his left eye. Now here's the wierd thing:

I tried to feed it an adult mouse. It struck, but missed and hit the cardboard box I had it in pretty hard with its nose. Did that twice, then reared back in pain (like hitting the box hard hurt it). Then after an hour or so I gave up and took it out of the box. It got confused and tried to strike my face (but didn't open its mouth to bite, so it just headbutted me). I tried again with a rat pup a few days later.

The snake is about 4 feet long, so pretty old by my understanding. I'm wondering if this could be partial blindness, trouble adapting to being in captivity again, or (I fear) inclusion body disease. Should I force feed? If this is IBD, should I euthanize? Exotic vets in my area cost 50 bucks just to walk through the door. I can't afford to lose that to find out that a snake is going to die no matter what. Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Thank you.