September 1997 - October 16, 2002

Dextrose is hunting for bugs at the top of the porch wall in the picture on the left.
She's the glider on the far right in the second picture.

Dextrose was very outgoing, sociable, and adventurous.  She was generally the first one to greet people when then visited the gliders on the porch.  Twice, she got outside and nearly gave us a heart attack.  The first time, a tortoise pushed aside a block of wood that covered a gap under the porch door and she slipped through and was gone for about 24 hours, only to return safely the next night.  The second time, the porch door didn't latch properly and was open for a few minutes.  Everyone but Dextrose stayed put, but she went gallivanting around on the roof.

Her fellow gliders were very upset after she died.  It took them several months to return to normal, and they still aren't quite as sociable with humans as they were when she was alive.  She must have been the center of their little colony.

Her symptoms were very similar to Nox's, so we decided to have a post-mortem examination done to see if the two of them had something that could be prevented in our other gliders.  The results showed that her liver and kidneys were failing and that the swelling on the side of her head was a pasturella infection.  I'm betting the pasturella infection only cropped up because she was already compromised by the organ failure and wasn't a primary cause of her illness. 

I now believe that Nox died of organ failure, also.  Both he and Dextrose were awfully young to be running into problems like that, so we are left wondering whether we could have done something to prevent it or whether it was inevitable.  Perhaps it was a case of "bad genes."  Geri died a year later, also very young.  We're keeping our fingers crossed that Sucrose, Pocket, and Nocture don't have the same tendency.