Hamster in trouble, need some help...

Question
Hello,
   I would say 4 days ago I noticed that both of my Teddy Bear hamster Fuzzy's eyes were stuck shut and he was sneezing...so I used warm water on a Q-tip for the eyes and that worked. Then for the bedding I got some carefresh and some fluff(I just found out now how bad it was and took it out immediately).

  So on the weekend I went away for a trip leaving it in the capable hands of a babysitter who took good care of him.  However he would not come out of his cage when i was gone.  Once I got him home on sunday(4 days after i first noticed the sneezing) he came out of his bubble extension house, and just kinda toppled on the bottom of the cage.  So I immediately picked him up and noticed he was "very" weak and was shaking quite badly.  So now I'm not quite sure what is the matter and I don't think any of the vets in my (small)city deal with hamsters.  He also has a wet tail, but I think its because he is too weak to get up to go...He is 1 year and 9 months old. If there is nothing I can do without a vet, what can i do?

Answer
Hello, carefresh and fluff are very good bedding to use. Your hamster has wetail which is a bacterial infection. You will need to buy two things to help him out. The first thing is you will need to buy some dritail which I know you can find at Petsmart. The other thing that you need to do is to buy some vitamin drops. I use oasis vitamin drops and you can also find those at Petsmart too. These are two things you can do without a vets help. The dritail is general antibiotic that helps treat wettail. However, you must know that it doesn't always work. It depends on when you catch it. The vet can give you specific antibiotics which would work better than the dritail but if you can't make it to a vet then those two things I would buy. Also, you will need to force feed him water though since he is not drinking water nor will he be eating during the bacteria infection. I wouldn't worry too much about the not eating part because as he gets better he will start to eat but a hamster can die within a few days of being dehydrated. What I normally do with the hamsters I had at work is I would place some water in a dropper and slowly push it into their mouth. Even if some goes on their fur they lap it up. Since the vitamin drops are highly concentrated I would just place the vitamin drops in the water bottle that you normally use for his drinking water and just take some water from the water bottle and use that water from the water bottle to force feed him water. I hope you understood what I just said it's kinda hard to explain that part. You will need to keep force feeding him water until he starts feeling better. Good luck and keep me posted.