Spawning a dropsy betta

Dropsy is a terrible illness. Not knowing what to do with it and yet not having heart to 'terminate' the bugger. One of the bettas from D&S had dropsy. It's the first time ever we've got this over very long period of time - actually not quite sure when the last time we had it. Anywho, it was all started when he spawned and then somewhat become over-protective male, where he would guard the fry for days without eating. So, he managed to destroy his internal organs, we're not sure which one though. He has been having dropsy for a full month. It gets worst now, he moves about and still "quite" active, but the scales started to show off up to his peduncle now...So that's kinda worrying.

He started to eat recently, and that got us excited. Perhaps it's a bit too late though, but better late than never ;)

He was so active and we were so scared that he's going to pass out very soon that we tried to spawn him ! Heck, might as well try it out and hopefully get the best out of him, won't you agree?

Anyhow, he flares like crazy, build huge nest, female is all ready too, but apparently we had our hope too high. He couldn't manage to wrap the female. The dropsy, or rather the scales sticking out, has prevented him to wrap the female properly. He would position himself on wrapping position, then wrap, somehow the female went loose, and he would just slowly fall to the tank floor. No eggs, nothing :(

We kinda wondered whether we should wait for another couple of days, perhaps if he's not dead yet, to try out with other female. The problem is that we don't have any other smaller females. All of our breeder-quality females are large giants....S'pose we can only wait and see whether he'd get slightly better and we can try it out again. Fingers crossed.

At the moment we're running another experiment on curing the dropsy, by starving him and lowering his temperature to the point that many of his internal organs operate on much lower pace. Tomorrow we'll feed him some vegetables, to help clean up his internals. If that doesn't work, then chances he won't survive these couple of days.

>>> Update: experiment failed. He died a couple of days after.