March Hare

Tuesday night a young guy showed up with this wrapped up in a hoodie.



It's a snowshoe hare, which is the predominant leporid species around these parts, though still not seen very frequently. This one is already starting to transition from winter to summer coat. She (He? I didn't really look) had apparently been hit by car and was a bit dazed but had no obvious major injuries. The trouble with bunnies is that they often don't do well in captive situations, even when they're being well cared for.

Still, this one seemed well enough to warrant trying to save, so I made a stop by the Center for Wildlife on my way home. As I've said many times over, they're good folks and if anyone can get this little hare hopping again, they're the ones to do it.

And as I've also said before, it does cost them money to take care of all the critters, so if you do happen to have $5 or $10 to spare, click the donation button on their site. Think of it as giving up a visit or two to Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. Donating to the animals is good for your health!

Stash Sale for Lee Ann

And if you're looking for an option for fattening something that won't be bad for your health, Norma is helping dear friend Lee Ann sell off her stash. Details are over on Norma's blog, but I will say this: Lee Ann has excellent taste in fiber. Even though I really, really don't need any of it, I've put in a couple of bids. It's lovely stuff, and I can't think of a better reason to plump up my stash.



UPDATE:

I found out this morning that the hare was euthanized after he took a sudden turn for the worse and started showing neurological signs. Their suspicion is that he most likely had a parasitic infection that spread to his brain.

I found out in the course of dropping off this barred owl that had been hit by car last night and had a broken wing. Hopefully this one will fare better, but I'm told they have had considerably more owls than normal this season because of the unusually deep snowpack. Rodents are only surfacing where there has been signicant melting of the snow, which is primarily along roads. So if you are on the fence about donating something to them, they still really, really need it.

And in Other Other News

Thanks everyone for your good wishes for David. The CT scan was basically unremarkable, and he seems to be on the mend, albeit slowly. Whether the mystery will be solved or not remains to be seen.

David's health ended up overshadowing another bit of sad news on the farm; Paula called us last weekend to let us know that Malaga, the last of the pygmy goats, had passed away. You may remember that his failing health was what prompted me to bring home Angus and Shaun-Fergus a couple months ago, so it really didn't come as any great surprise. He had actually done fairly well, though, and was in pretty good spirits despite his arthritis up until his last few days. Had he made it to spring, he would have been 14 years old, which is beyond ancient in goat years.

He apparently passed away sometime in the night or early morning of last Friday-Saturday. Paula had to get up extra early to go to a Maine Alpaca Association meeting, so Wendy was the one who found him in the barn and covered him with a blanket until Paula got home. Paula told us, though, that when she got home the blanket had been pulled off and Angus had curled up on the blanket right next to Malaga with his head resting on Malaga's chest. The sheepie boys had really bonded with the old goat over the past couple of months and had been seen curled up with him in the barn at night. Seems Angus felt that he needed to keep vigil over his old friend one last time.

Knitting Semi-News

No photos to share, primarily because I started working a couple of days ago on a top-secret-hush-hush project. All I will say is that it's something of a variation on a published pattern, fruity beverages might have been involved, and short rows have definitely been knat (been knatted? knut?). Fear not, as all shall be revealed in the fullness of time. The work of the last couple of days, though, has put a bit of strain on my hands and forearms, so I'll be taking a break from it for a few days to let things settle down.

Firewalled

This might be one of the last posts I write from the workplace. Last week, a pair of terminals in the clinic (not ones that *I* typically use for teh intarwebs, I might point out) fell victim to a previously unknown and fairly nasty worm. So now the Mother of All Firewalls is about to be installed to keep us from going to pretty much any site aside from a handful that we need access to for work.

Of course, that probably means we're also going to get locked out of a lot of sites that are useful but infrequently visited, like websites for veterinary schools if we need to contact a specialty laboratory or a teaching hospital about a case. And although those situations don't come along often, I can see us being hampered considerably when, say, we need to track down a phone number outside of our area. I suppose we can always call directory assistance in those instances, but it'll end up costing the clinic more money.

I do spend a lot of time online, but I can always knit, or read, or study, or do something else. I'm more concerned about what will happen when I start classes again in the spring. Since I spend more of my waking hours here than at home and since I generally spend more time here than anyone else on staff, this could potentially damage my ability to keep up with my studies if the powers that be don't make allowances. Seeing as I've been asking for a password for two years to access the wireless hub from my own laptop, so I can do schoolwork without having to use work computers (which should, in theory, expose the clinic network to less risk, since it would mean one less avenue for malware to pass to the network), I'm not sure what to expect.

Anyway, there may not be any more work pics for a good while, and since this post is short on images as it is, I offer you this little bit of silliness. Enjoy.

Why Anna is a Merry Jew*

Stolen from these folks: http://www.greenposting.org/


Actually, the dog's name wasn't really Anna (though that's what I'm going to call her), nor was she particularly merry or, to my knowledge, Jewish. Her owners left her at the wife's parents' house this afternoon while they went down to Boston for a Red Sox game. When they got back, they found the dog extremely off balance and dribbling urine, so they did what most people do. They freaked out and brought her to see me.

When they got here, one of my techs brought the dog out back for me to evaluate, and sure enough, she was very wobbly on her feet, dribbling urine, and if she sat for a bit, she'd kind of slowly fall over and stare off into space. And I declared to all assembled, "That dog is stoned, and I am going to assume she ate pot until proven otherwise." So my techs did the usual asking of questions: Antifreeze? No. Mushrooms (not necessarily the magic kind)? No. Prescription drugs? No. Recreational drugs? No.

But then on the second round of questions (from me), it turned out that the owner's father is being treated for leukemia and, "There may be weed in the house." She was fairly certain, though, that he was anal-retentive enough to keep it locked away from the grandchildren and said parents are currently in England, so wouldn't likely have left stash out for the dog to find. And then a light bulb went on and she said to spouse, "Oh shit, remember those pot cookies we threw away yesterday?"

Turns out there had been some old chocolate chip cookies with a "secret ingredient" that they'd thrown in the kitchen trash, but they'd never actually gone back to check the trash when they found the dog falling over because they'd panicked. So spouse went back to the parents' house and sure enough, "Anna" had gotten the lid off the trash and all but two of the cookies had been snarfed. Mystery solved!

Fortunately, this is a good thing, as cannabis toxicity is a fairly minor concern and most cases will recover in a day or so with little to no intervention. We could have admitted her for IV fluids, but since "Anna" had probably gotten into the cookies about 9 hours or so earlier and she tends to get stressed out (or, dare I say, paranoid?) in veterinary offices, her owners decided to let her sleep it off at home.

The funniest part? The owners brother had been over to walk the dog in the afternoon and had noticed she was walking a little bit funny then. The time he came over to walk her? 4:20.

*Get it? Merry Jew Anna?

Belabored

*Gore alert: Bloody pics below!*

After spending the midweek getting through what may or may not have been the piggy flu (still haven't heard test results), I thought I was ready to head back to work on Saturday. I was still a little on the weak side, but I had slept, I was rested...

...I was so very wrong.

In general, our two busiest weekends of the year are Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend - the two bookends of tourist season here in Vacationland. I also worked Memorial Day weekend, and it was pretty manageable. The rains were starting, people were nervous about spending money, and while we were reasonably busy, we were spared too much hell. Not so for Labor Day weekend, though.

The weekend came after a week or so of gorgeous weather with the beginnings of dry, autumnal air, so the hordes descended like we hadn't seen for at least a couple of years. And at the clinic it really, really showed. In the course of my nominal 15 hour shift, I saw 24 cases, which exceeds the Upper Limit of Manageability (ULM) by quite a few. In fact, the overage could have made for a moderate night in itself.

The end result was that my so-called 15 hour shift lasted for 21 hours. And by the time I collapsed in the overnight room and managed enough of a sleep that I could drive home without being a menace to others, I had been at the clinic for about 28 hours. I got home about 30 hours after I'd left, then got up the next day to do it again.

Thankfully, Labor Day itself squeaked in right about at the ULM. Truly, the most beautiful sight of the day for me was driving up the Turnpike to work and seeing tens of thousands of vehicles heading south. Traffic was literally at a crawl or a standstill all the way up to the 20 mile marker, and they were all leaving for the season. Had I not been driving, I'd have danced a little happy dance to celebrate.

Of course, not all my cases were happy ones. One of the first ones I admitted Monday night was an old brittany spaniel who turned out to have a bleeding mass on her spleen. About 80% of these masses are malignant hemangiosarcomas, which I understand are fairly rare in humans but are very common in dogs. Survival times for these are incrementally better with surgery and chemotherapy, but the bottom line is that about 95% of cases are dead within a year, even with aggressive chemo. In a nutshell, double plus ungood.

Still, the owner wasn't quite ready to say goodbye and opted to proceed with a transfusion and surgery. I was able to pick up the bleeding mass readily on ultrasound, but I was reluctant to put the dog into potentially stressful positions because of the hemorrhage and shock and had missed a couple of other masses in the spleen. Note the fist-sized clot I took out of her abdomen.



I had also not been able to get good views of her liver and had not seen one large mass taking up most of the quadrate lobe, which is essentially a time bomb waiting to blow. I called the owners during surgery just to make sure it wasn't going to change their decision, and it didn't. I also could feel at least two other nodules in the liver that weren't readily visible at the surface. And this is the blood I suctioned out of her abdomen.



That's like a pint and a quarter. If it were Ben & Jerry's, you'd gain about a pound eating it, though I'm not sure it's a flavor that'd sell. It's also more blood than I transfused into her, but it's clear that without the transfusion first she would not likely have survived surgery. As it was, she did relatively well and went home the following afternoon, albeit on borrowed time.

In Cheerier News...

I finally got the chicken coop up on pressure-treated stilts today. And for extra butch points, I did it all by myself. Well, Tuck supervised, but I provided all the muscle. Despite my efforts at engineering the coop to be relatively light, it's quite a heavy and bulky beast. But by cleverly using braces and leverage I was able to get the stilts on one side firmly screwed in place, then jack the other side up with my shoulder and a brace board to get the stilts on the other side. I didn't even strain my back doing it, either.

I also got a double layer of predator-deterring chicken wire laid across the top with a layer of mylar-coated bubble wrap insulation sandwiched in between, plus a layer of chicken wire on the underside for more predator deterrance. Tomorrow will hopefully be spent on getting the corrugated metal roofing on and getting a ramp/hatch in place so they can enter and exit from underneath.

The plan is to enclose the area underneath to they've got a protected area where they can hang out in inclement weather. Aside from that, there are also little details to attend to - latches, window and windowsill, wheels, some sort of system to hold window and doors open, etc., but it looks as though I may actually have it ready for them before really cold weather sets in.

Döggi Långstrump

So, a bit of background first:

At the clinic where I work, there are two full-time day doctors, Doug and Sara. They're both foreigners - Doug is Canadian (and didn't see anything wrong the first time he saw this), while Sara is Swedish (and hadn't seen this until I showed her). They also have a mostly friendly rivalry that is ongoing and whose origins have been lost in the mists of time, but which mostly consists of sabotaging each other's desks.

Anyway, a couple of weekends ago, Doug shaved a ginormous mat off of a cat's back and left it on Sara's desk. Yesterday, Sara and one of the daytime techs decided to affix bits of this matted fur to a printed photo of Doug's head (which is, in fact, rather devoid of fur) and take pics of it to put up as the desktop wallpaper on all of the computer terminals. And being Swedish, Sara decided to make one of the photos look rather Pippi Longstocking-ish.

I thought that was such a good idea that I took another Pippi-esque photo of the head and went online to find some Pippi images to attach it to. Because we don't have Photoshop here, I used the open source program GIMP. The look of the program is similar to Photoshop and it can perform a lot of the same functions, but it's different enough that there's still a bit of a learning curve. Still, I managed fairly well for a rank amateur - at least for comedic effect. See if you agree.

Cute And Not So Much

There continues to be relatively little to blog about Chez Tête-de-Laine, but this is my off week and my surprise birthday party is Saturday (the date being the only thing that won't be a surprise). Aside from it being porcupine season again (I treated 10 dogs with quills last week, including two who belong to a famous actress. And who were brought in by her less-famous male partner, but now there's only one degree of separation between us. And that last sentence contains a clue to whom I'm talking about.), it is also apparently baby animal season. The other night some dude cut down a tree and found a nest with these in it.



Baby squirrels are just too freakin' adorable to step on. They wag their tails when they're nursing! They're also very unsentimental and will suckle food directly from a hard plastic syringe. Who cares if it feels like mom? It has food! I handed this lot off to the Center for Wildlife, where they are sure to do well and grow up to be happy and healthy poofy-tailed rats. And since it's tax day, I'll just point out (yet again) that Center for Wildlife is one of those non-profit-y type places where you could make a tax-deductible donation. And we all know what a difference just $5-10 can make.

Speaking of which, Nyondo informed me last night that y'all have donated around $700 to the Tso Pema Medical Emergency Fund since I wrote this post. It's still a ways from their funding goal, but that amount will make a huge difference - $5 here and there adding up to something big and wonderful. You rock! And if you haven't donated a spare $5 and would like to, head on over to Joy's blog, where there's a Paypal button.

On a less happy note, Tuck started coughing again a few nights ago, so I took him in to work with me Monday night to take some x-rays and his lungs look like this:



I'm feeling too lazy to draw a circle around it, but there's pneumonia in his right caudal lung lobe. I'm a little bit encouraged that it's in a different location from before (and a bit milder), but that may also mean that he's got a congenital problem that's going to keep predisposing him to this sort of infection. We're still waiting on culture results, but I'm hoping to have more information by tonight or tomorrow. Meantime, he's responding well to the current antibiotic regimen and is still giving lots of sweet kisses.

And now I need to go for a bike ride while it's still warm-ish. By which I mean above freezing. And then maybe later I'll tell you a funny story about my new used bike.

Don't You Just Love...

...a snow-bordered, wintry stream?










Except it's not a stream.



A water main broke this morning behind the L.L. Bean warehouse next door to the clinic. My tech discovered a raging river when she walked a dog outside at about 5:30. We called the non-emergency dispatch, fire crews were sent to survey the damage, and now the water utility has a crew working on the problem. This is our clinic parking lot, though:






I hope only sure-footed people wearing crampons (If ever there were a word screaming for redefinition....) come in today.

Catch Up

I did say I had a few pics, right? Let's start with one from VD. I actually had the day off, and we had a very nice, low-key day. No roses or cards with pink and red hearts, but we did pay a visit to our local chocolatier and each picked out an assortment of their handmade yumminess, according to our individual tastes.



The box on the left is David's and tended much more towards the conventional, or at least as much in that direction as Cacao ever goes. His big stepping-out-of-the-comfort-zone pick is the white one in the upper right corner, which had a gorgonzola-white chocolate ganache filling. He also got one of their extremely popular fleur de sel caramels, as did I. My selections, on the other hand, trended much more towards the spicy. I started out with the one wrapped in green foil, which is filled with an habanero-lime ganache, and finished off with the "Mayan", which is filled with a citrus-chili pepper ganache and has had a square of 24k gold leaf on top. Yum!

After that it was lunch at the local bakery, followed by a visit to the produce market next door, where we got salad fixin's, baby taters for roasting, and artichokes, which I steamed up and served with a cheese sauce for dinner, which we ate while watching a movie. As I said, low-key, and about as perfect as the day should be.

Work Pics

For the most part, work is what it is lately. The other night, though, we had this handsome fellow come in:



You can't tell from the photo, but this kitty weighed in at over 22 pounds! And he wasn't even fat! He's a Maine Coon, and a real one. Most people around these parts will call any long-haired cat a coon cat, but the purebred ones are generally really big like this.

This guy had a couple of issues. He came to see me because he had a urethral obstruction and couldn't pee. Common enough problem in male cats, but he'd been previously diagnosed with problems and I know his regular clinic would have counseled the owner properly on avoiding recurrence, meaning there were likely some compliance issues. Complicating matters a bit was this little problem:



This lip lesion is what's known as an eosinophilic granuloma, or rodent ulcer, because of its tendency to deform the upper lip at the philtrum (the cleft at center front) and expose the incisors. It's peculiar to cats and appears to be a type of allergy manifestation. The suspicion with this guy is that his diet was likely to blame, which meant that he probably should go on standard prescription-type diets for the urinary problem. Of course, these lesions tend to be steroid-responsive, and there are hypoallergenic diet options available that would also be appropriate for the urinary issue, so I suspected there was a bit more to the story than I was getting, but his owner opted to transfer him to his regular veterinarian the following morning, meaning I never got more history on him. I'm hoping the management of his health issues improves, though, because he was a really nice cat.

Knitting

There has been some going on. I have yet to cast on my sister's second glove, as I got wrapped up in a special project just for me. Two Rhinebecks ago I bought myself 2 oz. of qiviut, but I couldn't decide what to make with it and it's been sitting in my stash. And then last month Carole (whose blog appears to be down as I'm typing this, but y'all know who she is, right?) posted pics of her Dale wearing her rendition of the Three Seas Cowl. Instant inspiration!

So it took me a few false starts to sort out the right combination of needle size and pattern repeats for this particular yarn, which is a little thicker than the yarn the pattern calls for, but I found it and have been knitting away on it - a little here and a little there.



I weighed the remaining yarn last night and calculated that I should get it to about 11", which is one inch less than the pattern recommends but will be, I expect, just fine to keep my neck nice and toasty. Exquisitely and expensively so, even.

Jumping in with Both Feet

I started back at work Friday night, the 4th of July. So much for easing myself back in. It was busy, which wasn't particularly surprising, but it could have been much worse. As it was, though, I didn't get all of my paperwork done until nearly 1PM on Saturday, making it a 20 hour shift. I took a fitful two hour nap before heading home and getting another too-brief nap. I have until Tuesday to recover, so let's hope I manage to rest up well in the next 36 hours.

I suppose this is all a very roundabout way of explaining why I've been making slow progress at going through the wedding & honeymoon photos. I do now have a Flickr set from the wedding. though not all of the photos have captions yet. Pics from Nova Scotia yet to follow.

Speaking of the wedding, though, let's talk about...

...Cake



Juno recently sent out a call for cake recipes and my hospital manager has been bugging me for the recipe for the wedding cake, so
I suppose I have to share. The recipe is actually just a minor variation on cold oven pound cake, which is an old family favorite. You can follow the recipe at the link with the following notes and modifications:

• Use cake flour, if possible, as it will give the cake a somewhat finer crumb. Make sure to sift before measuring.



• Sift two teaspoons of baking powder together with the flour.



• Preheat the oven to 375°.



• Grease two 9" cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment or wax paper and flour the sides.



• Bake for about 40 minutes, or until center is done. Cool for about ten minutes before turning the layers out onto wire racks to finish cooling.



• Ice as desired. If you go by the original recipe and bake it in a bundt pan, a simple lemon juice & confectioner's sugar glaze is really tasty.



• Try not to think about what this does to your cholesterol levels.

Enjoy!

One More Night

After tomorrow night, I will be off for three weeks!

It occurs to me that I haven't posted very many photos lately, and it's been quite a while since I've posted any of gross stuff. Last night at work I managed to get a really good one, though. Since I know some of you are delicate, I'll just put it up here in thumbnail size (You know what to do).



This is a fat, middle-aged weimaraner who had been vomiting on and off for a few days - had been hospitalized here, sent elsewhere for an ultrasound, went home and didn't improve, and ended up back here - and nobody could quite figure out what was causing the problem. So the decision was made to go in and do an exploratory, and I found this section of infarcted bowel.

While this sort of thing isn't unheard of in dogs, I believe it's the first one I've seen in 14 years of practice. At least in a dog who was still alive. This guy was likely within 24 hours of having this rotten bowel perforate. And I do mean rotten - this stuff stinks to high heaven. Had it done so, he would have joined the body count of what was a very. bad. night.

Now, though, the nastiness has been cut out and the rest has been pieced painstakingly back together. We won't know for certain if he's out of the woods for another week, as the repair can always break down and start to leak. I'm paranoid about these things and my track record is actually very good as a result, but I worry about every single bowel surgery I do. Which is probably why I don't like doing them very much.



And no, I didn't have time to work on the kilt hose, but I'm just a few rounds shy of starting the bottom-of-calf decreases.

Long Night

When I got to work yesterday evening, everybody was standing around bored and there were no patients in the hospital. Unfortunately, we made up for it overnight.



This photo doesn't include the charts for my three inpatients. At least I didn't kill anything, which is always good, but it'd be nice if the caseload would just spread out a little more evenly.

Now We Are Twelve

After the onslaught and in between writing up records, Rabbitch and I had a little discussion about the etymological origins of the word jahoobie. She decided that it must be Sanskrit (I'd vote for Hindi from Persian, but whatever), so I wrote it out in Devanagari and took a picture for her.



Just in case you were wondering.


A Little Request

My friend Dena has a little problem. If you happen to have a few yards of Cascade Ecological Wool in color 8095 you could spare, she will probably love you forever.

How About an FO?

Since there's been a dearth of those around here lately (damned project monogamy), I offer you the following:


From down below


From up above (sort of)

This little made-it-up-as-I-went project has languished in a drawer at work for over a year now, so I finally got around to finishing it off. The yarn is Limbo Superwash from Halcyon Yarn. If you're thinking the bunny motif looks familiar, that's because it's the ASCII bunny from the Cute with Chris website (Rabbitch, no doubt, will insist that it's actually all about her, and I suppose that, too, is possible. That bunny is a little off kilter, after all.)

And a Bag of Chips

Quite a bit going on this week. I am currently working my second night in a row. Because I work 15-hour shifts, this is a rare occurrence, especially since it means not going home between shifts. With only 9 hours between them (or actually, a good bit less by the time all the paperwork and rounds and phone calls are done), I just can't afford to spend two of those hours on the road. As it is, I only got 6 hours of sleep here before I had to get up and get ready to do it all over again.

Ideally, the workload between the two nights would be divided up fairly evenly, particularly since it's midweek in what is still our "slow" season. At the very least, one would hope for it to be busier on the first night, when one is a bit fresher, than on the second. Apparently, though, that memo got lost, because my caseload tonight has been over twice what it was last night.

I will be glad to leave here.

And the reason I'm working back-to-back nights is that I am leaving today - for lovely Northern California. This will be the first time in nearly 14 years that I've visited that part of the country. I'm nominally off to a weekend symposium on veterinary hospice care at UC Davis. I figured that because I do the end of life talk so often (twice so far tonight), I might be able to take away some useful information from it. Mostly, though, it's an excuse and an opportunity for me to visit friends - some of whom I haven't seen for years, and some of whom I've only ever met online.

Stephen tells me that Monday night is knit night at the Three Dollar Bill Cafe, so I am definitely going be there. Monday is a play day for me before I come home, so I'm planning on heading down to the San Francisco Bay area for the day. I'm hoping I'll have time to visit the Muir Woods, and maybe visit the Scharffen Berger factory.

The wedding vest will be traveling with me, but rather than risk having it taken away by the TSA goons, it'll be going in my checked baggage. Since I'm looking at 10 hours of travel to get there and 11 back, I expect I'll be either sleeping (often not possible for me) or picking up the Hindi textbooks to catch up on those studies a bit.

I expect there'll also be a bit of fretting happening. When I spoke to David this evening, he told me he'd finally talked to Landlady Wendy about our proposed purchase of the house. After many, many months, she and Landlady Paula have finally settled on an asking price. The only problem is that it's about $50K more than I had figured we could easily afford, and they're not really inclined to negotiate.

I'm pretty sure we can do it. It's within what the bank pre-approved us for last month. And we do really love our little house and would rather be building equity than just paying rent. And they'd sell the entire parcel with an easement, so that whenever they decide to stop using the pasture behind the house, I could get myself a little flock of Shetland sheep. And we could eventually put up a wind turbine and go off the grid.

But it would mean coming up with an extra $400-500 per month over what we're currently paying for rent, which is just a little nerve-wracking to contemplate. Except that that amount is less than we've been setting aside each month for the wedding.

So maybe it won't be that difficult to manage, after all. But at the moment, thinking about it is making me want to puke.

Only 11 hours until I get to run away from it, though.

Reason #241 Why I Hate People

We'll call this little dog Gem.



Gem came into the clinic on Sunday along with a sob story about how she'd been adopted in Alabama and the family had just moved up to this area recently and they had thought she was spayed but then came home to find her tied with their male, etc., etc. And now she was in dystocia (medspeak for difficult labor) and the owner had actually pulled a leg off of one of the pups trying to extract it. And they had no money.

So some calls were made, and a rescue group was found that agreed to take her in and cover her medical expenses (to which I also applied some of the leftover funds from Phoebe donations) and find her a new home. Which is good, because the rest of Gem looked like this:



Even before she got into such rough shape, I'm not quite sure how she was managing to walk. But it was pretty clear that she needed to go to surgery fairly quickly. When I did open her up, this is what I found:



I made a notation on the Flickr page, but there was gas in her uterus. This is never a good sign. It turned out that at least half of the 8 puppies inside her were decomposing, meaning she had likely been in labor for at least 24 hours and her former owners had simply done nothing to help her until she was half dead. Of the pups, only 3 were still alive, but two of those were in such a weakened state that they also succumbed. The remaining pup is doing well, however, and Gem has been spayed so that she won't ever have to go through this again.

The surgery wasn't the end of her troubles, though. When she was being readied to go to a day practice yesterday morning, she vomited a large volume and appeared to have aspirated some of the fluid into her lungs. She is reportedly doing much better today and set to go home, but I was worried about her. Oh, and this is what she looked like post-op (she lost over 1/4 of her body weight):



It turned out, not surprisingly, that the former owner's story wasn't exactly true. It's possible that the dog may have been acquired in Alabama, but there's no indication that they were under the illusion that she'd been spayed. Particularly since he'd been seen selling puppies at a local fleamarket before. Also, judging from her degree of mammary development, I'd suspect that she's had several litters before this one, and judging from her teeth, I'd suspect that she may be older than was reported. In any event, they'd had two months in which to do something before she ever went into labor, and even then waited until her condition was very dire to do anything. The only thing that can be said in their defense is that they didn't let her die at home.

Hit & Run

On Friday night, I got involved in this case. The wife brought the dog in while her husband was being taken by ambulance to the hospital. I'm not going to share any photos on this one, since they will likely be part of the criminal investigation. Phoebe's wounds were fairly gruesome, though, and she only narrowly escaped wounds that would have been much, much worse. As it is, she has a pelvic fracture that will probably require some sort of surgical repair, and I anticipate that the healing of her other injuries may be less than straightforward.

Until today, the news stories have all mentioned that Mr. Smith was hit while walking his dog, but none have mentioned Phoebe. I've tried to rectify that today and to see if I could generate some donations to help cover her expenses here. I've already written off nearly $700 in my fees and we have a pet assistance fund to help with extraordinary situations like this, but the fund simply is not large enough to absorb all of the expenses associated with her care and it is strictly donation-based.

To that end, I've created the donation button below if anyone would like to help out. This simply goes into my Paypal account and I will, in turn, transfer funds to the pet assistance fund here at the clinic, since we don't currently have any mechanism for direct donation set up aside from people coming in and making one. In the event that any donations were to exceed Phoebe's expenses, they would remain in the pet assistance fund for the next case to come along. There is no tax write-off for this, no particular reward other than helping out a family and dog in need, but I'm sure they'll appreciate it. And I will thank you for it.

A Word of Advice, and Some Less Painful Stuff

If you own a wolf hybrid, you should make damn sure that he is not able to escape and run off into the woods. Otherwise, he might come back looking like this:



Can't see that closely enough? How about this?



Fortunately, no bones were broken and his toes were still warm, albeit very badly bruised, so he'll likely do fine. Turns out he's gotten loose and damn near gotten himself killed before this, too, so who knows what it'll be next time.

And Now for Something(s) Completely Different

Let's see.... It snowed here last night.



I'm very excited at the prospect of having a white Christmas this year, since we missed out on one last year and the year before started brown, then saw us driving home from my grandmother's in an ice storm. Of course, there are 11 more days to go and today's temperature is supposed to rise to about 40F, but we're expecting a Nor'easter on Sunday which should bring even more of the white stuff.

What else? I cast on finally for the wedding vest.



That's a provisional cast-on in purple laceweight with 341 stitches. I'm now 3 whole rows into the hem, and I am just hoping and praying that my gauge swatch didn't lie by too much. I'd really hate to have to start over. The plan is to knit the hem flat, then turn it up, cast on steek stitches, and continue in the round in color pattern. After the front steek is cut, then I'll knit on the button band and facing as one would a shawl edging. This will allow me to place horizontal buttonholes, which won't gape like a vertical buttonhole is prone to do. I've only got 6 months and one week to go, so I'd better get cracking, eh?

Oh, one last thing. On Wednesday, I got to meet this little fella:



Here's the video:



Once I actually sat down on the floor, he came back out and climbed into my lap for some more lovin'. He's the last of the frenchies to be adopted or go to frenchie rescue. His current foster person didn't want him to be bounced around between homes, as he's still coming out of his shell and learning what it's like to be a loved dog. He's also got some significant, but treatable or manageable, health issues. The only remaining concern is how he'll do with the cats, so I'm hoping to be able to bring him home for a trial run next week, when I'm off and will have the time to spend with him and supervise introductions. I'm pretty optimistic, though. So much so that I'm already planning a sweater for him in my head. I have some green heather C220 that'll be perfect.

Frenchie

This one is especially for Stephen. This little guy was confiscated in a raid on a local puppy mill a few months back. The state has moved really quickly on getting this case through the courts - likely because they now have 300 or so dogs that they're paying to take care of. He just got neutered today and stayed the night for us to watch because he's a got a wicked heart murmur (grade 5 out of 6, with 6 being the loudest). I don't even know if he has a name.



Otherwise, tonight's been mostly a night for catching up on some sock knitting. I'm working on the heel to the first Hundertwasser sock (using the Sherman short row technique. I had actually done the heel over the weekend and figured out when I finished that I needed to add another inch and a half to the foot. That'll teach me to be optimistic.

FN(early): BSJ

I figured FN comes just before FO. The BSJ still needs to be seamed and needs buttons, but it's off the needles.



You can see the transition from original brown to my dye job near the bottom. If it were in the middle of a typical pullover, this would not work at all, but since the BSJ is supposed to look a bit scrappy and modular, it works great. I should be able to get the rest done during my off week and get this headed to Afghanistan.

Assticle Answers

Ted - Yes, indeed, there are canine and feline blood banks where we can purchase blood in the event a transfusion is necessary. We try to have some on hand at all times because we do see bleeding tumors (thought generally not Assticles) and other disorders quite frequently. In this case, however, the expense of a transfusion would have likely been a life or death matter for the dog, as even proceeding with the surgery required some discussion.

JJ - My suspicion is that the mass is a liposarcoma, and I'm by no means convinced my excision was complete (though I did get out all the necrotic crap). I had the owners take it to their regular veterinarian to have it sent out, though, because of the aforementioned cost concerns. The other lipoma, which is almost certainly benign, actually does cause some mobility issues for the dog, but as I said, it wasn't bleeding, and the dog still wags her tail and is perfectly happy to hobble along. I still think she'd be happier if she didn't have it, but sometimes we have to settle for good enough.

I don't use Fluorofil very often, usually preferring PDS, though they handle somewhat similarly. I let the techs vote on this one, though I think the PDS would have shown up better. I don't do very much oral work, but I did have to repair a lower lip avulsion in a silky terrier last weekend. Used 4-0 PDS, after extracting all the nasty lower incisors - they needed to come out anyway, and removing them made my job much easier.

Attack of the Assticle

Okay, this post contains work-related ick, so if you're one of the weak-stomached types, you may want to stop right here.














So now that they're gone, I'll tell you a little story about last night at work (There's a photo, too, but only an "after" one. I do have some sense of decorum.). One of the uncanny things about emergency work is that cases often tend to come in clusters. Everything can be nice and sedate and then...

...*bam*, six cases walk through the door in as many minutes.

Such was the situation last night, and in the midst of everything came Cassidy, a very obese and very sweet old golden retriever. Cassidy's regular vet had her scheduled on Monday for surgery on what they thought was a hernia protruding out next to her anus. This type of hernia is fairly serious, as it is fairly easy for bowel that slips into the hernia ring to get pinched off and lose blood supply, which can be life-threatening.

Only this turned out not to be a hernia, but a large mass that had ruptured and was bleeding all over the place, very heavily. This is also not a good thing, so we rushed her to the treatment area and hastily fashioned a diaper of sorts to put some pressure on the mass and stop the bleeding. The way forward from there, of course, was obvious. The mass would have to be removed.

So Cassidy was admitted, we ascertained that all her important parts were functioning properly and that we didn't have a scary amount of blood loss and proceeded (once the rest of the evening's onslaught had been dealt with) to anesthetize her and prep her for surgery. As we were prepping, we noted that the largely hairless mass resembled nothing so much as a large, ugly scrotum holding a single testicle.

So I started calling it The Assticle.

Removing The Assticle was a little bit of a challenge, as all it wanted to do was break apart and bleed. Profusely. All over my scrubs*. But I quickly hacked and slashed and packed and got the bleeding stopped and the wound closed. I think I did a rather good job, under the circumstances.



Cassidy's rather happy to be rid of it, too. Of course, there's still the matter of the football-sized fatty tumor inside her left hind leg, but that one's not bleeding and is not going to be my problem.

* I keep extra scrubs on hand for just such an occasion, so I did not have to walk around covered in Assticle blood all night. Just in case you were wondering.

A Little Rant

The other day I got two sizeable packages in the mail. One from the Humane Society of the United States and one from the International Fund for Animal Welfare. These were in very similar large white plastic "envelopes", and within these envelopes were clear plastic bags that were vacuum-sealed and contained thin polyester fleece blankets made in China with cutesy designs that are supposed to make me want to contribute to these organizations "to help the animals".

Two plastic bags each to go to the landfill and petrochemical blankets mass-produced by factories in China, where their commitment to eco-friendliness, human rights, and animal welfare is so well known around the world.

To help the animals.

Guess who won't be getting any money from me. I did, however, add the blankets to our clinic collection of cage bedding. To help the animals.

Morning Haiku

Black roasted goodness
Slowly dripping in carafe
Awake for drive home


Actually, a nap at the halfway point may still be necessary to make it home, but the coffee will certainly help. I've been particularly sleepy the past few days because I've been battling The Crud that's been going around the office. It appears that I may actually be getting the better of it, but I'm a bit concerned it may just be waiting for me to drop my guard. The Crud is tricky that way.

Between all the sleeping and a fairly busy midweek at work, there hasn't been a lot of knitting going on. I did manage to make some progress on Koolhaas between sleeps the other night, though, and I finally managed to take a (very crap) photo with the clinic camera.



Turns out this is looking quite nice in the Highlander, so I'm very excited to finish this so I can move on to doing it in the Shokay, which arrived on my doorstep Wednesday. There shall be a photo of that at some point, but there's no more time this morning. I need to finish up here and hit the road for home. But maybe just a bit more coffee....

Baby Names

David tells me this one's name is Cougar. His left leg appears ready to have the splint off, and I'm thinking to bring him home with me this weekend.



He didn't tell me that this one (born last week) is Haylex. I had to find out from Val.



And I decided that this one is Lakshmi. That's her half-sister Sibri behind her (Haylex is their first cousin). We're going to try for a full sister for next year.

In the Full of the Moon

Technically last night was still waxing gibbous at 98% of full that's apparently close enough for jazz. Last spring (maybe summer, actually, but you get the general idea), some folks at Colorado State's vet school had a study published showing a small but significant uptick in visits to their emergency service during the full moon, and that certainly seemed to be the case here last night. I'm exhausted and ate far too much chocolate in an effort to retain my sanity. A nap before driving home is going to be in order.

This, of course, was after waking up earlier than planned and getting a call from the ladies as soon as I rolled out of bed to come look at their old mama goat, who wasn't doing well. So I went over to examine her and determined that she needed to go see their regular large animal person, who has the facilities to hospitalize, then gave her some Banamine to make her more comfortable in the meantime.

And then David was having fits because Earthlink decided he'd used his allotted bandwidth for the next month and shut his business site down - for the next three weeks. I'd gently told him before that he really needed to find a better hosting option, but tech things scare him and he's had more pressing matters. His office manager is equally tech-phobic and was all ready to go with bundled service through Comcast at a ridiculous cost. Thanks to knitnzu (who blogged about it) and Steph (whom I e-mailed), they're exploring considerably saner and cheaper options and will hopefully get something resolved quickly.

Note to Elizabeth: Yes, we do still have some herd yarn, but your comment didn't give me an e-mail address to respond to and your profile isn't public. Um, scratch that, as I seem to be able to access it now. Anyone else who might be interested, though, can e-mail me at mel dot vassey at gmail dot com.