thoughts, whims, and delusions of a middle aged mama

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Dying fish, upset children....



Well, I'm in that rut, again....

Wanting to write something profound and all I can think of is talking about my fish dying....

We had bought a large, pretty, orange and white koi a few weeks ago....along with three smaller butterfly koi.....

Turns out that the big girl wasn't all too healthy....

Despite lots of effort and much money on medications, she died on Monday afternoon....

And, as it now turns out, half our fish are sick....with several fungal and bacterial infections....

So today was spent draining about a third of the pond's water, removing all the plants...replacing a couple of hundred gallons along with aloe and stuff to dechlorinate the new water...

Tomorrow we will get medication that is being UPS'd to us and start treating the entire pond.....

Hopefully we won't lose anymore fish....

I know it sounds silly, but I have grown quite attached to some of them....one of the blue shebunkins regularly comes and eats from my hand....
Anyway, I'm feeling kinda sad....
Laurie, my favorite daughter-in-law stopped by with Ethan this afternoon....right in the middle of the pond draining mess....and Ethan promptly picked up Dusty, my 19 yr. old cat, by the throat....poor cat...he's so old and frail he couldn't even muster the strength to scratch or object...he just sorta hung there, captive to a two year old.....and I yelled at him....porr baby...he had no idea that he was hurting the cat.....or that Nana can turn into a monster...now he knows....many tears later....
Then Laurie was bitching about Mike....and me, always wanting to balance things, I pointed out a couple of Laurie's areas of issue....like nit picking about money to the point that Mike is less than candid with her....Oh Lord!!!....wrong thing to tell Laurie....she left here in tears, threatening suicide, homicide, general genocide of all things male, except Ethan....
On the lighter side....Becka had two seizures on Sat. morning and we immediately started her on the valium protocol and it worked!!!!!!....she was stoned out of her gourd for three days but no more seizures!!!!....it broke the cluster!!!!
Well, gotta go fix something for supper.....
NOT fish!!!!!!!

1 comment:

Darrell Otto said...

Hi Ducky,

I'm still waiting patiently to get an update on the plight of your fish.

I was under the impression that chlorine at drinking water levels, will actually off-gas if left standing in about 24 hours or so. That made me wonder about the logic behind the aloe treatment.

What did you end up treating the fungal infection with? A little bit of chlorine in the water might not be a bad idea to control fungal infections. Goldfish and carp are tough as nails and will tolerate very poor water quality. The correlation between stress and illness in fish is even more direct than in humans, so I would look for an underlying factor that might be allowing the fungal infection to persist.

Darrell

About Me

My photo
First I am a mother, and grandmother....that is probably the single most important aspect of my life. Then I am a family advocate for a large, national advocacy organization. I work primarily in "systems advocay", helping to identify needs and change policies in children's behavioral health. And I love my dogs, my garden, my pond and fish, and trashy murder mysteries and the occasional shot of good scotch.... Fell free to post a note in whatever the most recent entry is...I love meeting new people!

FEEDJIT Live Traffic Feed