This is Toby with a blow-by oxygen tube in front of his face. Toby is 14 years old. As often happens, in the earlier stages of his disease a lot of his clinical signs were chalked up to "just getting older". When he began having difficulty breathing, his mom sought help. This is a lady […]
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Last week we saw a lovely (if overlarge) cat named Baby. She didn’t look quite so bedraggled then. This picture was taken as she awakened after her ear-cleaning procedure today. It was Baby’s first visit to our hospital and I was unhappy to learn that she had been suffering from chronic ear infections "for years". […]
Does he look a little brighter here? He sure acts that way. After being totally hand-fed, hand-watered with a syringe, and receiving lots of oxygen, this guy is back on track today. He’s eating well and running and playing. I had a terrible time getting a picture of him because he’d keep running up to […]
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall." You know, I think that’s generally true. Of course, I also believe that the older they are (or the older I am, anyway), the harder they fall. When I was a little kid and made accidental dismounts from the horse, it seemed like a longer distance to […]
Well, not actually my first braces or retainer (that was 44 years ago, after all). I mean the first one that I’ve applied to a patient. In a previous post we talked about how retained baby teeth can lead to malocclusion: teeth that grow in where they don’t belong. On little Cocoa here, I failed […]
Back when I was in veterinary school, Dr. Larry P. Thornburg was a lecturing pathology professor (as opposed to the hands-on pathologists who worked with us in the laboratories). One of my favorite Thornburg-isms was "This is a very interesting disease — we don’t know a thing about it." When we moved on to the […]
Set the Way-Back, Sherman. About ten years ago, I was flipping the channels and came across a guy in England who had built an enormous trebuchet: a counterweight-driven catapult that uses a sling to further extend its throwing arm. He was throwing small automobiles and upright pianos, among other things. He like to see things […]
One of my high school classmates became a veterinarian as a second career. When she (and I) went to college the first time, women were not exactly being encouraged to apply to veterinary school (the dark ages — sometime between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and 1980). She became a teacher, despite really always wanting […]
Old Yeller Alert It’s always hard to give bad news, but sometimes it’s harder than others. Today I had two old patients with kidney failure. Everybody’s pets are special to them, and saying goodbye is never easy, but today… The first one was a cat whose kidneys were so large and misshapen that I could […]
People make a lot of jokes about not working on Labor Day. Drive around town and you see plenty of people working, though. I typically cover the clinic chores on holidays. I feel that I need to check on the patients that are here, so I might as well clean up after them, too and […]