Two days out of the clinic, sixteen hours of driving, overpriced motels and meals: $____(I’m just not thinking about it, and yes, I used MasterCard). The "Dad’s Weekend" with my daughter: priceless. I’m not terribly keen on football, so when we found that her scuba certification conflicted with THE GAME, I wasn’t too disappointed. Instead, […]
Author Archives: Doc
Unless you ask his offspring. How fondly I remember the day when my teen-aged daughter first called me a geezer. What a proud day that was. It recalled to me my own youthful days of innocence. I felt a little shaky on the day when I first began to suspect that my own father didn’t […]
So, we’ve been treating our itchy pet for allergic itching with a variety of approaches, but he is still itching. How can this be? It could be that, despite our skin scrapings, cultures and other in-office tests, we missed something and it’s really not an allergy. We may need to do a skin biopsy (cutting […]
When my son got chiggers at camp, he asked his mom what to do about the itching. She suggested the traditional remedies of Benadryl cream, Chigarid, or clear nail polish. He didn’t care for those alternatives, so I facetiously suggested that he "scratch them till they are bloody sores". He gave me a quizzical look […]
It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity. That is, it’s the stupidity of the body’s defense system that results in allergies. You’ve got this great and amazing array of mechanisms that protect your body from foreign invaders. When some harmful germ or poisonous molecule (i.e. a really tiny thing that is bad for you) enters […]
We had a horse come in with a runny eye on one side. He didn’t seem to be bothered much by it, but his face was wet and a little gooky (scientific term: things with gook on them are gooky). Now it just so happens that your tears are made in glands around your eye, […]
Thinking about Macey’s battle with cancer (see yesterday’s post) reminded me that a lot of people have some real misconceptions about chemotherapy. The commonly held belief is that the treatment is worse than the disease. I often encounter pet-owners with the preconceived idea that chemotherapy makes you really sick, rarely works, and just generally makes […]
I had intended to write a more light-hearted post this evening, but sometimes things take an unexpected turn. Macey was a Boxer who developed lymphoma a year ago in July. She had been misdiagnosed elsewhere and put on antibiotics for her swollen lymph nodes. After four weeks of that, they sought a second opinion, my […]
Of all the strange beliefs of pet-owners, the notion that "a dog’s mouth is cleaner than a person’s" is one of the more surprising. I suppose it may arise from the fact that you can get a really nasty infection if a person were to bite you (those old "germs that cause bad breath" again). […]
Lane e-mailed me to ask how to get the pooch used to the idea of tooth-brushing. Actually, we want them to accept the actual practice of tooth-brushing in addition to the idea of it [joke: observe the twinkle in my eye, please]. Lane’s second question was about the type of toothbrush you need. Why not […]