Camping out at the vet...again

It had been a couple of weeks since we've been to the vet's office so naturally it is time to go back. This time it was Axel and Jojo who drew the short straws. It seems no one else wanted to volunteer to go in for some reason.

Axel went in for a bout of diarrhea that lasted three days before we gave up and took him in to see the vet. We brought in a stool sample and he was given some nasty medication to take to help clear up the diarrhea. We had to coat the medication in peanut butter to make sure he would swallow it because it tastes bad and starts to dissolve quickly - I know this from personal experience. I had to take this same medication several years ago and in order to be able to swallow it at all I had to coat each pill in chocolate almond bark so I wouldn't be able to taste it. Gotta give me props for creativity, right? Axel's visit was pretty straight forward: test for parasites and treat for diarrhea.

Jojo's visit was another story. Jojo went into the vet for something that we thought was minor - blocked tear ducts and a disinclination to use his litter box - that turned out to be a bigger problem than we foresaw. His tear ducts are in fact blocked, and he was given eye drops to try and clear that problem up but his reluctance to use the litter box was more than simply wanting to keep me on my toes and make more work for me in an effort to keep his cage clean. It turned out that he had poor control of his hind end which could have been caused by several different things, the first of which was parasitic infection, so we tested for that and it came back positive for E. cuniculi. Enter another medication, stage right. Now, not only is Jojo on eye drops three to four times a day, he is also on oral medication twice a day. 

And they weren't done yet - they wanted x-rays of his back end, so back we went to the vet. The x-rays were taken but the vet advised sending them out to a specialist to look at to see if it could be cancer of the bones that could be causing the rather squabbagy (pronounced skwa-buh-gee, it basically means crooked) look to his spine. It seems the vets are determined to clean out my entire savings account this month. The results are in and they do not think it is cancer (thank goodness), just arthritic changes and an old, healed fracture but they want him on an anti-inflammatory medication and ideally laser treatments twice a week for several weeks at $50 a pop. Someone there must have a child headed off to college that they need me to pay for. We are starting with the anti-inflammatory medication because really, why not add another medication to the already long list of medications the animals need each day? Whoever said that moving to the country and living on a farm was getting back to the simple life was seriously mistaken. Or else I just have rotten luck.

Making duckins

We have long known that we attract "special" pets. A chicken that needed a hysterectomy, a cat AND a dog on anti-anxiety medicine, a duck that didn't produce the oil to condition his feathers, a dog with seizures, and so on and so on. So it would only make sense that our rooster would be special, too.

On the plus side, I finally figured out why Gretchen and Maggie were fighting. It happened the other day when I heard the usual frantic flapping of wings that generally means trouble. I ran to the window and looked outside in time to see Minna, pinned down underneath Gretchen who was trying his very best to produce what I can only assume would be called "duckins," a sort of duck-chicken hybrid creature. Maggie generally takes it upon himself to protect Minna and this attack on her was more than he could tolerate. To add insult to injury, Gretchen apparently tried to mate with Maggie as well and you can imagine how well that went over with Maggie. Hint: it ended with much flapping of wings, pulling of feathers, and jabbing of beaks.

When I was at the vet's office with Maggie the other day (yet again - I should probably just set up camp in the parking lot or else buy a horse trailer and just live on the road, hauling all the pets from one vet clinic to the next) I asked the vet if that was a common occurrence, roosters mating with ducks, and she said that she had never heard of it happening so I guess that makes us special. Lucky us.