eric135

NASCAR 1: Planned Parenthood 0, What if nurses got paid per patient instead of by the hour, Culling our Platys...

• I read on the internets that the House voted out Planned Parenthood, and is continuing to fund NASCAR. What's that all about? I've never been much for either -- parenthood or NASCAR -- but how have our priorities gotten so effed up? I personally don't consider NASCAR a "sport" per se, although yes it does take some skill -- right up until you run up against a RIGHT turn -- but, hell, the only way I'd get into it is if they required the drivers to txt while they drove, or if the audience got to throw obstacles randomly into the road.
• I wonder how much health care would get fixed if nurses got paid via capitation (per patient) rather than by the hour, or if physicians got paid by the hour instead of by capitation. I mean, let's just say a nurse is paid $30 bucks an hour for a 12 hour shift for taking care of five patients. That comes out to $72 bucks per patient. I wonder, as much as we nurses do belly-ache about patient safety and all that, how many of us would take another patient (or more) to get another $72 (or more) a shift. More interestingly, I wonder how many of us would choose to get $72 per shift less in order to be assigned one patient less? I'm totally not saying we should do this, but I wonder how the discussion would change, if it would change at all?
•  We just had to thin our population of platys in our 10-gallon fish tank. We started out with several species of fish, but over the past couple of years, everyone died out except for these Platys. They just kept breeding, and at this point there must have been 70 fish (most of them juvenile) in the tank (along with one bad-tempered Beta that probably hates kids). We looked it up on the internets, and it seems one of the more humane ways to euthanize tropical fish is to drop them into ice water (actually the most humane methods were clove oil or a fish anesthetic called MS-222 or alcohol -- we had none of these). But it still felt strange catching 10-15 baby fish and dropping them in a bucket of ice water. A bit traumatizing, considering how much heartache we go through when our goldfish die.
• I have been playing iTunes, and for whatever hellish reason, I keep playing the theme song from The Sound of Music over and over...

Kitty rekovery and a Goldfish Gastronomic Emergency

Missy had those bumps removed from her back and the base of her tail. I was pretty impressed with the veterinarian (Greg Benson, DVM, North Ranch Animal Hospital). He called us after the surgery was over and let us know how the surgery went. Hell, my room mate didn't get that kind of service from my surgeon when I had my gallbladder taken out.

She's still not feeling all that great. She wouldn't eat until I started feeding her one piece of food at a time with my hand, and drinks a few sips of water when we bring her a little bowl. But it's still the first 24 hours and I remember after my gallbladder surgery I was quite the helpless mess for 4 days. But we are the perpetually worried parents keeping the other 2 cats at a distance.

We also have meds every 12 hours -- 1cc of an Amoxicillin slurry, and 0.1cc of Buprenorphine for pain. And we have to take her back in a couple of days to get the dressing on her tail changed.

We also had an issue with our goldfish. We were about to sit down to dinner when we noticed she (we assume it's a she but we really don't have any idea) had apparently attempted to swallow a large piece of gravel at the bottom of the tank. She managed to get it into her mouth but was too big to push out. We managed to catch her in a net, and while I held her with one hand, I used a straightened paperclip to pry the stone out of her mouth. She was amazingly calm about the whole procedure.

Yes we've been one long episode of Animal Planet's Emergency Vets the past couple of days.

There be fish here; Boykitty

Our fish died a few months ago, and we were hesitant to get new ones. We just got really attached to those fish, and we actually went through a period of mourning.

But there be fish here now. We got two orange fantails and one algae eater. My room mate has been resistant to naming them, but for me, the big one is Agador, and the little one is Spartacus.

We got a bit of a scare with one of our kitties, Boykitty. He had apparently broken a tooth, and although he wasn't in any pain, even though it was three in the morning and even though roomie and I were fighting about something, as soon as it was something about the kitty, we decided, right then and there, to hop in the car and go looking at Veterinary Hospitals. None were open, we would just sit in the car in the empty lot and look at the building, and try to figure out how nice they were to kitties based on their curb appeal.

Yes, when it comes to kitties and fish, we get very dramatic at times.