Sequim Gazette Editorial and Letters to the Editor

There was a series of Sprint commercials on television regarding garbled communications over cellular telephones. One of the funnier ads pictures a survivor in the midst of domestic wreckage talking to another man who asks, "Why would I say there's a tomato coming?"

I recently experienced my own incident of telephone fuzz.

A client called and said that his dog had ingested two packages of De-Con. Should he be worried?

I repeated over the phone, "two packages of De-Con?"

"Yes," came the reply.

"How long ago?" I asked.

"Early this morning."

I had treated several cases of poisoning from this rodenticide. If not carefully placed, dogs can find it and devour it. It was by now midafternoon, too late to pump the dog's stomach or give it inactivated charcoal via a stomach tube to prevent the poison being absorbed from the gut.

Since warfarin (De-Con) kills its victims over a period of days or even weeks by inhibiting the blood-clotting mechanism and since my schedule was full with afternoon appointments, I suggested that he bring in his dog the next day to be administered with vitamin K, a specific antidote for De-Con.

The next morning my client showed up with his dog and announced that some of the ingested material was beginning to be "passed."

Puzzled, because the poison that is targeted for rodents usually comes in a powder or light granular form, I inquired as to how he was sure the dog was passing De-Con.

"Pecans!" he stated with undisguised irritation.

"He ate two packages of pecans."

Boy, did I feel nuts.



Fish story

It's hard to write a fish story in veterinary practice unless, of course, you are trying to beef up the numbers when selling your practice.

Although there was no aquatic animal medicine when I was in vet school, I did take a fish disease course at Texas A&M in 1972 during graduate school.

I learned basically from this course that fish medicine is "herd (i.e., school) management." Laboratory data acquired from sick and dead individuals provide a diagnosis so therapies can be directed toward those that are still alive.

"A sick fish is a dead fish" was a mantra our professor frequently quoted.

A few years later when a woman called me about a sick goldfish, I chose to counsel her over the phone, believing there was little I could do to help. Because the sick fish showed terminal signs such as swimming in circles on its side, I told her we had a dying patient.

Since she did not want to see her pet suffer, she inquired as to how she might humanely dispatch the sick goldfish. Considering various alternatives, she decided that the Old Toilet Flush seemed the most practical.

However, because she envisioned a frightening spiral down into the sewer, she decided first to numb her pet's senses. She got out the vodka, poured a half-glass and placed the already drunk-acting piscine into the booze.

To her horror, the fish began to swim frantically about as if in great distress. With a dip net she quickly scooped her sick pet from the vodka back into its bowl and called me in sobbing hysteria to ask what to do next.

Since the woman was blazing new trails beyond my experience, I suggested that she try to calm down, relax and see if the alcohol would kill the fish.

I did not hear back from her that night -- and, I might add, without disappointment. But two days later, I got the startling news that her goldfish was alive, feeding and swimming normally.

Jane was grateful for my advice even though the entire therapeutic regime had been her own inspiration.

The whole fishy incident has forced me to ask some basic questions:

_ Can a little booze sometimes set your head straight?

_ Is there perhaps a place in veterinary medicine for alcohol therapy?

_ Is death by flush an acceptable (com)mode of piscine euthanasia?

Maybe in the final analysis, recovery involves basic choices. For our little patient it was simply a matter of sink or swim.

Dr. Jack Thornton is a semiretired veterinarian. Reach him in care of editor@sequimgazette.com.