Your Pet's Best Friend

Veterans' Day - remembering Tom B. Mobley

This is the Purple Heart my father was awarded in World War II.  I never saw it until after he died.  We found it when we were cleaning out his dresser.

On November 5, the United States Army Field Band & Soldiers’ Chorus gave a terrific concert in Kennett.  While there was a variety of music, the overall mood was certainly patriotic.  They played “Armed Forces Salute”, a collection of the theme songs of all the service branches. The director asked that veterans of each branch stand to be recognized during their theme.   He also asked that any family members of a veteran stand, so that you also should have been standing if a spouse, father, mother, sibling or child had been in the service.

I didn’t stand, as I would have felt a little like a fraud, standing up for something my father did before I was born.  That doesn’t mean I’m not proud of it, though. 

Dad didn’t talk much about his war experiences.  Most of what I know came out in little bits related to some other conversations, or came second-hand from Mom and other relatives.

Dad graduated from Kennett High School in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression.  The family was well-off enough to send him to college, even so.  He graduated from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College).  From there he spent a year in law school at Texas A&M.  Then it was 1941.

He joined the Army (then the Army-Air Force, a concept I was never clear on as a kid).  The only thing he ever mentioned about his training was his experience in Officer Candidate School.  “You’d ask the instructor a question, and he’d say, ‘Good question, candidate. See me after class.’  Only there was never any time after class.”  He finished OCS and became a lieutenant, commanding a platoon of tanks.

He probably looked just about like this picture when he made one last visit to Kennett before shipping out overseas.  He went around town and the farm and his other favorite places, saying goodbye, as he might never see them again.

Most of his combat service was in the deserts of north Africa.  Of this experience he said that it was the only time in his life that he didn’t have post-nasal drip (having spent the rest of his life in the swampy south).  He had also been impressed with the savagery of the flies.  “You couldn’t just fan them away.  You had to make a deliberate effort to catch and kill them, or they would just keep biting you.”

He talked about an officer who strode through the gunfire exhorting them to leave their foxholes, saying, “Do you want to live forever?”  “We called him Fearless Fosdick.”

It was in Africa (somewhere) that he was shot.  He was riding exposed in the conning tower of his tank and was shot through the muscle of his right arm.  It left him with the minor disability of being unable to perform “jumping jacks” properly.  The only time he ever said anything to me about it was while we were watching a Western movie.  I made a remark about some cowboy taking it awfully hard when “it was just a flesh wound”.  He got hot in a hurry, saying, “Let me tell you something: a flesh wound hurts like hell!”

When Italy surrendered, his unit went to southern Italy as part of an occupying force.  According to Mom, one of his jobs there was to verify that the camp-followers had current health inspections before they were allowed to “visit” the soldiers.

As far as the rigors of combat, the only advice I remember was that you should thoroughly rinse your mess-kit when washing it.  If you leave soap in it, you’ll get dysentery the next time you eat.  That’s what he thought, anyway. The dysentery may have been more from incomplete washing (though my speculation on that comes more from watching Boy Scouts).

While in Italy, he frequented a café where a young singer regularly performed “Come Back to Sorrento”.  “She could tear your heart-strings out.”, he said.  He brought sheet-music back with him.  I learned to play it for him when I was a kid, though I personally couldn’t do much with anybody’s heart-strings (good or bad).  I still have it, tattered and crumbling.

Our legacy of that posting was him telling us “Andiamo!” sometimes instead of  “Hurry up!”, plus an Italian flag and a couple of Italian police sabers that he “liberated”.  He brought an alabaster vase back to Granny.

I went with him to an Army reunion at Fort Knox, Kentucky when I was eleven.  All I really remember is that I climbed around on a tank (it was cramped and hot inside), and we went to a big dinner one night.  I didn’t hear any war stories.

That’s what I know about the war experience of my own “Greatest Generation”, and precious little it is, too.  But it’s worth knowing and remembering.

Fiberglass Dermatitis

This is "Patches", a 3-years old kitty who is a total house-cat, unless she escapes (which happens rarely).

Three weeks ago, the owners had some kitchen vent-hood problems. An opening was created, allowing the cat access (via a series of jumps) to the attic crawlspace. The space is unfinished, with exposed joists and fiberglass bat insulation between the ceiling joists.

When recovered from the attic, she became intensely itchy, excoriating herself and losing hair. Over a couple of weeks, she recovered about 90% and was doing much better. Five days ago she gained access to the attic again. The itching exploded.  She has some mild spots of hair loss and scabbing (from self-trauma) on top of her neck and rump, also the lower hind legs. Those areas are similar to the facial area in the picture.

Take a look at her belly, though.  If that doesn't make you hurt, you just have no empathy at all.  Her tail is even worse.  She's been biting holes in it.

I believe that fiberglass is the likely culprit. I know that I get really itchy if I just handle the stuff a little bit.  In searching Veterinary Information Network, I could only find a few cases mentioned.  They suggested that you might be able to find the glass fibers by doing a skin scraping (like you would for mange mites) or by using clear tape to lift little thingies from the skin.  I tried a skin scraping and found nothing. A scotch-tape preparation yielded some debris that might be fiberglass and might be anything, really.

I went up to the clinic attic and gathered the little glob of fiberglass in the picture.  My fingers itched for an hour afterward.  I cut off a little to look at under the microscope. My eyepiece cam is low resolution, so this won't show up well. The heavy dark line at lower left is one of my own human hairs. 

The salient information is that the fibers were of dramatically different shapes and sizes. Some looked straight and stiff, others coiled up. Some were three times as thick as others. Some had little globules, like nits, along their length, others did not.

In short, you could take virtually any linear debris from the cat's skin and find a fiberglass fiber that resembled it.  So did I get fiberglass from the cat?  Is fiberglass the problem?

One of the dermatologists I consulted with says that her own cat gets in the attic and plays with the insulation and has no problems at all.  On the other hand, there were other case reports of fiberglass-associated dermatitis available... and my own hand itching for an hour after barely touching the stuff.

Treatment-wise, the only suggestions I found in my research were topical cortisone and tincture of time (three weeks to grow a new layer of skin?).  I gave her a little dexamethasone injection and sent home DermaCool HC for topical use several times daily. She is to come in for a recheck after two days. I may have to bandage the tail, get an e-collar and add antibiotics.  I've sure got to do something.  She looks tough.

French Bulldog Breeding

Once upon a time, I wrote a post on weird-looking dogs.  One of the most unsound breeds is the English Bulldog.   Because of their extreme conformation, the males are rarely able to breed the females with natural service. Their chests are too big and their hindquarters are too small, and they just cannot assume the position. Almost all English Bulldogs are conceived through artificial insemination.

Then, you have the problem of delivery.  Just like the males, the females have small hindquarters, which means a tiny birth canal.   The puppies, like their parents, have some really big heads.  Big head plus small birth canal equals puppies who cannot get outside when the time comes.  Virtually all English Bulldogs are delivered by Caesarian section (meaning, you open the dog with exploratory surgery, open the uterus to remove the puppies, and sew everything back up again).

The problem is that you have to decide when to do this.  If you wait too late, the puppies don't make it.  They've lost their connection to mommy, and they didn't get outside to start breathing.  Not good.

If you start too early, they may be premature and unable to survive, or the mother may not have any milk to feed them.  Then you've got to come up with colostrum or extract serum to give the puppies their early immunity from disease, not to mention bottle-feeding them until the dam's milk comes in. That doesn't sound like fun, and it isn't.

This means that you have to track your breeding dates very carefully.  Unfortunately, the breeding date could be a few days ahead of the actual conception date, so you still have problems.  If you monitor the bitch's hormone levels during her cycle, you can get a handle on when she ovulates, which lets you pinpoint that conception date.  You can also use the Whelpwise system in late pregnancy to determine if it is "time".

French Bulldogs (like Lolly here) have that fat little bulldog head, but their conformation is not so extreme as the English Bulldog (and they are a lot smaller,too).  They generally breed with natural service, and some of them are able to free whelp (have their babies without assistance).  Many, though (like Lolly here), do require C-sections to deliver the pups.  She looks a little woozy here, because she's still recovering from anesthesia in this picture.  That little touch of color is the Vetrap tape on her I.V. catheter.

In her case we didn't know the conception date, and her owners (while they are generally very conscientious) did not invest in the Whelpwise system.  The day that we delivered these guys, they weren't sure that she was actually in labor yet.  She just barely had any milk (which could happen 2 days before whelping or 2 hours before whelping, or not at all).  It was a Saturday morning, and I was thinking, "Well, great.  I'll have to check her every few hours all weekend."  As it happened, her cervix was already dilated completely and I could feel the top of a puppy head.  Time for surgery... right now.

And here they are, at 6 weeks old (this week), getting their first immunizations, and looking for homes.  If the folks will just send me the link, I'll post it so you can check out which ones are still available

Fan-Belt Kitty, Day 36

Here's Alley back for another check-up, 36 days after getting caught in the fan-belt.  She looks pretty good overall, though she hasn't grown her hair back, obviously.

You may recall when we started this case that I noted it's hard to tell whether traumatized skin will survive or not.  An area can look pretty decent, yet have its circulation irreparably damaged. Days later, it becomes apparent that you are going to lose it.  That's what we saw at day 9.

There were a couple of other areas that developed a hard crust, but didn't slough off at that time.  There was a spot on the outside of her right thigh, and her remaining tail had a pretty large area, as well.  When I've seen these in the past, the crust has eventually sloughed, leaving a new, pink skin underneath (rather than the yucky giant hole that we saw on day 9).

That's what the patch on the side of the thigh did, but the tail was a different story.  Alley's owner hadn't really noticed a problem, but on the way to the clinic, the tip of the tail came off.  Well, the skin on the tip of the tail, anyway.  The remaining tail has pink skin on it, but the tip does look a little raw.  It remains to be seen how this will finally heal, and whether it will grow hair or not.  Scar tissue has no hair follicles, so we might be up for one more surgery to get the tail into a nice non-painful (and more cosmetically appealing) situation. 

This has got to be one of the funkiest things I have ever seen. I think that eventually this will just be a bad memory for Alley as she goes into her new, more sheltered, and bob-tailed life.

Spayed female dog still having "heat cycles"?!

That could be a tabloid headline, though I guess it's pretty tame compared to "Elvis sighted in laundromat!" or "Politician actually admits lying!".  The point is that it's weird -- dogs who have been spayed have no uterus and no ovaries, so how could they still be having estrus cycles and coming "in heat"?

Once upon a time, about 28 years ago, I spayed a Scottish Terrier.  She continued to have heat cycles, and I was mystified (not to mention mortified).  That is NOT supposed to happen.

Now, I have to tell you: when you're performing an ovario-hysterectomy on a dog, sometimes it's pretty hard to pull the ovaries up out of the abdominal cavity.  If you're not careful, you might cut things a little close and leave some ovary in there.  When you've cut things off, you need to inspect what you removed and be sure the whole ovary is there (plus a little extra tissue, just to make you feel good about getting  100%). 

If you leave some ovary in the dog, they will continue to cycle regularly, coming in heat every six months. They won't get pregnant, since you've removed the uterus, but they still come in heat, they are still at greater risk for breast cancer, and could even have "female trouble" developing pyometra in the stump of the uterus.

Sometimes, you cut things pretty close, but in the case of the above Scottish Terrier, I recalled vividly that there had been no problems at all.  It was not a "close call".  So, I called the reproductive specialists to ask what I needed to do.  Now you could run hormone assays to see if there is functional ovarian tissue left, but if the dog is coming in heat every six months, you can be pretty sure there is functional ovarian tissue.

Here's the problem: it could be a piece of ovarian tissue the size of a pin-head.  The specialist told me that I could even have implanted some ovarian cells on the body wall by rubbing the ovary against it on the way out.  "Jeez, how am I going to find that?!" He told me to wait until she was sure enough in heat (flaming) and do an exploratory.  Look for a little tiny red thing that looks like ovary. It could be anywhere -- the proverbial needle in a  haystack.

So, what happened, you may ask?  The owners asked, "Can she get pregnant?" and when they found she could not, they refused to allow the exploratory (even at my expense).  They decided to just live with it, and the dog lived a long and happy life, despite cycling every six months.  So, I'll never know if I could have found what I needed to.

This is Tinkerbell.  She was spayed at six months old, and at seven years old has had heat cycles every six months.  And really, lately she hasn't been feeling all that great.  Several years ago, I told her owner what it would take to look for the little tiny piece of ovary and she decided not to do it.  Lately, though it had started to bother both Tinkerbell and her mom more and more, so she said, "We'll do it the next time she comes in heat."

I must say that I had some misgivings.  I had told Mom that I wasn't sure I'd be able to find what we were looking for, even with the dog in heat.  It could be so tiny.  And it could be anywhere in there... I thought.

What I had not counted upon was that whoever did her surgery did an incredibly lousy job... unbelievable, really.  This picture shows a piece of ovary on the right, removed from the usual ovary location.  On the left, also attached to a usual ovary location, we have an entire ovary, which you can't see because it's behind that big thing that looks like a Vienna Sausage.  The "thing" is a section of uterus that is full of pus, sort of a pocket-sized pyometra. It was bigger than her kidney or her colon, and when I first looked at it, I couldn't imagine what it was.  It just didn't occur to me that a surgeon could have left that much uterus in place. 

So, while it was hard to believe, it wasn't all that hard to find.  I sent the tissue off to the pathologist, thinking it must be a tumor or something, but it wasn't.  "Ovary and uterus, filled with pus".  The good news is that Tinkerbell feels better than she has in a long time.

Fan-Belt Kitty, Day 21

Alley still has a few "issues" as they say, but she is stuck back together.  She's eating well, gaining weight, and feeling pretty good.  For a long time she did NOT feel pretty good.  Her whole body took a beating, not just her skin.  We know she must have been thoroughly bruised inside and out, even though we didn't open her body cavity to look at things.  Just as it took time for external tissue to die and slough off, it took time for bruised tissue internally to heal.

Here's a close-up of her suture line.  When her hair grows back, the scar will hardly be noticeable. Of course, her tail is a lot shorter than it used to be, but she can live with that.  It's really great to have a committed owner who is  willing and able to give the patient the care she needs.

Fan-Belt Kitty, Day 11

Alley came back in so that we could recheck things and remove the surgical drains.  It's looking good here. Very minimal swelling and drainage.  I'm getting really optimistic. 

Fan-Belt Kitty Follow-up, Day 9

I'm way behind on updating the Blog.  Too many long days and late nights.   After 3 weeks,  Alley had mostly  recovered from her ordeal under the hood.  I thought you might find the follow-up interesting.

As you may recall (if you followed the above link), Alley was caught in the fan-belt and the friction crushed and cooked her skin, as well as tearing it.  So, nine days after the initial injury and repair, we find that some of the skin we carefully sewed together has lost its circulation and died. You say you can't see it very well?  Well, it's time for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

So, time for another attempt at repair.  This time we hope to do better, as everything that was going to die should be dead by now.  There is still contaminated infected tissue, but this time we will sew up living skin instead of questionable skin.  Also, with any luck, the hole won't be so big -- the skin that lived will have stuck down to the underlying tissue (we hope).   You can see where things are pulling apart here. The dark stuff is dead skin and the "light stuff " is a hole where things are pulling apart.

Here's the dead stuff I peeled off, and here's the hole I have left.

Things didn't pull apart nearly so much as the first time, and the tissue looks pretty healthy (although still pretty gross and disgusting).

So, we trimmed back to live tissue, put surgical drains in again, and put a nice bandage on.  She's still taking pain medicine and antibiotics.  (To be continued)

Fruit of the Ice Storm of '09

Some of you may recall that we had a pretty incredible ice storm last winter.  We are told that even though our power crews continue to work 12-hour shifts that the Kennett power grid is at about 75% of its previous capacity.  Incredibly, good planning and conservative management over the years had built up enough of an emergency reserve fund that we are not facing a utility rate surcharge to pay for the rebuild.  Our citizens continue to be indebted to the hard work of our city-owned utility company.

Still, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.  Our Euonymus bushes were so loaded that the ice pulled them over.  We staked them back up, but one just didn't make it.  We planted a little replacement, but it's still the ugly duckling, being about a tenth the size of its mates.  It's got a new companion, though.

We've lived in the ancestral manse since 1979.  Built by my great-grandmother, Panola Mississippi Rayburn Donaldson, in 1909, it was occupied before us by my great-aunt Madge Donaldson.  She was the gardener supreme and HER yard was always a showplace.  As soon as something quit blooming, it was dug up and replaced with something else.  There were many beds and it was really something to see.  She used to keep two boys busy moving water hoses, digging and fertilizing, and she did the same, on up into her eighties.

Our gardening is much less ambitious.  Mrs. Mobley has done a lot, but we don't spend the time and effort Aunt Madge did (she was retired).  We still enjoy her daffodils, tulips and "surprise lilies".

This one really surprised us, though.  We've never seen it's like in the thirty years we've been here.  I guess it needed more sun than it was getting.  With the Euonymus gone and the big pine trees stripped by the storm, the dormant bulb sprang forth this week.  It's not exactly compensation for the lost trees and cold nights, but it's pretty neat.

Cool weather puts cats in your car engine. Check under the hood.

Warning: Gross pictures at the bottom

When you go outside to start your car, bang on the hood, honk the horn, and check around to see where the cat is.  You might check under the hood.

Every year, kittens are born in the spring and summer.  Whether wet or dry, the weather is hot.  Then one day in the early fall, it suddenly turns off cool and rainy.

You're a little kitten, and you are used to things being nice and warm. Now you're wet and cold.  You're looking for a nice, warm, dry place.  Hey! It's dry under the car.  In fact, you can climb up under the hood and it's really warm, too.  It's cozy, and warm and dry (if a bit greasy), and you drift off to sleep.

The next morning (cue the sunrise theme from the William Tell Overture),  it's time for the folks to go to work.  So, they start up the old Buick, and it makes a really loud, really horrible noise.  Actually, the car doesn't make the noise.  The cat who just got grabbed by the fan-belt makes the noise. 

Open the hood, and you might find a really scared kitten who's basically okay except for a serious bad hair day...  or you might find pieces of dead kitten...  OR you might find a cat that's pretty messed up, but salvageable.  "Paging Doctor Mobley!"

This usually happens just a little later in the year, the end of September or early October.  Of course, if you're a global warming devotee, then you know that anything can happen -- too wet, too dry, too warm, too cold, oobleck -- it's global warming.  

Be that as it may, the first fan-belt kitty of the year came on September fourteenth this year:  a little early.  What global warming does NOT explain (at least, I don't think it does, but then, I'm not a high level initiate in the sacred order) -- what global warming does NOT explain is why a five-years old cat has fallen for the old "It's warm and dry in here, kitty.  Try it, you'll like it."  Naive little kittens, sure, but a five-years old cat? 

Alley was able to walk around, but her tail had been peeled like a banana (actually a "de-gloving", they call it), and her right flank looked like it had been sliced open.  My first thought was that the belt had pulled her into the fan.  Closer examination revealed that the flank had been chewed open by the friction of being caught in the belt itself. 

The wound edges were hard, dry, and black. They had been cooked by the friction of the belt.  All that open area is sub-cutaneous fat.  They say you can't be too rich or too thin, but being well-padded was a good thing for Alley.  She was cut through her 3/4 inch fat layer, all the way down to the muscle in some places.  If she'd been skinny, she would have been laid open and her innards would have been outside of her inside.

After 45 minutes of scraping, flushing, and plucking, we were down to mostly live tissue, though the skin edges on the front side were questionable.  The thing is, it's really hard to tell what's going to live or die with some of this.  Even if some of the skin dies and sloughs off later, it's still a better bandage material than anything else I could use right now.  Of course, even after all the cleaning, the wound is still grossly contaminated.  Drain tubes are incorporated into the repair so that yucky stuff can get out.  She'll need antibiotics, pain medication, and lots of good nursing care.

Here we have the phase one finished product, which is the broken pieces re-assembled into a reasonable facsimile of a cat.  More tissue will probably die, more surgery may be required, may have to treat some of it as an open wound.  Fortunately, cats have terrific healing powers (for their own bodies, I mean; don't rub a cat on your sore place), and I'm optimistic that Alley will eventually enjoy life again.  She'll have a short tail, but I hope for a long life.