ain't that a bitch

well as is life as sean would say...things were looking up, bills were being paid off, and then everything comes crashing down as it inevitably always does. so wednesday i get a phone call and petie [one of my horses] is showing signs of colic again. he had surgery back in 2000 and since then likes to scare the hell out of us with symptoms every year or so of a relapse to make everyone think that he's going to need more surgery which i cannot at this point in time afford. so i head on out in the dark to the crouts [jake, justin, jess, and their parents, donnie and cindy] to see what's going on. petie isn't too bad so i make up a mixture of poo soup [bran, oil, jello mix, brown sugar, purina senior horse feed, water, metamucil, and corn oil] and he eats some of it which is a good sign. i come back thursday and do the same for him for breakfast [6:30am ouch] and dinner and he cleans up all of it. friday i head back out there and he's acting like his normal perky self trying to stick his head in the bucket i mixed everything up in before i could get to his feed bucket. cooper seems to be doing well but a bit thin. i'm going to start taking some beet pulp/molasses mix out to him three times a week to see if that'll bulk him up some.

so friday sean and i take aurora and constantine to the vet. constantine needs a booster vaccine and aurora needs her yearly examination with all the bells and whistles. as we're leaving with our $210.00 bill the vet tech comes out and says we need to go back in the exam room because the vet needs to talk with us. we head back in and they tell us aurora has heart worms. this could have theoretically been prevented had i given her monthly heart worm treatment but my brain decided that she was an indoor dog so what were the chances of her being bitten by a mosquito infected with these little buggers. apparently those chances were higher than i thought. i forgot to mention that aurora decided to eat my lg chocolate one day when she was out at home and we were at work leading to her breaking off a tooth that also needs to be removed which is going to cost $200.00 minimum. i think my vet may be a bit on the pricey side. anywho so now he talks of using this immeticide treatment and hands us a sheet outlining what happens. so basically it's a shot given twice to kill the worms in her heart which will painfully disperse into my dog's lungs once they evacuate the heart and we have to keep her on exercise lockdown for about six to eight weeks. this is no big deal and of course we're going to treat her for them and get the other two dogs checked out but then he goes to tell me the cost is $350.00 for the treatment. two shots and an oral wormer [ivermectin which i give my dogs anyways which is $10 for a 1,000 lb animal] for $350.00 seems a bit much. he tells me the immeticide costs a good bit and that's why the price is so high. well lucky me, i worked for the surgical referral for a few years so i call to see how much the bottle of immeticide runs and turns out it is less than $40.00. yes you heard right, $40.00. so then i think okay well they're assuming i'm the average idiot owner who won't be able to deal with watching my dog in case she ends up passing a clot and they've worked in keeping her at the facility each time she gets a shot just in case something happens. then i'm reminded of how er knowledgeable the staff at the clinic was when i went to get my cat spayed there. they called me three times. the first time they asked if i realized that my cat was declawed. gee really? i had no idea. [heavy sarcasm] are people really this stupid that they don't know if their cat has claws or not? they called me again to ask if i was sure my cat hadn't already been spayed and the second time to ask if she had gone into heat recently to make sure the cat wasn't spayed yet again. so this leaves me a little worried with letting their employees watch my dog when she could possibly need emergency services plus the fact that they are thirty to forty five minutes from the emergency clinic in case such does occur. so i figure you can see my quandary here and once i get rukia and eros tested to see if they are positive this friday i'm going to call jonathan suber at the referral and see if he'll do the shots for me as opposed to having this done at my vet clinic.

in other news there was a huge storm monday and we lost power for 4 hours. when the power came back on we had no cable service. so i call time warner to report my outage and they state they'll set up a work order. i get home tuesday and still no cable. i call time warner and they tell me my work order is scheduled for thursday. i bitch and whine but they won't move the appt any nearer even though they don't show any other outages in my area. what really takes the cake is that my grandfather lost cable, called tuesday morning and it was fixed within 3 hours. so for now i'm being made to watch dvds and read! how dare they not fix my cable. grr.

oh well.

enjoy the silence.

-pyper