September 5, 2010

I am not so sure that we missed a bullet, but at least we gained some breathing room – enough to take a sigh of relief.

On Thursday Dr. Beth came out to see Zippy to re-evaluate him and to see if the treatments she suggested had made him any better, and to take x-rays of his feet to see how bad the laminitis is.

To us he seemed to be getting better- walking less gingerly, and trotting a bit now and then to get away from flies. And his eyes were brighter and responsive. He didn’t look depressed and in pain like he did last week. It seemed to be a start.

Dr. Beth was pretty pleased with what she saw too. He was walking better and did not seem too pained to move. The x-rays showed that his coffin bone on the right foot had not rotated and that there was only one degree of rotation in his left foot. There was also very little inflammation in either front foot.

It doesn’t mean that the laminitis is over – he will always have to be watched carefully and stay on a low carb diet and light exercise to help prevent another attack. For now though, we are going to continue the original treatments of medications, cooling his feet with water, and lowering his carbs until we are all sure that this bout is arrested.

Seems like we can breathe a little easier for now. We all feel a lot better.

Notes from the week:

This was the last week of the summer CSA season. Overall, we estimate that we grew enough vegetables for over 2,300 meals, not counting the shares we gave to our volunteers and to the food bank!

Friday night we were out and about and when we came home we checked on all the animals. Inside the chicken coop we found a 4’ long black snake helping himself to eggs. Since he wasn’t a paying customer we caught him and took him to a new home in the wildlife refuge area that is just a few miles away. I think we will have more eggs for our friends now!

Its really weird how we went from a tropical storm warning on Friday that included serious predictions of heavy rains to receiving no rain at all and sunny skies, requiring that a forest fire watch be issued, all in less than 24 hours. The weather is just so crazy. We could have really used the rain, and most of us around the area would have welcomed a swipe of Hurricane Earl to get it…