Daily Reads

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Diabetic guinea pigs

That's what I'm dealing with today. We have quite a few of the wee beasties at the moment (11 to be precise), and one of our older residents has been losing weight and drinking copiously the last six months. Other than that he seems to be a perfectly healthy pig.

So after some blood tests, we've got a diagnosis, and now have to decide on medication. There is always the old standby, injected insulin, but I don't look forward to injecting the poor little thing daily. He's going to squirm and he's so frail feeling at the moment I'll be afraid of breaking him trying to get the deed done. Also, it should be easier with a smaller guage needle, but trying to get an 18 guage for fluid sub-cues through a pig's skin is like trying to punch through leather. I'm pretty sure pigs must be related to moles in that regard. (I remember one of our cats lo these many years ago spending the better part of an hour chewing on her catch, and at the end of it all she had to show was a soggy squishy mole, without a single hole in it's hide.) So now I'm off to find dosages for glipizide, with which many guinea pig owners have reported success. Of course their reports don't include this pertinent piece of information.

Either way it will be fun to get more meds from the pharmacy with names like this on the bottle: "Albert Gui. Pig Smith".

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Does this make sense?

Something's screwy here. It's harder to get online access to school information about my daughter through parentconnect than it is to get to any of my banking stuff. If I forget a password, or the account gets locked, I have to go to the school office to get it sorted out. Of course the whole point of having this service is so that I don't have to go to the office, since I, as do many other parents these days, work full time, including all the hours when the school office is open. So to use the system that will keep me from losing work time by having to go into the school in person, I have to lose work time to go into the office in person. But to get access to all my bank info and send my money anywhere in the world, I can sign up on line, get the password online, and never once have to show a real person that I'm who I say I am. And it's not like this school info gives schedules or anything that would make it easier to stalk or abduct my child than what is already available to the general public on the school web site.

Aargh.