The goldfish that we found wounded last week is dead. We got back from having spent Friday through Sunday at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's parents and found the bad news.
I'm putting the details behind a cut because while I'm trying to not be gruesome in description, the stuff you imagine may be awful too.
We had set up a hospital tank, with about 20 gallons of water and heavy doses of antibiotic and antifungal and stress-coat, everything we could do for the poor fish. And when we got home Sunday we saw he was still swimming around, with his injuries surrounded by the wispy cloud of goo that fish excrete to cover where their skin is ripped out.
I have soft-pedaled this a lot, and will continue to, but the fish was very badly wounded, so that the cloud of goo was almost this halo around the poor fish. And, on study, bunnyhugger realized one had a fungus growing out of control. That might have been treated with more antifungal medicine (we had used up the last of it on Friday and still plan to get more). But she noticed something worse: the fish's mouth was wounded, to the point that it was not clear he could eat.
So we experimented, confining the poor fish with a bit of food so he could do nothing except eat. And ... he couldn't. A bit of food might drift into his mouth, but it passed right back out again. Goldfish don't need to eat much, and need even less in the cold of winter, but ...
If it were just his many injuries we'd likely have given him the time, because it isn't much effort to keep a hospital tank going, and maybe with enough time his injuries would heal over. But given all that, and he couldn't even eat?
We did it with a solution of clove oil, a numbing agent, so the poor fish would stop feeling pain, and then stop feeling, and then stop, and we hope that's how it went.
We feel guilty, of course. It's impossible not to think that if we hadn't taken the fish in at all, they might well be fine. Or if we had set things up differently, we might have avoided what we suspect happened. And there's the awful feeling of how we can't do anything more for the injured fish, besides think of how we might better serve the next one.
Some pictures from Christmas Eve, in the small hours after midnight. And if you wonder how it is I'm taking pictures of our home, after midnight Christmas Eve, when we had been at bunnyhugger's parents since Friday ... well, that is a story I will tell you in a moment.
Our upstairs tree. It's unlit because I got the picture after the timer had turned the lights off for the night, and I didn't want to figure out how to override the timer and maybe break something.
Another view of the upstairs tree Christmas Eve. The decorations are all amusement park ornaments, and note the heap of amusement park plushes on the bookshelf behind.
And here's a view looking up our downstairs tree, with a good number of carousel horses, yes, but also dragons and (you can see on the left) rabbits.
Also, a couple of Doctor Who tchotchkes. And if you glance at the mantle clock you can see yeah, it's technically early Christmas morning.
Trivia: Versailles's Hall of Mirrors, at its unveiling in November 1682, showed 357 individual panes, measuring as large as 26 by 34 inches each. The original intention had been to feature mirrors as much as six to seven feet tall, a feat that proved beyond France's mirror-making abilities. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean.
Currently Reading: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.
PS: From my Third A-to-Z: Tree and the remembrance of how we all thought 2016 was a particularly brutal year. Honest, we did, back then. Look it up.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-28 06:44 am (UTC)Note: Mirrors - yes! I discovered that when watching a show about the Crystal Palace. The technique for floating glass on molten tin to make large panes was developed as part of building that, so any mirrors past about 30 inches square that you see in movies set before 1850 are NOT RIGHT!