#zaphtiera

[ask-a-vetblr]

How much blood can a bull lose before it's a health problem? I tried researching this on my own and it got weird real fast.

If we’re talking a smallish bull at around 500kg (half a tonne, like an Angus) then it’s probably got a total blood volume of around 25-30 liters. A big bugger weighing in at a tonne will have slightly less than double that.

If a bull loses 20% of that blood volume they will likely go into shock, but if they’re raging on adrenaline at the time they may not notice for a little while as adrenaline is a vasoconstrictor. Losing 40% is probably death.

You could do blood transfusions for cattle and horses with 5 liter bags so a large individual (600-700+kg) can donate that but you wouldn’t want to go beyond that. And you will likely need nutritional support for the resulting anemia, but a healthy animal should recover with a good diet and a big drink.

- Dr Ferox

[drferox]

Does golden paste actually DO anything for arthritic animals? I've run into the suggestion a lot in the cat fandom.

Golden paste is mostly tumeric and coconut oil. Tumeric is actually scientificaiiyl very interesting, but the number 1 website you’re going to come across about it is going to claim...

“(Tumeric)is found to trump a lot of fancy, expensive drugs.”

And, look, if they want to claim there’s a lot of noise made about it’s prowess without a lot of facts and figures to back it up, then sure. It ‘trumps’ real anti-inflammatories, steroids and chemotherapy.

That’s massive sarcasm by the way. You can’t use tumeric to prevent or treat cancer.

Tumeric has some possible/probably anti-inflammatory effects for the gastrointestinal system, which is looking more ‘probable’ than ‘possible’ at this stage. It’s likely to be a useful complementary therapy for gastrointestinal disorders, similar to how we use fish oil for arthritis, but probably isn’t enough on its own.

But even with its small benefits for gut issues, coupling it with coconut oil is probably not the best way to get it into the cat. Especially if that cat has got IBD/pancreatitis/triaditis or similar.

Tumeric is worth watching, and actually included in several GI prescription diets, but not the magic miracle cure people often claim it is.

[ask-a-vetblr]

What could cause ketoacidosis in a cat that hasn't previously been diabetic? (Not asking for a personal pet, just didn't think it could happen to non-diabetics)

Acidosis can happen for all sorts of reasons, it just means the blood is acidic.

Ketosis just means there are ketones in the blood. Metabolising lots of fat can do this.

Ketoacidosis means the ketones are turning the blood acidic, and if the cat wasn’t diabetic before, it almost certainly is now.

- Dr Ferox

[ask-a-vetblr]

What do you know about strokes in cats? Have you ever had a patient who'd had one?

They’re usually secondary to some sort of heart disease, which can be occult (hidden or impossible to spot) in cats without regular heart ultrasounds, as they often have no symptoms before a catastrophe.

But sending a clot to the brain is less likely than sending a clot to a limb, and those are often referred to as aortic thromboembolism and they are one of nature’s cruelest tricks.

[drferox]

Is there any merit to the popularly passed around opinion that fish-based food will "destroy your cat's kidneys" (their words, not mine)? I feel like this is hyperbolic, but I'm not an expert. I just don't trust the internet's opinion on pet food, they tend to be... zealous.

There are a few reasons this sentiment might be passed around, but if you’re worried it’s worth checking whatever you’re feeding to see just how much fish is actually in a fish flavoured food. It’s generally not as much as you think it is.

Some fish species will have a higher risk of various heavy metal toxicities. Basically if you’d warn a human against eating it while pregnant, it’s worth limiting the amount you feed to the cat.

Fish like tuna are high in phosphorus. Cats with impaired kidneys already have difficulty filtering phosphorus from the blood, so if you feed any high phosphorous diet, you will make their symptoms worse.

Raw fish contains thiaminase, which while not directly related to the kidney, can cause a thiamine deficiency with symptoms including: lack of appetite, neurological symptoms up to and including seizures, cardiac arrhythmias and neck ventroflexion. 

A little bit of fish, or using it to flavour food is probably okay, but a fish exclusive diet is not ideal and will potentially run into these problems.

[pervocracy]

How often do LGBT people have trouble seeing their significant others in the hospital, from your experience?

I’ve never personally seen a situation where that was a problem.  Usually hospital staff are just glad as hell if anyone bothers to visit a patient.

However, my medical experience is in western Washington and eastern Massachusetts, two of the most LGBT-friendly areas in the country.  Things may not be so simple in Wyoming or West Virginia.

Also: I’ve never heard families request to keep out a patient’s lover.  However, I have had them request to keep out an incapacitated or underage patient’s “harasser” or “enabler.”  I’m sure most of the time that was a true description of the situation, and I didn’t have resources to investigate for myself.  But I can see it being a way to separate someone from their partner.

There are some settings, like the ER, ICU, and surgical recovery room, where visitor access is limited to one or two close family members.  Nowhere I’ve worked would say a partner isn’t a close family member, but a homophobic charge nurse could.   And if it’s an unmarried partner and a parent fighting for access, we might have to favor the parent.

Finally, there’s the issue of decision-making.  While an unmarried partner might be able to visit without too much hassle, they would be less likely to be invited to a care plan meeting, and their voice would have no legal authority there.  This is the really awful situation--when the doctor asks “should we do the high-risk surgery?” or “should we keep him on life support?” and the family that never gave a shit about him has decision-making priority over the boyfriend who’s lived with him for the last fifteen years.

(LGBT folks, or anyone with a contentious family, or really everyone: write an advance directive!  You can specify who gets medical decision-making authority, what kind of decisions you want them to make, and even specify who gets authority to make decisions about your funeral.)

-

All of this basically comes down to: in practical terms, if you get a nice friendly hospital staff and there’s nobody crusading to stop you, yeah, people can usually visit their partners in the hospital without an issue.  But those “if”s are big enough to drive a horrible tragedy through.

[gehayi]

I have a question about your sporking. How does a two-person spork work? Do you go over the material in chat form, or do you pass drafts back and forth?

This is the process:

I copy the chapter from a PDF and reformat it for a Word document. I also copy the HTML heading, counts list and HTML ending and paste them into the document.

I then go through the copied chapter and check for certain counts  that are easy to spot  (such as ENGLISH AND WRITING ERRORS), that require  keywords (such as DO I DAZZLE YOU? , where all that are needed are flattering descriptions of Christian Grey), or that I know will take some time (like DID NOT DO THE RESEARCH).

Once I’ve done this, I contact Ket and anyone else that we’re sporking with. We schedule a day that we’ll be available for sporking. This is subject to change without notice, as we (and often our guests) have health issues and other deadlines.

We spork, as a rule, in chat, with me copy-pasting the passages into Gchat or a Hangout and recapping/summing up what’s going on.  If the sporks sound conversational, that’s because that’s they are. (We did try passing a draft back and forth, but we both ran into times that we couldn’t access GDocs, which was a big problem.)

Once we’re done with the chapter, I copy and paste the spork into the chapter. This takes a lot of time, as Gmail doesn’t let you copy an entire chat at once, so you have to copy a certain section and then paste, copy a certain section and then paste, over and over again until you’re done. 

Once the spork has been copied in front of the chapter, I have to reformat it as well, change the font and the size, etc. 

I then look through it to be sure I’ve got all the counts I listed, all the problems that I initially spotted, etc. This involves cutting and pasting the missing bits into the spork and deleting the parts that the spork covered.

I go through the spork again, adding HTML, counts, splitting the spork if necessary to fit LJ size requirements, and so on.

I now have a first draft, which I send to Ket. Ket goes over the spork and tells me what she wants added, subtracted or changed, as well as sending me pictures to add.

I revise the spork according to Ket’s wishes and send the thing off to our beta.

The beta goes over it, makes her own comments (which are usually added in the form of dialogue) and suggests certain pictures and macros.

I make the changes the beta suggested (99% of the time, anyway) .

Then I contact Ket, telling her that she now has a few more speeches, here they are, and what does she think of them? I revise the speeches (or not) according to Ket’s wishes.

Finally, I copy the spork–or, as a rule, the first half of the spork–into my Dreamwidth account and preview it. Dreamwidth uses practically the same code as LJ, but unlike LJ, it doesn’t lock you out of your account when you preview a very long post twice in a row. Dreamwidth doesn’t care how often you preview, and the only thing you have to keep in mind is that LJ won’t have a billion blank lines  between  words and any given YouTube video. (This only shows up in Dreamwidth previews, not in actual posts. I’ve no idea why.)

Sometimes the preview shows that HTML is broken and I have to fix it.  Usually, the preview shows that I don’t have enough pictures in the spork, so I turn to my Picasa and Photobucket accounts and try to find something suitable there. 

Once everything is fixed and the pictures have been added (with Ket’s approval), the only thing left to do is post on LJ which I generally do shortly after midnight on Monday night/Tuesday.morning.

The whole process takes anywhere from three to five weeks. And we’re generally sporking other chapters while this is being done.

Be very, very sure that you want to do a two-person sporking. It is a LOT of hard work.