Friday, August 8, 2008

Just the thought is making me scratch....

I've just robbed my IRA to pay down half of my credit-card debt (most of it dental and veterinary bills, mostly dental). So naturally the other day I noticed that Amie was drooling.

Drooling means teeth.

So I took her to the vet today, and as we were waiting in the exam room I noticed a patch of flaky skin on her shoulders. The vet came in, I explained the drooling, and then pointed out the flaky patch. She looked at it briefly.

"Yep. We're going to do a skin scrape to confirm it, but I guarantee you she has mites."

She must have read the look on my face , because she said, "They aren't contagious to humans."

"What about cats?"

She paused. "yes."

Great.

So she did the skin scrape, let me see the mite under the microscope, and then pointed out that she'd also found a louse egg. (This kind of louse only likes rabbits, she assured me.) She also told me that the mites don't jump like fleas, but their eggs can fall on the floor. I thanked God I have hardwood floors.

Bottom line: I have to put Revolution (a treatment similar to a liquid flea treatment) on all the animals over several weeks, clean the house, wash the rabbit hutch with a bleach solution, and flea spray the house and the wooden parts of the hutch (because bleach isn't activated on wood.)

After trimming Amie's teeth, the vet brought her into the waiting room again. Amie gets very frightened at the vet, and the thing that calms her, oddly, is me holding her front paws and head in my hands up off he table. So there we were, Amie standing at an angle off the table, her head and front paws cupped in my hands, big brown eyes fixed on me, ears flopping on either side of her broad, blunt, soft muzzle. I looked back, then gently leaned forward and put my lips next to her ear.

"Skank," I whispered.

But she's so cute. Who knows, having had skin parasites the whole time may explain some of her behavior. It can't be comfortable.

Back home, everyone swarmed me for supper, and I took advantage of the attention to dose everyone, all the while singing, "So you say you want a Revolution, we-ell you know, we all want to kill the mites."

And although the mites don't like people in particular, the vet confirmed hat they could be the reason for my recent chronic itchiness, particularly on my hands. It's sexy, I tell you.

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