Wednesday 2 May 2007

Vets in France

Today has been a bit crap. We had to take Borg to the vets. He seemed to be panting a bit yesterday and what we had thought was a growing spare tyre increased in size dramatically. It was out with the dictionary first thing this morning to look up breathing difficulties, swollen stomach, appointment, today, as soon as possible, and so we got our first experience of French vets (who to our relief spoke excellent english). They kept him in for tests and it seems his heart is enlarged and he is retaining fluid. We have been calling him a lazy fat git and the poor old love has got a dicky ticker. Que guilt trip.

So we have had an anxious day where basically all we have done is driven him up there come back and poked around and stuff then driven back to pick him up all the while expecting the worse. Even when we saw the vet tonight and he showed us the ultrasound and the fluid he had drawn off I was thinking "Yes this is leading up to the nothing can be done speech". But we have some tablets for the fluid and some for his heart so we'll keep our fingers crossed that he starts slapping the dogs around again soon. By the way all the above, consultation, ultrasound, drugs came in at 79 euros much cheaper I think than our old vets in the UK.

The chooks have excelled themselves by delivering four eggs today except that they've taken to sleeping in the nest box and laying their eggs on the floor in the middle of their house. We've given half a dozen to Madame next door to store up some goodwill for when they decide to raid her veg plot.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Hmm- steroid tablets, I'm thinking. Or maybe diuretics. My first ever cat (Treefrog) got a fairly common feline auto-immune condition causing gradual fall-off of his kidney function, causing lots of fluid to build up. The vet gave him shots and I gave him a daily tablet (which he came to actually look forward to, the love), and he lived for another two years before his quality of life dropped off sharply. I have no regrets about his treatment (apart from mocking the roll of what we thought was flab for so long).

Chickens like to perch as high as possible, and nest where it's as dark as possible. You might need to do something to make the nest box darker, and possibly remove it at night for a few days until they get the idea. Dummy eggs (or a blown one filled with plaster of paris) can help too.

Breezy said...

He's a lot happier today and the diuretics have reduced the fluid so he is breathing much easier.

We've raised up the girls perch a bit and put a stone egg in the nest box. We got three in the nest box and one on the floor today.

Anonymous said...

Great blog.

I tried my hand at being self-sufficient some years ago. I wasn't very diligent and liked milkshakes to much to live off the land.

Hope the pooch gets better.

Anji said...

Glad to read you're still enjoying yourselves, though it sounds hard work. Scientific papers are always published in English so you'll find doctors, vets etc usually have a reasonable level of English.

Breezy said...

Hi Stevo we all have our weaknesses I guess some days it would be great to phone for a takeaway

Anji That makes sense. Yes we still love it here even though the list of jobs never seems to go down

tea and cake said...

Glad to hear/read Borg is doing ok (poor, fat thing!)

Our girls are a-laying on the floor, as well! We'll taken hedgewizards advice, too!

sorry about all the !!!'s

Breezy said...

Kaz don't worry about the !!s I don't. Borg's still pretty ropey but enjoying the chicken we have to disguise his tablets in. Of course we shut the shutters first so as not to upset our girls!

Anonymous said...

Caught your blog on a BlogMad surf, and just wanted to share that my cat did the same -- got fat, got made fun of, then we found out he had congestive heart failure. Try not to beat yourself up over it.

Breezy said...

Thanks Avery we do feel guilty in that if we had not been so busy getting on with things we might of twigged earlier.