Fishing in a Foul Pond

 

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For more than twenty years, I was a cub scout leader.  I started volunteering for a cub scout pack when we lived in Houston and continued being a Webelos leader when we moved to where we currently live in Louisiana.  It is interesting to run into my former scouts in town and see how they've grown up and see what they've done with their lives.  

Each week we'd meet and work through their books, learning skills and earning badges to commemorate their achievements.  So many fun activities and learning skills that stay with you throughout life like citizenship, scientist, forestry, fitness, cooking, camping, hiking and outdoor achievements.  We'd build our derby cars and race them in the Pinewood Derby.  Same thing with our sailboats that we would race in the Raingutter Regatta.  The Fire-building Race was always fun.  It involved stretching a nylon string across two sticks.  Each team would race to build a fire.  The first team to burn through the string would win.

One of the highlights of the year was summer camp.  Our camp was called Camp Edgewood in Gillis, Louisiana.  What fun we'd have at that camp!  Archery, B-b gun shooting, canoeing, fishing, swimming, hiking.  Running obstacle courses, building and firing off rockets, orienteering.  It was so much fun for the boys!  There was a campfire where boys would put together skits and sing songs.  We'd go back to our campsite and cook over a campfire.  Food somehow tastes better cooked over a campfire.

I passed in front of the camp the other day and saw the Camp Edgewood sign.  I began to reminisce about all of the good times and memories made when my boys were young and we'd venture out to the camp.  There were even "Mom & Me" camps that involved Tricia camping with the boys.  I smiled as I thought of the things my guys learned and joy we all experienced at camp many years ago.

Then I remembered a memory that wasn't so joyous and happy - for me, anyway.  On this particular night, Benjamin and I were camping.  He had won 1st place overall in the bb gun competition that day.  The pride on his face made my heart happy.  We attended the campfire and sang loudly.  I remember they lit the fire in creative fashion that night by sending burning embers in a bucket down a long rope on a pulley.  It struck the base of the campfire and erupted in flame and the boys went wild!

Over the course of the night I developed a headache.  It was a really bad one.  I strained so hard to get better, but late in the night, Benjamin and I packed up our belongings and headed for the parking lot.  I had to get home and get some medication.  These headaches I would get would be debilitating.  My eyes hurt.  Lights and sounds would aggravate the issue.

A little context for this story is needed before finishing: When I was in college doing stupid things, I fell off of a friend's shoulders on an asphalt road, splitting my upper lip wide open.  It required a trip to the ER for many stitches to try to put my face back together.  Unbeknownst to me, it damaged my front tooth.  In later years, my front tooth had root damage from those college shenanigans and had to be pulled.  So that I wouldn't look odder than I already look, I wore a retainer that had a tooth in the front that closed up the gap left by the missing tooth.  I could pop the retainer in and out to clean it.  You'd never know I was missing a tooth.

Back to the story.  Many times the headaches would get so bad, they would make me nauseous.  I would throw up uncontrollably due to the pain.  On this particular evening, walking back to the Explorer, apologizing to Benjamin for ruining the campout with my headache, I began feeling like I was getting sick.  Fortunately, (or unfortunately) there was a bathroom right near the parking lot.  I could see the lights from the latrine beckoning me like the sirens from Homer's Odyssey.  I should've just thrown up by a pine tree, but hindsight is 20/20.

I rushed into the bathroom, ran into the first stall and violently vomited, emptying the contents of my stomach into the toilet with such force and so quickly that I didn't see the toilet.  This toilet was vile.  Someone prior to my visit had diarrhea.  The toilet was plugged.  In addition to the contents of my stomach, the toilet was also filled with someone's foul, fetid, feces.  I was gagging.  My head was spinning.  My nostrils were filled with malodorous mayhem.

I exited the bathroom, stumbling outside gasping for fresh air.  Once I had somewhat gathered my wits, Benjamin and I resumed our trek to the Explorer in the parking lot.  And it was then that I had a cruel realization - my retainer with the front tooth on it was gone!  I rubbed my tongue in the toothless gap in my top teeth.  Apparently, the force of my projectile vomiting had dislodged the retainer and it had gone into the toilet with the rest of my campfire supper.

What to do?  The retainer was the only thing that kept me from looking like a toothless hobo.  I would be embarrassed to go to work or to church missing one of my front teeth!  I did the only thing I could do.  I mustered my strength and forged ahead, reentering the bathroom that smelled of rotting roadkill and death.  The good news, if one could call it that, is that the toilet was stopped up.  My retainer was somewhere in that slurry of sewerage.  My objective was to fish it out.  This was not a job for the faint at heart, and I'll spare you the details of my fishing expedition.  In the end, I was successful!  I found the retainer, raised it in my hand in victory and popped it right back into my mouth.

I did no such thing!  We drove home in silence, horrified at the night's turn of events.  I seem to have blocked most of that night out of my memory.  I don't remember exactly what we did with the retainer, but I did use it again after sterilizing it by boiling it for a long long time, if memory serves.   Speaking of memories, scouting with my boys fills my head with so many great memories.  That evening was one memory I'd like to forget!

Annnnddddd... We're Back!

Our Maker's Acres Family Farm has continued to operate (slowly), but Tricia and I have been on hiatus for over a week now.  A year and a half into this pandemic, we both tested positive for Covid-19, possibly the Delta Variant, although they're not really sure.  We both signed up for a free drive through test at our local Walgreens.  We drove up, got the test, shoved the stick deep into our nose and wiggled it until our eyes watered and gave it back.  In thirty minutes we checked our email account and got the results:

We both had different symptoms.  I had a splitting headache, but no fever or difficulty breathing - a feeling of light-headedness.  I just wanted to sleep all day - for days.  Tricia had a headache, fever, body aches and some shortness of breath.  

Now, I'll show you what we did.  As soon as symptoms showed up, we acted quickly.  We used the protocol by FLCCC Alliance (Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care):

• Ivermectin (0.4 mg/kg one dose daily)
• Vitamin D3 (4,000 IU/day)
• Vitamin C (1,000 mg twice a day
• Quercetin (250 mg twice a day)
• Zinc (100 mg/day)
• Aspirin (325 mg/day)

My preparedness-minded wife had stocked up on the Ivermectin from our local feed store.  You measure out the dosage into a spoon and choke the paste down - like a horse.  It doesn't taste good, but it doesn't taste bad either - just kind of strange.

Over 5-6 days of dosages, we went through a lot of it.  I tell people I have a craving for alfalfa and a desire to gallop around the house and winnie.  I assume those side effects will pass in time.

We feel like the protocol kept this thing at bay.  The other thing we did was the use of Nebulized Hydrogen Peroxide Tricia learned from Dr. Mercola.  We purchased a nebulizer and administered a solution of 0.1% hydrogen peroxide for 10-15 minutes hourly, breathing it deeply into our lungs through the nose.

We monitored our temperature, heart rate, and most importantly pulse ox to ensure we weren't getting into trouble.

There was a day (Day 6 for me and Day 8 for Tricia) we went to the local hospital out-patient room for an infusion (Regeneron).  I woke up with pleurisy and didn't want things to progress.  The doctor felt the infusion would bind the virus replication and not allow things to get any worse.  Tricia did the same thing two days later.

We will be on Day 10 of this thing tomorrow and feel mostly recovered.  Glad to have this behind us and blessed to have antibodies and T-cells that will give us immunity from Covid-19.

An Update on Luna

Luna, our youngest Jersey just lost her baby calf last week.  Its head was positioned in a way that made it impossible for Luna to go into labor and deliver.  Our veterinarian made a farm call and pulled the calf.  Luna was in bad shape too - just utterly exhausted.  Dr. Fontenot didn't think she was going to make it, but so far she had defied the odds.

She is eating each day, but is moving real slow.  She's also lost a lot of weight.  Last night we smelled a foul odor and we think she has an infection inside of her.  We took her temperature and it was 103.5.  101 for a cow is normal.  So the fever confirmed our suspicions that Luna has an infection.  The discharge on her tail is also evidence of this.  I would assume this is normal.  The dead calf, the invasive pulling of the calf, bacteria getting inside of her...  All of this could cause her to get sick. 

Tricia went to the vet today and got 5 syringes of antibiotic that we are to give Luna subcutaneously for the next 5 days.  Tricia also did some internet research and came up with an idea to try to help Luna out.  if successful, this procedure should help clean some of the infection out.  Tricia purchased an enema bag and mixed 1 teaspoon of salt for every liter of warm water and mixed it in the bag.  She took petroleum jelly and lubricated the end of the tubing.

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

Then for the uncomfortable part, she inserted the tube into Luna's vagina.  I know this is not pleasant talk, but we're trying to save poor little Luna.  I'll admit I cringed a little watching this.

Then by holding the bag over Luna (at about eye-level), you let gravity do its thing.  Pretty soon, all the contents of the bag are emptied into Luna.

After just a little while, a thick, blood tinged discharge began pouring out.  It did not look pretty.  It did not smell nice.  We'll repeat the syringe of antibiotic tomorrow evening and will repeat the vaginal enema and check Luna's temperature again.  Hopefully, we'll have a good progress report to give you in a few days.

Clarabelle's Feeling "Under the Weather"

After the livestock shows, we were ready for things to settle down to normal around our little farm.  The rains came and never stopped falling, however.  The cows were all mired in knee-deep mud and were just miserable.  Then, all of a sudden, Clarabelle got sick.  She just began looking very lethargic and week.

Tricia called me at work one day to tell me that Clarabelle had fallen down in the milking stall and Tricia was unable to get her to stand back up.  Tricia got a saw and screwdriver and took the stall apart and was finally able to get her back on her feet. 

Sickly & Weak

Then she stopped eating her dairy ration.  She lost her appetite and the only thing we were able to get her to eat was alfalfa mulch and hay.  Clarabelle began rapidly losing weight.  You could count her bones.  Dairy animals are bony anyway, but this was alarming.  We were worried about ol' girl.

On Friday, Russ was off work, so he and Tricia loaded Clarabelle into the trailer and brought her to our veterinarian.  He's located about a mile away, so it is very convenient.  Our veterinarian put on rubber gloves and got a fecal sample.  Then he put it in a solution and waited for "things" to rise to the top.  He then looked at it under a microscope.  He diagnosed her with a high load of parasites.  Worms.

Worms are easily treated, but there are some medicines that cannot be administered to dairy animals or there is a long period during which you cannot drink the milk.  Due to Clarabelle's condition, he advised us to "dry her off" (stop milking her) and wean her calf, Astro.  During her sickness, her milk production had dropped to almost nothing anyway.  The vet gave us meds to give her that hopefully will help.

35 cc's by mouth should do the trick.  We administered it by using a syringe without the needle.  We held her head, stuck the syringe in the side of her mouth, and slowly pushed it down her throat, ensuring that none leaked out of the side of her mouth.

All we could do at this point was wait.  Tick, Tock...  I put up the temporary electric fence in the yard and she picked around at the winter grass.  Amazingly, she wouldn't touch the white dutch clover.  Pretty soon, she was ready to go back with the other cows.  Things weren't looking good.

Yesterday, I began to wonder if perhaps she had a virus and was running a fever.  I got the rectal thermometer we keep in the barn and lubricated it with Vaseline and then took her temperature.  It registered 100.5 at its highest.  A cow's normal rectal temperature is 101.5.  So no fever.  Perhaps we just need to be patient and let the meds work.

At last night's feeding, Clarabelle began eating.  Not a huge amount and not fast, but it was progress.  We fed her as much as she'd eat.  This morning, she didn't eat as voraciously, but she still ate.  This afternoon, she ate a little better.

Get Well, Clarabelle!

I think she's turned the corner.  Hopefully, she'll continue to get better and make a full recovery.  She has a lot of weight to gain back, but we'll keep working with her.  Get Well, Clarabelle!

Why We Were Silent Last Week (Part III)

So this is the third and final installment in this series.  If you haven't joined us for the last two postings, CLICK HERE for Part I and CLICK RIGHT HERE for Part II.

Let's end this series by talking about what we learned.  Life is a big learning opportunity and our experiences can be a classroom, if we listen to the instructor and learn.  There are certainly exams in life and I want to pass the exams instead of fail them.

Here's what I learned:

1. God is God and I am not.  He is in control and He is So Good and Faithful.  He helps us to walk through difficult times and is there to carry us when we can't muster the strength to walk.  I realize that it is easy to say this now, but even if this had not turned out like it did, God would have seen us through this and would have given us what we need to survive.

2. Family and Friends are more important than silver or gold.  During this ordeal our family and our friends mobilized on our behalf, sending cards, money, flowers, texts, emails, feeding our animals, making meals for us, coming to visit us in the ICU waiting room even when we couldn't see them.  They cried with us, they shared our burden, they were there for us during the storm.  When the storm passed, they praised God with us.

3. There is Power in Prayer. This dovetails with #2.  Our family and friends are prayer warriors.  When Tricia needed it the most, people prayed.  These precious saints called other people to pray.  People across the nation and (thanks to the Internet) across the world prayed.

4. Miracles still occur.  I am a big skeptic.  Things like this  always happen to 'other people.'  This time it happened to me.  Right before my eyes.  The doctors still don't know what caused this.  They sent her home on no medicine.  I think they realize that perhaps all the medicine they threw at her didn't heal her.  God is still in the miracle business.

5. I love my wife even more than I thought I did.  We have been married for 26 years,  8 months, and 28 days, or looked at another way, for 9,768 days.  The thought of losing her shook me, scared me, and made me realize that I love her much more than I even thought I did and I already knew I loved this woman.

6. Cherish life - take nothing for granted - say what needs to be said. Things happen fast.  It seemed that things went from bad to worse and before I knew it, Tricia was on a ventilator, sedated and unresponsive, unable to communicate.  I realized that I didn't have time to communicate things that I wanted to say in the time that I needed to say them. Don't let that ever catch you by surprise.

7. Plan - and communicate your plans.  We are planning people.  Every Sunday after lunch, we have a family tradition we've been doing for years in which we put coffee on, get out some good chocolate and our whole family sits in the "parlor" with a calendar and goes over everything that is going on in the upcoming week.  I realized that we haven't exactly planned appropriately.  Although this is morbid talk, I didn't know where Tricia wants to be buried, what songs she wants sung at her funeral, where the passwords are to all the accounts and websites.

8. It is So important to be a member of a loving church.  We sing a song at church that says, "I'm so glad, I'm a part of the Family of God..."  Our little country church is small in number, but big on love and giving and praying.

9. Pass On the Love.  2 Corinthians 1:4 says, "who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."  We  aspire to be to others as those people were to us during our time of need.

I was going to end this list with 10, but I began thinking about #9 more and I think I ought to stop there.  Besides, in Scripture, the number 9 is the number of finality.  I think that is a good way to end this three part series - with finality.  We'll be back tomorrow with a new topic.

Why We Were Silent Last Week (Part II)

Yesterday I gave the first installment of a series explaining our absence from "the Blogosphere" last week.  Today is Part II, but you can Click Here to read the first installment of the series.

In the photo below, my wife's face is blue.  Although she was definitely feeling blue, she told me that she wanted absolutely no hospital photos in the blog.  I cheated a bit by coloring in her face.  I hope she doesn't mind.

So to pick up where we left off yesterday...  As the hours passed in the ICU, and despite numerous antibiotics and antifungals, Tricia's condition wasn't improving. They put in a PICC line to give her meds.  One of our ICU nurses told us she had never seen someone pumped with so many antibiotics.  They even pulled out the "big gun," amphotericin, an antibiotic nicknamed ampho-terrible because of its side effects. Her lung xrays were getting worse and they scheduled a bronchial lavage in which they went into her lungs with a scope and took a fluid sample to send for testing.  What was causing this infection?

Numerous tests were run on her blood.  Every test (to this date) has come back negative. They tested all bacteria that she could have picked up from cows, goats, chickens.  They tested for leukemia, autoimmune disease, and rare infections that the infectious disease unit brainstormed.  Due to all the fluids pushed on her, Tricia began to swell.

Over night, she became very restless.  She was struggling to breathe and it was making her heart rate increase, and her pulse oximeter decrease.  Her blood pressure began to fall and they started giving her albumin.  Finally, in the morning, they asked me to leave the room and they intubated her.  They put her on a ventilator so that her breathing wasn't labored.  The machine was doing the breathing for her.  They put in a feeding tube to give her nutrition.

Although she could no longer talk, she would motion for a pen and would communicate to me on a napkin.  We like to pray the Psalms, so she requested the following and I read them to her:

The doctors kept coming in and out of the room and I could see the concern on their faces. The doctor told me, "I hate fighting an enemy that I don't know."  Things were not going well and for the first time, I began to think about things that I didn't want to address.  Our daughter was on a mission trip in South Africa and that was a full 2 day flight to get back home.  Finally, I walked out of the room and asked the nurse to shoot straight with me.  "Do I need to call my daughter back home?"  She paused and said, "You are asking me a hard question.  Right at this moment, I would say that it is not a life or death situation, but a lot can change in two days.  I can't predict where we might be in 2 days."  I called my daughter and she arranged to come home as quickly as possible.  Things looked bleak.

The ICU waiting room was full of family, friends, and church members all praying. I went to the waiting room and we all knelt, held hands and prayed.  Prayer Warrior friends were fervently lifting Tricia up to our LORD.

Late that night I would hold her hand and pray with her and tell her I loved her.  I read Psalm 27 to her.  The last verse in that Psalm, verse 14 says,

Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.

I told her, "That's what we're going to do.  We are going to wait on Him."  The next morning the team of doctors met with us and looked at a curious rash on her stomach and thighs.  They took pictures of the rash.  In hopes of providing clues, they asked the ICU nurse to give her a shot of morphine and they would be back in a couple of hours to take a biopsy.  They showed back up, lifted Tricia's gown... And the rash was gone!

They looked all over and the rash that was there was all gone.  The doctors were dumbfounded!  He looked at me and said, "Someone in this room is going to have to pay for this biopsy tray, because I already opened it!"  Tricia's breathing was a little better and they were able to move her ventilator to 40%.  The doctor said, "Girl, you are getting better. It is going to take a while, but you are going to get better!"  Tricia smiled with her eyes that were filled with tears - tears of joy and relief this time.

The doctors left the room saying, "I don't know what just happened there."  I looked at her and said, "I do. God just happened!"  We prayed, thanking Him for His Goodness.  I said, "Tricia, you are going to make it.  We're going to be able to walk around the yard and smell the magnolia blossoms again.  We're going to be able to have coffee in the rocking chairs on the front porch again!"  She motioned for the pen and wrote the following:

Tricia loves fresh-squeezed tangerine juice from our fruit trees!  I was getting my wife back!  The change in one day was unimaginable!  In a couple days, she was released from the ICU and a couple days later, she was discharged from the hospital.  She still has a fever (on Wednesday, it will mark 3 weeks straight that she has had a fever every day) and has lost a lot of weight and is very weak, but she is getting better every day and I know she will recover.  The doctors still don't know what caused this.  There are lots of mysteries about this illness, but there is one thing I do know.  Our God is an awesome God.  God is our Healer and I KNOW he answers prayers and is still in the miracle business.  I witnessed it with my own eyes.

Why We Were Silent Last Week... (Part I)

I want to tell a story to testify as to God's Goodness to us.  I'll likely get to that in Part II tomorrow.  It all started two Wednesdays ago when my bride had a fever and felt miserable.  Tricia is not one to take medicine.  She always feels like the body can heal itself and that fever is a mechanism that the body uses to fight infection.  The problem that we ran into was that her fever persisted Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  On Sunday afternoon, I took my wife to our local ER where they ran tests.  The tests all came out negative and they informed us that it was likely a virus and it should be at the tail end of the illness.

Well, by Wednesday, things weren't better.  Still running fever.  Still feeling lousy. She went to our local doctor Wednesday at noon and he promptly admitted her to the local hospital.  Many tests were run.  One thing that was concerning was a rash, coupled with high fever, coupled with some odd cells being produced by Tricia's bone marrow.  Our doctor ran a test to check for leukemia.

On Friday at noon, the fever was still there and suddenly, she was having difficulty breathing and a chest x-ray showed a build-up of inflammation in here lungs.  Our doctor told us that this new development necessitated the transport of Tricia to the ICU of a hospital in Lake Charles within the hour since the hospital had a pulmonologist and an infectious disease department. 

We got settled in at the ICU and the doctors interviewed Tricia and I, trying to get down to the bottom of the fever.  They ran test after test.   They began treating Tricia with IVs of a number of different antibiotics; however, the fever never went away and actually things began to worsen.  I began getting "the look" from doctors & nurses that my wife was a "very sick lady."

Tomorrow I'll pick back up where I left off today.  By the way, the story gets better.  Tune in tomorrow.

Pasty Butt

We've experienced a little problem with our chicks.  Last week we had 60 meat birds shipped to us. The day old birds arrived all healthy with only one dead.  Then sickness swept through the fledgling flock of feathered fowl.  We began losing chicks.  Darn it!  Tricia did some research and diagnosed the problem - Pasty Butt.

That doesn't sound nice.  What happens is that the chicks get diarrhea and the poop gets caught in the down that is around their butts.  That poop clogs up their vent (butt), and causes a blockage and they die.  Who knew?  Chickens get constipation that is fatal.  So what are the causes?  Well, it can be caused by stress, by the chicks getting too cold when shipped through the mail, or with the chicks getting too warm under the heat lamps in the brooder.  Or it can be caused by viral/bacterial infections.  The latter, we think, is the culprit.  The chicks are comfortable in the brooder.  If they were too cold, they would be piled up in a bunch to try to stay warm.  If they were too hot, they would be away from the lamp.  The chicks are evenly dispersed and seem to be happy with the temperature.

Pasty Butt

So what can you do to combat pasty butt?  Well, you can wipe their "business end" with a Q-tip moistened with water/oil.  That will unplug things.  You can hold their bottom under running warm water and then blow dry them.

To combat the infection by helping their immune system, you can mix a little apple cider vinegar in their drinking water.  The recipe Tricia found online calls for 1 Tablespoon per gallon.  Our waterers are much smaller, so Tricia used 1/2 teaspoon in our quart sized waterer.  Is there anything Apple Cider Vinegar can't do?

Apple Cider Vinegar - a cure for pasty butt 

To help with the diarrhea, you can feed the chicks ground raw oatmeal with a little grit.  We used sand.  We began this regimen yesterday and today was the first day we didn't lose a chick.  Hopefully Tricia has put an end to the epidemic of Pasty Butt Syndrome that was running rampant in the brooder.

Get well soon, pasty butts

We will continue to keep a close eye on the chicks as we don't want to lose any more birds.  Cleaning birds' bottoms who are afflicted with Pasty Butt is not something that I look forward to.  But I'll check them out tomorrow and, if necessary, I'll do what it takes to save them.