Tonight is the full moon. Give your monthly preventatives!
Note: If you have another way to remember to give your preventatives, that’s okay too! Do what works for you. I thought it might be fun for us to all give it together.
My New Year’s Resolutions:
- Live into the World I Want to See.
- Hold myself more loosely.
- Move at the speed of Love.
What are your New Year’s Resolutions? I would love to hear them!
This month I am having trouble knowing what to write and what to share! I miss Dr Mack. She will let us know soon when she will be returning. She welcomed her first grandson the day after Christmas!
I spayed two dogs and a cat today, and I am waiting for the owners of my last spay to arrive. Can I brag and say we do a great job with surgery? I premedicate pets so they have pain medication and anti anxiety medication and anti nausea medication on board the night BEFORE surgery. We use a long acting (3 day) local anesthetic around the surgical incision site. I leave pets with their people through the premedication and often through the anesthetic induction process. We try to have just one pet here for surgery at a time and we focus on that pet. It makes the pets less stressed. They don’t even know that their people left and by the time they wake up completely we have everyone reunited. Less stress for me, pets, and their owners. Hooray!
I got that far with my newsletter and it is the next morning. It is always hard for me to decide how much of myself to share. And then I am surprised when someone says, “I already know, I read it in the newsletter.”
For “hot pet tips” this month, let’s talk about taking a resting respiratory rate (RRR). I think a RRR is really useful (along with monitoring weight and water intake and output). But this month let’s focus on RRR. Below is a link to a video from my undergraduate alma mater, Virginia Tech. (Go Hokies!) In this video, a canine cardiology technician takes the resting respiratory rate for her own dog.
How to measure your dog’s breathing rate.
She counts 10 breaths in 30 seconds and multiplies by 2 to get 20 breaths per minute. Normal is less than 40 breaths per minute. RRR is something we use to monitor our cardiac patients, both dogs and cats, particularly those that are receiving cardiac medications, but I think it is useful to know your pet’s normal. To that end, maybe you can take a RRR once per month around the time the monthly preventatives are given. Then you know normals for your pet. Any significant increase from normal, or if the value is creeping up to or over 40, means you need a trip to come see me and check things out! Increased respirations can be the first sign of a problem, and it can be subtle, particularly in cats.
I have a crazy topic from my personal life for this month: apples! My son eats LOTS of them, but only if they are fresh, crispy, and perfect. I have a pile of less than perfect apples that I plan to peel and bake this weekend. It always amazes me that the wrinkly apples can sit there for weeks on the counter and then… a little cinnamon, sugar and lemon juice… and we are fighting over them once they are out of the oven. My grandma from LaGrange, Georgia had an apple tree and she would dry apples and store them over the winter. One of the very happy memories of my childhood are “fried pies.” They were biscuit dough rolled thin, filled with reconstituted dried apples, and pinched closed into a half moon shape and fried in a frying pan. I remember showing up in the middle of the night at her house, or houses of relatives throughout the deep south, and having them make and serve ”fried pies” in the middle of the night! One of my treasures is a recipe for apple cake that my grandma wrote down for me. I’ve never made the cake, but I never want to lose the recipe. It makes me think of her everytime I see it. The New York Times recently had a recipe for “apple hand pies” which are NOT fried pies but as I followed the comments there were links to what I hope are my grandmother’s fried pies. I will admit to paying too much (not something my Grandma would have EVER done) for 5 pounds of dried apples that I plan to reconstitute to make “fried pies.” I’m hoping to do it this weekend, but dried apples will wait, my wrinkly ones I need to deal with first. Maybe I’ll use those apples to try my hand at Grandma’s fresh apple cake.
Hope you are cooking and traveling down memory lane in this cold January weather.
A picture of my grandmother’s Fresh Apple Cake Recipe is below.
Stay warm.
Give your monthly preventatives!
Enjoy the Full Moon!