The country life for me

The koi finds a friend

Please, don't tell it that it's its own self; I haven't let on yet.

Koi, like goldfish, are highly sociable creatures and don't like being alone in their own pond in quarantine very much, although this one seems to be starting to get used to the fact and the new rhythm of life, including 30 minute to one hour Nifrupirinol bath treatments in the afternoon. We are staving off the Ziploc bag in the freezer option as long as we can continue to give the antibiotics I can get in the store and the sea-salt regime a chance of working. It isn't eating anymore, aside from the perhaps accidental ingestion of a koi stick the day before yesterday, when I put it in the clear salad bowl of Nifurpirinol solution for the first time, which isn't so great a sign.

Neither were the enlarged blood vessels around its right eye yesterday. They don't look much worse, and possibly a little better today.

Word must be getting out, however, that I am something of an animal recovery and treatment center because the neighbor turned up at the gate with her 3-year-old and her 5-year-old niece in tow earlier than I expected them to come for a swim.

"Ah, on a eu un changement du programme?" I called from where I was peering into the quarantine basin. They were to have taken a postprandial nap before coming for a tea time swim.

"Non, on a trouvé un bébé crapeau dans le bac à sable, et on a pensé l'amener ici."

Why, merci beaucoup!

In short, they found a baby toad cowering in a corner of the sandbox, and they thought they'd bring it to me. Well, as it happens, I have a toad house or two available, with piscine, in the border. I invited them in through the gate, and led the girls, followed by my neighbor, to the very spot, an empty orange juice bottle filled with water for the toad pool in hand. This, I handed to her small daughter, standing next to me in her ruffle-bottom swimsuit, and asked if she would like to fill the toad pool herself before we released the bébé crapeau into it.

She began to show advanced stages of doubt and trepidation, standing there clutching the one liter -- plus 15cl gratuit! -- orange juice bottle against her bare belly, eyebrows drawing together and lowering several centimeters as her lower lip protruded worrisomely, and then quivered. She cast her glance demurely down to the right and refused all further action or offer of assistance.

"Tu veux que je le fais moi?" I asked, certain of failure. She raised her eyes and their brows a millimeter in my direction, and I detected the faintest nod. Oui. "D'accord, je le ferai." I reached for the bottle, which she released, and poured it carefully into the dish. I pointed to the clay flower pots, decorated with stones and sunk into the dirt on their sides below the yew tree. Chez Eugénie G, half-way house to toads not inclined to stick around.

"Ca c'est l'une des maisons. L'autre," I pointed to where the second one was, behind a hosta, "est là." She nodded, her blond hair drawn up into a ponytail leaving wisps of honey colored hair along her brow and round cheeks. Her mother smiled, amused by the seriousness of the event, and handed me the sandbox toys that contained the small toad. I opened them carefully to reveal a bébé crapeau, standing on its hind legs, eager to find la sortie. I lowered it to the dish and it hopped directly into the shallow water and on past it to crouch at the base of the Falstaff rose and clematis ('Niobe'?).

"Tu le vois, Lili?" asked her mother, as the older cousin looked on, silently. She nodded.

"Il y a quelque chose d'autre de l'autre côté," said Lili, her nickname. I peered, trying to understand to which of the many things possible she might most likely be referring. The holly berries, an eye-catching shade of a dusty violet-blue, seemed most likely. She pointed toward them. "Les choses bleues," said Lili. The holly berries. I reached and broke a bunch off.

"Ce sont les fruits du houx," I told her.

"Ca ne se mange pas," added her mother. No, I confirmed, we don't eat them. They would taste very bitter and give us a stomach ache. Of course, I am not sure of that, but it works with preschoolers.

"Ils sont les graines de la plante," I explained, "pour que le houx puisse en faire d'autres houx." The girls nodded together, ready for lycée. "Tu veux les prendre?" I asked the older one, who reached out and took the little bunch of violet-blue fruits. "Ils ne te feront pas de mal si tu ne les manges pas."

I briefly considered a job as a teacher, or a gouvernante for a wealthy family with vast gardens, and exceedingly well-behaved children, interested in nature, literature and foreign languages, art and alpine sports. Perhaps yoga in the shrubbery.

We looked at the frogs in the bassin, and I accompanied them to the gate to go home for their nap so they could come back and enjoy our pool.

Ah, the joys of country village living, such as they are. Second only to the joys of marriage and your child being "admis" by the Académie pour son Bac.

Time to go remove the pool summer cover and vacuum it.
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Dropsy

In a Nifurpirinol treatment
baktopur direct

I was going to give up, and then I went online one more time and googled "Dropsy" and "Hydropisie". I found just enough hope not to go get larger Ziploc bags and prepare myself to euthanize my koi in the freezer.

One site I had not read yet said:

My heart goes out to any koi or goldfish I see that has dropsy. It's such a nasty infection and almost always fatal. It's basically an infection of an internal organ, often the kidney. The fish is no longer able to process its fluids. They build up inside the fish causing the tell-tell [sic] signs of bloat. You could probably wquate the effect it has on the fish to the effect kidney failure has on us.

There's very little we can do to help a fish in the advanced stages of dropsy. We can, however, do things to help prevent it [great] and treat the fish we suspect could have early stages of it.

Well, that cheered me right up. About as effective as thinking of the bac results being available tomorrow. I read on, listlessly.

What makes dropsy so hard to diagnose in time to treat it is that the symptoms that we know as dropsy do not come out until the fish has entered the final stages of the disease. The fish literally blows up like a balloon. Its scales stick out, making the fish resemble a pinecone [sic]. In fact, dropsy is often called Pinecone [sic] Disease because of it. The eyes will bulge out from the trapped fluids beneath.

Dropsy is also often accompanied by external bacterial infections including fin rot, mouth rot and ulcers. In some cases I've seen almost any and all symptoms. It's really a sad sight to see.

There was a picture of a dead koi, lying on its side, a sort of medical tool lifting one of its raised scales.

My eyes continued scanning the page.

What was the point? My koi might not have ulcers or enlarged blood vessels, but it definitely has raised scales, even if it doesn't look like a cartoon of a koi that has breathed in the air from a balloon it was blowing up.

I have a bad habit of giving up when I hear the symptoms of dropsy described to me by a customer [Hunh? He had my attention]. I will always say that there's really nothing they can do for it [Oh] -- just to make it comfortable and let it live out its short life in a stress-free environment [well, that's not the Ziploc bag in the freezer, anyway]. I was happily reminded [Hunh? What's that?] just this spring that every now and then a fish actually survives dropsy -- even after it has swollen up from it [Smile!].

And ours isn't that swollen. Yet.

The treatment regimen [All eyes here] that worked on the lucky koi who survived this year was feeding it triple antibiotic food and keeping him in .3% non-iodized salt. This was such a no-nonsense approach and so basically simple! The triple antibiotic food kept the internal infection at bay while the salt prevented water from seeping into the sores or skin of the koi and keeping his protective slime coat intact.

That leads me to believe that there is hope for a koi or goldfish who has dropsy as long as the fish is still eating [Oh].

I hopped in the car and headed to Truffaut. The young woman has helped me before, and she told me the bacterial tablets I had picked up wouldn't work, even though I had read the notice, and it did mention the symptoms of dropsy and treatment, and showed me to shelves with the big bags of non-idodized sea salt. I put the tablets back and went to the cash register, feeling a little regretful.

I drove over to Jardin de France and looked for and found the tablets, picked out a pair of natural rubber garden clogs, some sock things that prevent human fungal infections or keep your feet warm in cold-weather gardening, looked at expensive cat litter boxes, tried on a few more straw hats, exercised some self-control and left them in the store and went to pay.

I drove home, hitting a bird of some type that was sitting on the road. I backed up, trying not to do the same to two kids on bikes, whose grandfather and younger sibling were watching from father up the road, and got out of the car. The wings flapped, the dog in the garden on the other side of the link fence came charging up, barking, and the grandfather looked at me -- oddly. I smiled -- forcedly. The bird folded its wings. Everyone peddled on by, the dog kept going crazy, and I started to reach down, uncertain what exactly to do, when it spread its wings and lifted at an unnatural angle into the sky, trailing a broken rear leg behind it, and disappeared into the branches of a tree across the street. I returned to my car and drove the last two kilometers, trying to not damage anything else.

The koi has had a 30 minute bath in the dissolved Nifurpirinol (antibiotic that is easily absorbed through the skin) "baktopur direct" tablet, over which Baccarat and I presided, and which it seemed not to dislike, and returned it to 60 liters of basin water with 280 grams of dissolved sea salt and two élodée (or elodea) plants for oxygen and company, and sat back on my heels with Baccarat to watch it.

It swam around more than it did in the malachite green solution.

It is not particularly interested in eating, although it did eat one koi stick at the beginning of its Nifupirinol treatment, but it has been moved about so much.

I have emailed a company in the US to see if they will mail their antibiotic food, not available in the UK and France, which has been said to have some success with dropsy, here.

Dare I call the vet to see about antibiotics?
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Update May 28, 2012: Over time, many people have read this page, and I thought it might be a good idea to add that as of this date, this carp koi is healthy, growing and in all ways thriving. I went back to the garden store to tell the young man who suggested I put it in a plastic bag in the freeze to end its life gently that my treatment worked, and he was on third interested, one third probably trying to remember who I was (despite my accent), and one third-distracted.

Quarantine

The sick bay

"Vous n'avez que de vous en débarrasser," said the young man in the fish department chez Truffaut after looking at the terrible photo of our sick Koï I had brought, along with the sample of water from the "bassin". The Canon printer had been telling me for some 3 months that it was out of ink. Now it is, but the salmon red lines across the photo weren't enough to obscure the raised scales toward the tail.

"L'eau est nickel," said the young woman to whom I had initially addressed my inquiry. "C'est quoi alors?"

"Une hydropisie," said the young man. Dropsy. A non-existent but fatal illness that describes a goldfish or koï with the body swollen, the eyes bulging and the scales raised all over the body, which also leads to it being called by its more proper name in English, Pinecone disease. The symptoms indicate a generalized internal infection and there's nothing to be done for the fish.

Only, the sites don't tell you what to do with the fish so racked with illness. This young man was much more specific: get rid of it.

"Mais! Comment?" I asked, off-balance. I meant how do I get rid of it. I am not good at killing things. Just look at some of the recent pages of this journal. Specifically, everything concerning birds. There is a tag for your convenience. And the shubunkin last June. Images of me trying to put it into the toilet and flush ran through my mind. I couldn't even one of any sort of crushing or stabbing.

"Mettez-le dans un sac en plastique au congelateur." I considered that a half instant. Put him in a plastic bag in the freezer. I understood. It was kind, all but the putting him (or her) in the plastic bag part. I nodded.

"Il s'en dormira. Je comprends, mais ça serait très difficile de le mettre en sac. Il se débattrait," I said. This time he nodded, and I continued to fill in the thoughts, "Il n'a pas de tout l'aire malade; il n'y a aucun changement de comportement, il mange bien, il est fort." In other words, he'd fight going into the plastic bag, and I didn't know how on earth I could force an otherwise strong fish with a healthy appetite into a bag and put it in the freezer. I had been online, and I had seen the information on Dropsy on the koï sites, but he didn't look like that. He only had one or two areas of raised scales, near the tail. And his belly and eyes were definitely not bulging like in the pictures. In short, I didn't believe it, but I hadn't read enough.

He nodded again and led me over to some shelves stocked with various antibacterial products, suggesting that I could try the one he eventually picked out for me.

When I got back, I did some more checking, and I found that there is a distinction between all over raised scales and areas of raised scales. In the second case, it is due to a bacterial infection, like the parasite Costia (scroll just under hydropisie, or check out an English language koï site for Dropsy and Costia), and can be treated with salt baths and/or antibacterial - antibiotic treatments.

Frankly, I can't imagine our vet injecting our koï with antibiotics.

So, I did as instructed. I cleaned out the black plastic basin I bought for the frogs last year, when we repaired the basin, and I put in 80 liters of water from the "bassin" and 80 liters of fresh water, added a plant and a rock and the appropriate amount of malachite green and then the koï.

He was not happy. I did not blame him. He blamed me. He might be a she.

Then I went and read some more while the hose refilled the "bassin", which I emptied by a bit more than the mere 80 liters. I found the references for salt baths and prepared a 3% salt bath in a galvanized pail, retrieved the koï, who might just never forgive me, if he or she survives whatever is ailing him or her, and put it in there, covering it with a largish water lily pot (they are like sieves) and sat, holding the inverted pot over the pail so he couldn't knock it off and perish in the sparse grass under the linden tree, for the 30 minutes suggested for the treatment, which it seemed to take rather well. Bath over, I returned it to the malachite green water in the black plastic basin, where he has been pouting ever since.

I can't say the scales look much better, but it can have some additional salt treatments, and the malachite green treatment is a four-day affair, followed by a second treatment if necessary. If that fails, I can consult the vet for antibiotics.

Or get a plastic bag.
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