Well, we maneuvered her onto a tea towel for a sling and gently took her over to the pond from the 50 gallon fountain we’d used for a hospital tank. Her head wound hasn’t closed yet, but it’s a lot better, and her ripped fins have all healed, a very good sign in a fish that has battled infection: the rips won’t heal until healing has become the going process, and then they seal up nearly overnight. Ragged fins are a bad sign, and she had those for a while. <\/p>\n
She was very gentle—she’s terrifically strong, a foot and a half plus some long and so big my hands just barely go around her body, but she was ok with my maneuvering her where I wanted her, and with us picking her up, and went into the pond, I think, with great relief when she smelled home water—she went down under the winter cover, where her whole school was there to meet her. They rubbed all over her, getting their slime all over her and vice versa, I’m sure, until she would smell like them, and then they all went out into the pond for lunch, which she scarfed down in great style.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if she will recover, or survive the winter, but we gave her the best chance we could, and it becomes a case of how long to keep her in a square only a foot longer than she is, and only a foot deep. Oxygenation we did as best we could, but the more she felt better, the more oxygen she was using, and though I changed out the water once daily and filtered it and dropped water in from a high hose, to pound air into it, we were still constantly only one predator-invasion from having that hose go off its aim and drain the water from her, or some other calamity.<\/p>\n
So she’s home, in 5000 gallons instead of 50, able to swim twenty feet in a straight line without having to slow down, and having her own pond to tootle about, and plenty of oxygen in very good water constantly—which I think is probably an essential for that wound to go ahead and heal: her metabolism needs to be running full bore. And the infection is cured, at least. So we’ll see. Nasty wound. I really wasn’t hopeful. But now she’s on her own and much improved. A fish that’ll eat from your hand and tolerate being taken hold of and moved about better than some four-foots will tolerate it is really a pet, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, we maneuvered her onto a tea towel for a sling and gently took her over to the pond from the 50 gallon fountain we’d used for a hospital tank. Her head wound hasn’t closed yet, but it’s a lot better, and her ripped fins have all healed, a very good sign in a fish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}