June 7, 2010

White Dog and Quinn both spent most of the day laying low and trying to stay cool. We are having a mini heatwave and the temps have been over 100 degrees...today was also humid by NM standards. A couple of times tempers flared due to the weather, boredom, and the innate need for brothers and sisters to torture each other for no apparent reason. Mostly, though, there were two fluffy white lumpy rugs sprawled on the tile under the cooling breezes of the swamp cooler ducts. White Dog and The Other White Dog stuck to their preheat negotiations that divvied up the house into "Hers" and "His" comfort zones.

When Jesse came to clean and shooed them outside for the twenty minutes it took her to vacuum, you would have thought she had condemned them to the pits of hell...Even though the yard was shady and they had cool water, they both stood at the dog door panting and whining to come in...When she gave the "Come" signal White Dog hip checked her brother out of the way and ran to her spot where she sat and glared at Jesse; Quinn ambled in after and got even with Jesse by taking big sloppy gulps of water from his bowl in the kitchen and sloshing water all over the floor.

All day Quinn has kept a close check on Milo (we are all observing her very closely). She had carefully climbed down and spent most of the day sitting on the floor; he would sniff her from head to tail and then briefly stand over her before returning to the job of staying cool.

Unfortunately, there is not a huge body of knowledge about reptiles even among vets (and we do have a good one with lots of old fashioned common sense as well as modern techno savvy). Until very recently no veterinary college even offered the possibility of specializing in reptile or amphibian care (there is just not enough collected data) so much of the medicine is guess work. Additionally Iguana anatomy is very alien in structure and is hard to diagnose (for example, an iguana's kidneys are usually not visible in an xray until they become enlarged enough from injury or disease that they protrude into the main cavity and by then the situation is life threatening).

Dr. Julia fears that Milo may have bruised or damaged either her kidneys or her liver in the fall. This coupled by Milo's elderly status (15 is old for an Iguana) would not be good. So we are watching and taking blood samples and hoping that maybe just maybe (and very remotely) Milo's amorous advances to Quinn, her sluggishness since the fall, her changed excretion patterns, and her reduced appetite might mean she is gravid! But right now we just don't know. We will share the story as it unfolds...thanks for your continued positive healing energies.