Yesterday we got to bring Simba home from the breeder. Here he is at 8 weeks in a rare still shot while the wife and breeder are inside going over paperwork and stuff.
I brought him back inside so the wife could hold him for a bit before we left.
When we got Simba home, we brought Nala outside to introduce her to Simba. Nala wasn’t quite sure what to make of this black furball the wife was holding. Then we brought them inside so they could check each other out some more.
I think Nala’s still not quite sure what to make of Simba or why he’s still here. Hard to believe that Nala was once that size.
After a while Simba pooped out. We’re slowly working on crate training him. He doesn’t mind it too much and will sleep in it, although he’s still a little reluctant to stay in it. He’s adopted some strange sleeping positions in his crate. Here he’s managed to prop his head up against the side of the crate and is sleeping peacefully.
Most of the time he’s got his head dangling out of the crate like this. Don’t worry, he can still breathe.
New beast in the lab
There’s a new beast sitting in the radiopharmacy lab at work called a BVA-100 that’s supposed to revolutionize the way blood volume studies are performed. The old way is a labour intensive process that took about 3-4 hours to complete. This new machine can do it in about 60-90 minutes with 6 blood draws. I haven’t had a chance to familiarize myself with the entire procedure, but it looks pretty simple and is a lot less work. Patient is injected with about 20-40 μCi of I-131 HSA and 6 blood samples are drawn at regular time intervals. Blood is spun down, plasma removed and put into 2x1mL test tubes which are placed in the machine. The computer takes care of getting all the samples counted and spitting out the results.
It’s pretty neat and is supposed to be helpful for a few different things like finding appropriate treatments for hypertension. The company came to our nuc med radiologists to get us to try the unit out for a 3 month demo period, which considering our current volume of blood volume study requests was hard to justify. Once their sales guys figured out the people to go to were the cardiologists, those guys were all over it and immediately requested us to proceed with the demo. We just got through with the installation and training period and have done 2 or 3 patients so far with good results and positive response from the techs. If it gets a similar response from the cardiologists and spreads to other potential referring docs, the machine might stick around. The one big downside I’ve been told is that the consumables have to be purchased from the company and is a little on the pricey side. That’s something I leave for te administrators to worry about though.
I’ll have to see about finding some time to become a little more familiar with this thing.
7 years at work
Marking the 7th year on the job here go started off with an early bonus. This week I got to transfer to the much coveted E lot parkade across the street after 7 years on the waiting list. Woo hoo!
Year 7 was a pretty good year marked with lots of new equipment and a few accomplishments. It was also another year where I added more things to my to-do list than I managed to tick off. Between keeping up with the latest technology and taking on more research, things are getting busier than ever at work which is starting to make getting all the equipment surveyed on time a little more difficult. Hopefully one of the things that happens in year 8 will be hiring of another physicist to share the load.
In the meantime, this 8th year coming up I have lots to look forward to. I’ll be wrapping up a couple more research projects and trying to get them published or presented somewhere, starting up a few new projects, new digital x-ray equipment being installed and getting more involved with the PET/CT scanner. Should be another good and very busy year.
Vegas pics!
Finally got around to posting the pictures from our Las Vegas trip in the gallery. Haven’t had time to caption them yet, so feel free to make up your own while you browse. 🙂
Back on the food merry-go-round
The search for a food for Nala continues. After about 2 months on the Blue Buffalo Lamb & Rice, Nala’s back to having soft runny and now mucousy poops. Since everything else about Nala looks normal, the only suggestion the vet could offer was that Nala had a sensitive or irritable bowel (large bowel issues) that wasn’t agreeing with one or more of the ingredients in her food. Rats. She was looking really good on the Blue Buffalo food too.
So now it’s back to searching for another food. In the meantime the vet suggested we put her on some Science Diet i/d for a while. He says it’s a very digestible food for dogs with sensitive tummies.
This time I’m going to take a more methodical approach to finding a food with a thorough ingredients comparison. I know that when she was on Diamond LB Lamb & Rice everything was fine. It wasn’t until the beginning of the year when we started switching her to adult foods that the soft poop problem started.
- Premium Edge Skin & Coat formula: soft poop after a month.
- Wellness Fish & Sweet Potato: still soft poop.
- Blue Buffalo Lamb & Rice: Poop firmed right back up. Soft runny poop again after about 6 weeks.
So breaking out the trusty spreadsheet, I put all the ingredients for each food in and see what’s in the Premium Edge, Wellness and Blue Buffalo that’s not in the Diamond. Since they’re all so different, filtering out what’s in one and not in the other is easier than it sounds, but at a first iteration, the Premium Edge, Wellness and even Blue Buffalo have some kind of fish or fish meal in them. More noticable is that they also all have some form of barley, which the Diamond doesn’t have. So maybe it’s the barley Nala’s reacting to. Neither the Diamond or Nutro lamb & rice have barley or corn in them, so those are two possibilities for us to try. Diamond does have fish meal in it though, so if Nala has problems with fish too, Nutro might be the one to go with.
Anybody want a 30lb bag of Blue Buffalo lamb & rice to try?