You are the apple of my eye

I got up fearsomely early by my lights --- earlier even than bunny_hugger had to wake for school, and before even the sun had risen --- to take Sunshine to the vet. Not our local vet; a specialist. Her fast breathing and fluttering heart worried her regular vet enough to recommend we get an echocardiogram. And promised us that there was a vet at this place in Ann Arbor that would look at her. When bunny_hugger tried to make an appointment, they told her they don't see rabbits --- a common refrain about ``exotics'' --- but, assured that we had a referral, they agreed to make the appointment but reserved the right to cancel if their doctor didn't want to see an adorable huge rabbit after all. They never did, so I went. bunny_hugger had to go to school, herself.

The clinic location turned out not to be hard to find: it's not just right off the Arborland exit, a mall we comment on every time we pass it, it's about a block away from the White Castle between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti that's an occasional treat for us. And a reasonable walk from the apartment complex where bunny_hugger and her mother lived in separate decades.

And the staff was delighted to meet Sunshine, as you'd hope. They don't get many rabbits, they said, and everyone took turns petting her while she carefully explored out of her carrier. The reports were that she was an excellent patient while being examined too, which matches our impression. She seems very tolerant of people holding her and prodding her and restraining her, within reason, trusting that we probably have some good motivation for all this harassment.

Her health, though. That's the important and troubling thing, although it seems to be stuff we can probably control with medication. Still, I'll try to put that behind a cut for people who don't need to hear that stuff in detail.

So her heart is enlarged, and weakened. And she has a bit of an arrhythmia. The prescription is for double the dose of heart medicine she's been taking; she'll have no trouble taking that morning and evening. It's already her favorite thing in the world. She'll need another medicine for her arrhythmia and hopefully they should have the prescription for that filled tomorrow.

She also has a tiny bit of fluid in her lungs. A diuretic should clear that up and we're hoping that will get filled tomorrow too. Her regular vet should be able to compound it and, we hope, flavor it with whatever's made her heart medicine her favorite thing ever.

The drawback is the diuretic can be hard on her kidneys, so she'll need blood work done after she's had two weeks on the stuff. We've got that appointment made; it's set for right before Thanksgiving. Also, though, it can interact badly with meloxicam, so once she starts that she'll be off the pain medicine, whatever it does for her arthritis. There aren't many approved pain medicines for rabbits, though, so we've got limited alternatives. On the other hand, it's possible the diuretic will only be needed for a short while, to clear her lungs while the heart medicine reduces her heart's size. We can hope, at least.

All this took only a bit over an hour to do, so I was able to swing by White Castle for my own lunch and get home to where Sunshine spent the whole afternoon underneath the coffee table.

I promised amusement parks and I deliver amusement parks. Here, pictures from that trip bunny_hugger and I took to Michigan's Adventure back in August, on an incredibly good riding day, one where we got to walk on everything including Mad Mouse. Good times.

Rare image of Mad Mouse actually running! And sometimes even more than one train at a time, on a ride that should support five running at once.

Still outside the park and watching someone maintaining the grounds outside Mad Mouse. Warning: This doesn't actually do anything for your park in Roller Coaster Tycoon, so you're just putting staff on this for the authenticity of roleplay purposes.

bunny_hugger admiring a working Mad Mouse while we get closer to the front entrance.

And here's the front entrance! For the year 2022 the park replaced the sign up front, among other physical-plant improvements.

Mad Mouse seen from the midway at an angle that I hadn't noticed before, somehow. This is just the back-and-forth sections of the track but they look like huge banked turns somehow.

There's two shrubs planted on either side of the exit queue; unfortunately, one is directly underneath the track and so has had its growth stunted in the twenty-plus years since they were put there. Makes for a nice Laurel-and-Hardy pairing.

Trivia: Transferrin, the protein in serum which transports iron through the body, can serve as a powerful antibiotic by denying iron to any invading bacteria. Part of the body's response to a bacterial infection is rushing transferrin to move any free iron from the blood system to the liver. Source: Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley.

Currently Reading: Meet Me By The Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, Alexandra Lange. Ah, here's the part that talks about pinball. (It's in the section about malls turning on teenagers, and about how the ``arcade panic'' of the 80s was not a new phenomenon and was exactly foreshadowed by the moral panic about pinball machines.) Also wow, it's amazing the lengths malls go to to make sure teens and non-white people don't mistakenly see them as a place they're allowed to exist.