Bob, so glad to hear that your dad has rallied!  Those times are special
extra gifts to us.
 
Okay, for Christmas I got an unbelievably sexy gift from Steve: a Nikon
Naturescope, a 20x little scope designed for fieldwork.  It is a marvelously
designed little thing.  Tonight Meltdown was tired so I put her bed on the
table and used a 20 watt little halogen light on the side to provide the
lighting (in lieu of using up the battery) and to keep her tail warm.  She
let me study her tail for over half an hour!  Unlike Warp's fur (which is
albino, and which I saw only in fast glimpses) and our hairs (blonde,
chestnut, gray, and white) a number of Meltdown's silver colored ones (She
is mostly gray.) look to be partly transparent.  Since she's mostly bald on
her tail since having a (removed) malignancy of the L adrenal years ago I
really got to look closely at skin and at blackheads and the like.  Here is
what I noticed: 1.  white heads tended to be sites with ingrown fine hairs
which were noticeable at 20x magnification 2.  the orange ones tended to be
fresher oily secretions which usually accompanied an erupting or very short
fine hair; when the oil was carefully rubbed off the hairs were there and
were firmly anchored 3.  black secretions appeared to be older and more
dessicated, often without any associated hairs; when hairs were present they
were usually loose and sometimes completely out of the skin, and sometimes
were wound tightly in the secretions; often there were also flakes of skin
involved in the black ones, too 4.  it was possible to see much of the
length of the shafts since they ran at a pronounced angle under the skin
 
I'll have to try using a moisturizer (which has helped in the past whenever
any of our's have blackheads) and see what changes I see in the breakdown of
the secretions, easy freeing of hairs, and wicking of oils.
 
Oh, at one point I yelled out, "Steve, please come in here; I want to
compare your nose and Meltie's tail." He declined, but one day I'll take out
the stage and compare.
 
Yes, I also looked at her ear wax and saw no mites.
 
BTW, she's doing well enough that we have put a ramped litter pot back in
her cage.  (Of course, with her form of cardiomyopathy she may be too unwell
for it again in a few hours or a few days, but for now she's very happy
with it.)
 
Melissa mentioned runny noses with excitement.  Ruffle had a chronically
runny nose (to the point where she learned to blow into a handkerchief on
command) and whenever she got to do favorite things outdoors she would just
drip all over.  It was not from allergies because we could take her on the
balcony and she would not reach that level of intense sniffing and joy, and
just not drip all over, but if she even saw that we were about to open the
front door while she was in our arms she'd be watering all over before the
knob even turned.  She used to leave a wet little drip trail.
 
Sukie
[Posted in FML issue 1797]