A few weeks back my Great Dane-Saint Bernard hybrid, whom I had bred in an experiment (insert laugh here, but true nonetheless - I just didn't use any of my own DNA), became very sick. The vet didn't seem to know what it was, his appetite disappeared, he seemed to have anorexia, and he was suffering from severe lethargy and had a lot of trouble sitting and standing. His left leg seemed in great pain. He lost his sense of smell temporarily. He also seemed to lose his will to live.
He seemed to have a mix of symptoms from different diseases. I spent three days researching and finally got a sample of his feces. (When he was sick his feces were bright orange - probably from excess bile production, thin, very small in volume, and he kept hiding them from me, going out into the woods to defecate rather than nearby so I could examine them. He also wouldn't drink water and at first I considered rabies from a possible coyote bite.)
Finally though I followed him at a distance with my binoculars into our west woods. I watched him defecate, took a sample bag and went down into the woods to recover the sample.
When I got back to the house I prepared a slide and examined the sample and from everything I could see on the slide and the culture I grew realized he likely had a virulent strain of the coronavirus (canine form). Once I understood the likely disease, and the pathogen, I developed my own recovery program.
He wouldn't eat any food at all, or take medicines after the first three days, but I noticed he would drink milk.
So I used the metaergogenics I had invented for myself and my children, high doses of probiotics, liquefied yogurt, ground amino acids, an electrolyte solution and raw eggs and made a shake. Which I could get him to take twice a day. In a week's time he was eating food I had put through the blender and in two weeks time he was completely healed.
He's back up to speed now. He plays ball, jumps, moves with no pain or hesitation, wrestles with me again, goes hiking, and has returned to his regular ravenous appetite. Though he's still recovering the weight he lost. He's probably back up to 140 or so of a regular 160 pounds.
It scared me there for awhile, but with some research, determination, comparative analysis, and my microscope I figured it out and developed a treatment regime that got him fully recovered. For a week or so though I thought he might die.
He's standing beside me now as I write this. Wondering what I'm doing.
I'm not sure if that's considered Geeky or not, maybe more nerdy than anything else. But it was very gratifying to me.
I haven't been to a con in almost 6 years (which is kinda sad) so I'm really looking forward to it.
