Ooooh, Regular Fish...

Three guesses as to what this picture is all about...

We wanted to spice up Regular Fish's living arangement...nope!

We were drunk and put Regular Fish in the wrong spot after cleaning his tank...nope!

Aliens came overnight, bypassed our home security system and this is how we found poor Regular Fish...nope!

This, my friends, is what a fish hospital looks like. Yup, you read that right. Regular Fish is in the hospital. I've been scouring the internet to find out what's wrong with him (since taking him into the vet is LAST on my list of things to do). Seems he's either caught a nasty fish disease called Velvet or we have accidentally contaminated his living quarters with a mystery poison...either way, he's sick. Over the last few weeks he's developed a brownish ick all over his body and he's lethargic and won't eat much and he buries himself under his coral thingie and acts dead. So some nice (crazy) people on an internet message board devoted to betta fish suggested that he needed to be treated with salt, tannins and quarantined in a small space to save his energy and allow him to recover. Yup, people, we are still talking about a fish here, not a human or even a dog...a fish! Previous to this, my only fish treatment has been something like this..."oh look, Swimmy is dead, guess we gotta flush him..." But not now. I guess we spend alot of time paying attention to dear Regular Fish, so now that we've noticed he's not well, how can you ignore that? So I mixed up a special concoction of water conditioner and salt and moved Regular Fish to a wine glass (cuz that's all I could find of the appropriate size) and he's been "in the hospital" for about a week so far. I will say his attitude (betcha didn't know fish had attitudes, did ya?!) is much improved. He isn't "acting dead" and is swimming around more. He is finally eating happily twice a day instead of just staring at his food in a trance and not touching it. But the brown ick is still all over his once beautiful blue body. I'm sort of at a loss. The one issue I've had in his "treatment" is that I haven't added "tannins" to his water yet. Supposedly fabricated tannins (yanno, like if you buy it in a jar at the pet store) are expensive and don't work. And to get natural tannins...well you have to find an oak tree that you are positive hasn't been treated with pesticides, collect up some fallen dried leaves, crush them and steep a tea out of them which you then add to the fish's water. Is anyone rolling their eyes yet?! Not only am I thinking "are you serious?!" but in my pet fish mommy defense, we don't have ANY oak trees around here. Pine trees abound and that's it. So admist housework and running the monkeys around to all of their sports practices and games, I haven't had time to drive hours into the hills around Boise and try to find an organic oak tree. Ughhh...

So, for now, that's Regular Fish's health update. I'll post again with any good or bad (ooooh let's hope not for poor Carter's sake) news.