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Hyacinths and Capybaras

A Brazilian capybara walking through some water hyacinths

It’s true that humans are always messing up ecosystems. They bring in new pests or plants or they drain swamps or divert rivers. Generally they really mess things up. But here’s an article about humans maybe doing something good for a change! Wouldn’t a wild population of capybaras in California be wonderful? And Melly knows we will eat water hyacinths because she saw some of my wild cousins chowing down on them in Brazil.

Thanks to Sharla Hardy for this great link.

Melly Update

Melly at the hopsital

Well, after a month of vacation, Melly is finally home from the hospital. As many of you know, she had a stroke in her right visual cortex. She is mostly okay but she can’t see very well. She lost vision in the left side of both eyes. It’s all very complicated but she is going to write it up as a little story, which she claims will be funny but I’m not so sure. I think I like her better without hair, although it took a little getting used to. What do you think?

Capy om the conversation.

Everybody has been coming over to visit since Melly got home and they are all making a fuss over her instead of me. I think this is because I was sitting on the floor whereas all of the humans were on the chairs or couches. I felt much more included when I got on my favorite blue chair. Melly says she can’t edit the photos very well so she hopes they look okay. Of course, any photo of a capybara is going to look cute, especially if it’s me (just saying).

For those of you who are too curious to wait for Melly’s full story, the summary is that she had a AV Fistula that resulted in a large bleed. She had two craniotomies (that’s where they open your brain up) in one operation, one on the right back of her skull to close up the fistula and one on the upper right to take out the “pancake” of blood that had accumulated there. This has left her with 16 inches of scar, which is totally awesome! (As long as it’s not on me.)

What’s Going On?

Melly’s blog:

Hi all! This is Melly here. I suppose that some of you are wondering what is going on with me and Garibaldi Rous and why there haven’t been any recent blog posts. Well, never fear! Garibaldi is still doing well. His next vet visit is scheduled for Dec. 10th and Stacy Winnick, Dobbye Winnick’s owner (yes, the same famous Dobbye from petcapybara.com), is coming out to help us with the trip up to College Station. In. In the meantime, Gari continues to take his antibiotics and is not displaying any further signs of dental distress.

 

I’m afraid the problem with the lack of blog posts, and the fact that I have taken down the Capybara Madness store, is because I have spent the last three weeks in the hospital following a stroke. No one was more surprised by this turn of events than I was. I am too young for a stroke and I don’t even have high blood pressure. But it turns out I had a congenital malformation in my brain and it chose Oct. 16th, 2013 to go off. Luckily, the damage seems to be restricted to my right visual cortex. That makes it difficult for me to see and very difficult to read a computer screen, along with some other vision related problems. But otherwise I am more or less fine. I should be going home sometime next week. I can hardly wait to be back with my Garibear!

Even so, the blog will probably remain off line for another month or so due to my vision problems. I’ll try to post quick updates now and then just to let you know how Gari is doing.