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Oct. 28th, 2010 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickProgress continues with Nick and the ground-driving practice. She's not in love with it, but it's going along as well as can be expected. Last night I tied a lead rope around her neck as a "collar" and attached two other lead ropes to it (one on either side) as "traces" and had Trys lead Nick around while I pretended to be the thing-being-drug-behind and put pressure (including realistic turning action*) on the traces. Nick was not amused, but she dealt with it.
I also took her for walks while I drug a tire alongside. That went reasonably well in a not-amused way. She did get better as we went along, though we are still nowhere near ready to do anything more. Additional practice on this is sorely needed. I am not a patient soul, but it is what it is.
*realistic turning action -- when a horse is pulling something behind them and goes to make a turn, the thing-being-pulled turns inside the radius of the horse's turn. This means that the outside trace (goes from the collar back to the thing-being-pulled, on the outside of the turn) touches against the horse's barrel and butt during the turn. Nick does not like "realistic turning action" and so needs to become accustomed to it before we actually try to pull things... either that or we can only ever pull things in a straight line. :(
The week's adventures also contained grandma's recurring UTI, which recurred again. Jackie took grandma to the doctor and the doctor offered up some better antibiotics than before, in the hopes of defeating the recurring UTI... we've tried regular antibiotics before and they have not vanquished ye olde bacteria. So, y'know, get a bigger gun The bigger gun that they gave her was significantly expensive ($2000.00 for like twelve pills), an antibiotic called vancocin, a trade name for vancomycin. Vancomycin is a last-resort antibiotic for several classes of bacteria, including (apparently) the one that they thought grandma had in this UTI.
I discovered all of this two days ago at work when Heather came in to inquire as to whether or not we were OK with dropping $2K on twelve pills, which kind of sounds like a 1 cow / 3 magic beans transaction. We said, yeah, we were good with it. I thought that sounded alarmingly steep, myself, but I'm pretty tight about money. Whatevs. I don't know shit about that stuff, maybe it's a reasonable price.
I went home that evening and resolved to read up on last-ditch antibiotics and why on earth they were so freaking expensive. I cranked up my google fu and I read thusly: Vancomycin is in a class of medications called glycopeptide antibiotics. Ok. And I read thusly: Vancomycin will not kill bacteria or treat infections in any other part of the body (besides the intestines) when taken by mouth. Hrm. That doesn't sound quite right, does it? Grandma has a UTI, a Urinary Tract Infection. I'm pretty sure that the urinary tract is not in the intestines.
I googled some more. And I read thusly: VANCOCIN® HCl Capsules may be administered orally for treatment of enterocolitis caused by Staphylococcus aureus (including methicillin-resistant strains) and antibiotic-associated pseudomembranous colitis caused by Clostridium difficile. Parenteral administration of vancomycin is not effective for the above indications; therefore, VANCOCIN HCl Capsules must be given orally for these indications. Orally administered VANCOCIN HCl Capsules are not effective for other types of infection. That's from the drug company website, bold as in original.
Okay, so now I was really confused. What I was reading suggested that the doc and the pharmacy gave us $2K of drugs (about twelve pills) for grandma's UTI that would do fuck-all for her because the hideously expensive drug is NOT EFFECTIVE ON ANYTHING BUT COLITIS WHEN GIVEN ORALLY. I talked to Jackie and discussed my concerns, asked if she could check with the doc and see if I was just being an idiot and misusing google for MD purposes. She said she'd rather check with the pharmacy first, which she did. Pharmacy agreed with me and with the internet, that oral vancocin was useless for UTIs and, in point of fact, was butt-useless for anything other than colitis-type stuff in the intestines.
So. We're getting a refund for the pills grandma didn't take yet. I guess that's something. We might have caught this earlier, but the pills did not come in a bottle. They came in a ziplock baggie. There was no package insert. There was no consumer information. We spent $2K and all we got was a ziplock with about twelve capsules in it. Hell, the only reason we noticed the problem AT ALL was because I thought that was an insane amount to pay for like twelve capsules (3 magic beans) and I went to go learn me some drug information from the internets. If I hadn't gotten a bug up my ass about the high cost of medical care, we still wouldn't know.
You have to ask yourself -- how often does this sort of crap happen out there in the Wonderful World of Medical Care?
I also took her for walks while I drug a tire alongside. That went reasonably well in a not-amused way. She did get better as we went along, though we are still nowhere near ready to do anything more. Additional practice on this is sorely needed. I am not a patient soul, but it is what it is.
*realistic turning action -- when a horse is pulling something behind them and goes to make a turn, the thing-being-pulled turns inside the radius of the horse's turn. This means that the outside trace (goes from the collar back to the thing-being-pulled, on the outside of the turn) touches against the horse's barrel and butt during the turn. Nick does not like "realistic turning action" and so needs to become accustomed to it before we actually try to pull things... either that or we can only ever pull things in a straight line. :(
The week's adventures also contained grandma's recurring UTI, which recurred again. Jackie took grandma to the doctor and the doctor offered up some better antibiotics than before, in the hopes of defeating the recurring UTI... we've tried regular antibiotics before and they have not vanquished ye olde bacteria. So, y'know, get a bigger gun The bigger gun that they gave her was significantly expensive ($2000.00 for like twelve pills), an antibiotic called vancocin, a trade name for vancomycin. Vancomycin is a last-resort antibiotic for several classes of bacteria, including (apparently) the one that they thought grandma had in this UTI.
I discovered all of this two days ago at work when Heather came in to inquire as to whether or not we were OK with dropping $2K on twelve pills, which kind of sounds like a 1 cow / 3 magic beans transaction. We said, yeah, we were good with it. I thought that sounded alarmingly steep, myself, but I'm pretty tight about money. Whatevs. I don't know shit about that stuff, maybe it's a reasonable price.
I went home that evening and resolved to read up on last-ditch antibiotics and why on earth they were so freaking expensive. I cranked up my google fu and I read thusly: Vancomycin is in a class of medications called glycopeptide antibiotics. Ok. And I read thusly: Vancomycin will not kill bacteria or treat infections in any other part of the body (besides the intestines) when taken by mouth. Hrm. That doesn't sound quite right, does it? Grandma has a UTI, a Urinary Tract Infection. I'm pretty sure that the urinary tract is not in the intestines.
I googled some more. And I read thusly: VANCOCIN® HCl Capsules may be administered orally for treatment of enterocolitis caused by Staphylococcus aureus (including methicillin-resistant strains) and antibiotic-associated pseudomembranous colitis caused by Clostridium difficile. Parenteral administration of vancomycin is not effective for the above indications; therefore, VANCOCIN HCl Capsules must be given orally for these indications. Orally administered VANCOCIN HCl Capsules are not effective for other types of infection. That's from the drug company website, bold as in original.
Okay, so now I was really confused. What I was reading suggested that the doc and the pharmacy gave us $2K of drugs (about twelve pills) for grandma's UTI that would do fuck-all for her because the hideously expensive drug is NOT EFFECTIVE ON ANYTHING BUT COLITIS WHEN GIVEN ORALLY. I talked to Jackie and discussed my concerns, asked if she could check with the doc and see if I was just being an idiot and misusing google for MD purposes. She said she'd rather check with the pharmacy first, which she did. Pharmacy agreed with me and with the internet, that oral vancocin was useless for UTIs and, in point of fact, was butt-useless for anything other than colitis-type stuff in the intestines.
So. We're getting a refund for the pills grandma didn't take yet. I guess that's something. We might have caught this earlier, but the pills did not come in a bottle. They came in a ziplock baggie. There was no package insert. There was no consumer information. We spent $2K and all we got was a ziplock with about twelve capsules in it. Hell, the only reason we noticed the problem AT ALL was because I thought that was an insane amount to pay for like twelve capsules (3 magic beans) and I went to go learn me some drug information from the internets. If I hadn't gotten a bug up my ass about the high cost of medical care, we still wouldn't know.
You have to ask yourself -- how often does this sort of crap happen out there in the Wonderful World of Medical Care?
