Can you describe the symptoms? Hnladue, I worry about using the medicated food just before shut down because it reduces the good bacteria as well as the bad bacteria in the fishies gut and I haven't heard any thing about parasites which I would think should be addressed as a possibility. What do you think about using some winter active bacteria? I had planned to use it any way, but for other reasons. I would agree with the salt as a general tonic. As for the amount of salt, with a pond that size could she use the salt blocks for water softening? Otherwise, it could get a little pricey. I know you were around when David mentioned it. Can you help refresh my memory? The Melafix... would it stay active in the water beyond a treatment period so that she would have to do a water change? Sorry about the questions seemingly addressed just to you. I would appreciate info from anyone who is an old timer or who is familiar with the problems. Sandy

Tracheal mites have kind of been put to the back burner in the last few years. They are still out there, but I haven't heard much about losses due to them. Varroa mites are probably a bigger problem. You DO have them, it's just a matter of how many. While I would like to say that testing should be done before treatment for anything, (I always test before I treat) it would probably be more realistic for me to advise Mite-away as it will kill both.

We set my MIL up on Life Alert. I have doubts about whether she wears the tag regularly, but I can say that it appears to work. We got a call from the Life Alert dispatcher one day saying that they'd received a signal but no one was answering her phone when they called. They had called the emergency dispatch in her town and were giving us notification of that. Meanwhile I tried a couple of times to reach her and finally did. Evidently she had accidentally hit the button and then fallen asleep! I called the L.A. dispatcher back and he notified the emergency responders that all was well. They went ahead with a welfare check, replied to L.A., who then called me back with a follow up. I believe her system monitors into the garage, but not much further. My biggest complaint with L.A. is that once we requested information they hounded us night and day to make the sale.

An accident of this sort can range from bruised scalp to a cut throat. It all depends, and folks, there are a lot of 'depends'. For one thing, many posters above are assuming they know what kind of glass was in the windshield. We don't know this. The make and model of the car was not identified. We don't know if the car was new or old at the time of the accident. We don't even know ths size of the window or its elevation in relation to the person's body. Some old time cars had small windshields so high up that a short person had trouble viewing the road. Its a fairly safe assumption there were no seat belts. For example, the year could have been 1939 and she was in a 10 yr old car. That could have been a Model A Ford. I'm not sure what kind of glass the Model A had, (I owned one a long time ago) but I do not believe it was 'safety glass', the type that is two pieces of glass laminated together with a polymer film. Laminated safety glass is supposed to be heat treated in such a manner so that on impact, it shatters into little bits and does not produce long shards. The polymer film holds things together, stretches, and reduces (not prevents in all cases) the possibility of sticking a head all the way through and getting cuts in bad places. Well, that's what its supposed to do - t'aint always so. In 1965, the company I worked for occupied a new office building and the rear glass doors were supposed to have been treated to break into tiny bits. One evening, a friend of mine was leaving the building with a group when someone distracted him. He turned and kept up a brisk pace. He thought the door was held open by the fellow in front of him, It wasn't. He turned his head forward just in time to bang into the glass. It broke. Large shards of glass, some 2 to 3 ft long, fell around him. Miracously, he got only a bump on the head and a small cut with shards of glass surrounding him. Wasn't supposed to happen, BUT IT DID. He was one lucky fellow. Naturally, there followed an investigation with the supplier, installer, and insurnace company with a lot of finger-pointing. There was a goof-up somewhere. So, was it possible that she went though the windshield without a lasting facial blemish? Yeah, but the likelyhood of other scenarios are more common. From what scraps of information I got from the original post, it seems that her entire body launched through the windshield and ended up somewhere out outside of the vehicle. That is possible. I have first hand knowledge of such a case. In this case, the car went into a ditch, struck a culvert and instantly stopped. He went through the windshield flying much like Superman, and nailed a very stong post. He never came out of the coma and died weeks later.