This is why you should pay attention in chemistry…

13 July 2011 6 Comments

There are debates that will never be answered: McDonald’s or Burger King’s fries. The Packers of the Vikings. Cold, ice, and snow—or heat, humidity, and bugs. And fungus.

Before moving to the South, the only fungus I ever had to deal with was the occassional case of scratches, and that cleared right up with a scrub or two of Betadine.

Down here, I’ve been introduced to chronic scratches and more versions of fungus than should exist in the world. Fortunately most of this has been at a distance, but a month or so ago, Ro started getting a rub in her girth area.

I figured she was either reacting to her own sweat or that the girth was rubbing. I made some adjustments to her tack, made sure I hosed and dried her off well, and kept an eye on it.

In short order, it started flaking. And then it got stringy.

This is the point where I wondered WTF I was doing living in the South and started trying to figure out if I really hate the cold as much as I think I do, or if I maybe exaggerated my hate a bit and moving back would be… if not enjoyable… at least tolerable.

Meanwhile, I attacked the fungus the only way I knew how: Betadine.

Ro wanted to know WTF I was doing molesting her arm pits, but I managed to bribe her into disgusted compliance.

The fungus laughed in the foam of my betadine and kept growing and spreading.

So I did what any good horse owner would do: I browsed a couple horse forums, read up on fungus, dismissed any solutions that were similar to scrubbing with Betadine, and decided to go out and buy a bottle of Vetericyn.

Vetericyn costs roughly as much as the GDP of a small country, so I checked the ingredient list to see if I recognized anything. Maybe I could find a cheaper version of it. Here’s the thing. What I remember about chemistry? Passing notes about black holes back and forth with one of the guys.

So I stared at the ingredient list on Vertericyn and concluded that it had, you know, some chemicals in it.

I go through life like this:

I am reading Elfrida right now, a really awful poem published in 1752, because I was reading Horace’s Ars Poetica and the translator’s editor put in a footnote lambasting Elfrida’s author. I was curious about how bad the text really was to make an editor break from otherwise standard cross-references to give a negative review. It may be worth noting that I was only reading the Ars Poetica because Adam Lindsay Gordon borrows from it to title his “Ex Fumo Dare Lucem,” which I was only reading because I needed another poem from the Hippodromania series for something else.

My point is, I do this stuff all the time. If I am interested in something, I will follow threads and thoughts to places no normal person would bother going. The Elfrida being one of them; if you are still trying to figure out what the Elfrida is and why you haven’t heard of it, there’s a reason it has been largely forgotten by history.

But if I am not interested, I stare blankly at things and then go on. Thus it was with the list of ingredients in Vetericyn: they were chemicals, all right. I paid an arm and a leg and bought a bottle.

I used it, and the fungus cleared up. Score.

Today, I learned just what is in Vetericyn. The main ingredients are, essentially, two types of bleach and salt. In a very dilute form.

I feel like an idiot. To be fair, the Vetericyn worked, so I can’t argue with the results. But I paid only marginally less than the budget for NASA for a bottle of it, and that is beyond even government contractor overpricing for what is essentially diluted bleach.

Now that I’ve peeled the sucker sticker off my head, there’s no way I’m paying for Vetericyn again. I can mix up some Dakin’s Solution (now I’m interested, so now I’m finding all sorts of interesting things I should have found out before), dilute it a little more, and throw some salt in. If nothing explodes or gives off noxious fumes… mmm…. ok, perhaps I’ll do a little more research and then start experimenting with chemicals. I may not remember much about my chemistry class, but I passed it. Presumably, I can figure out if I’ll blow up Houston by mixing salt and bleach.

Watch out for fireballs on the horizon…

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