One Tough Little Girl.

I noticed her on June 17th, 2008, one of the females that was hiding in the plant in the tank. Not eating. Her scales looking like a pine cone and the skin covering her eyes was bulged out. Dropsy and pop eye. I isolated her in a breeding tank at the top of the tank. I started treatment with Maracyn-Two immediately. Within a couple days, she seemed to be noticeably better and I thought she was well on her way to mending. She showed interest in eating when the other fish ate, so I gave her a flake or two. She would take them in, but spit them out. At one point, she took it in and then pushed her mouth up against the side of her cell to hold the food in. She managed to eat a few flakes by doing that.

Once the course of treatment was done, though, I noticed what appeared to be a fungus and she started bloating again. Really bad. So I started a course of Maracyn. The bloating increased, so the next day I started another course of Maracyn-Two. She wasn't improving and I couldn't figure out why.

I researched medicine on the Internet and believed that I should treat her with Maracyn-Plus and Coppersafe. We went yesterday looking for those two items, but none of the pet stores carried Maracyn-Plus.

My husband was looking at the medicines, trying to find an alternative and came across an API product that treated, among other things, a disease called Hole in the Head ("HITH"). I'd never heard of that before, but it didn't sound like much fun. He asked what that disease was, I said I didn't know, and half jokingly said "but maybe she has that, too. She seems to have had everything else." I asked one of the pet store employees if they carried Maracyn-Plus, she said no, but in an attempt to find an alternative, asked me what I was treating. When I described it, she said that unfortunately once a fish gets sick it's nearly impossible to get them well. I felt frustrated with her answer, how can a person not even try?

When we got home, my husband took a look at her and suggested that maybe I could find a website with pictures of HITH, which I did. As it turned out, it looked like what she had and the symptoms she had seemed to match that disease.

A website I came across said that HITH is, unfortunately, a common disease that fish, especially cichlids get, and it's also one of the diseases is, unfortunately, most often misdiagnosed and treated as something else and by the time people figure it out, if they ever do, it's too late. It is also highly contagious in a community tank, so the entire tank should be treated for it. Symptoms exhibited include severe bloating, excessive gill action, decrease in activity, sitting on the bottom of the tank, stringy like material coming off the fish, loss of the fish's coloring, grayish color down its side and what looks like pin holes in a grouping around the fish's head. All of those described my poor fish exactly. HITH is actually a disease of the fish's digestive tract, as the holes are actually glands that help the fish digest their food.

I pulled her out of the community tank and isolated her in a 10 gallon tank at midnight last night, acclimated her to the new tank over a period of a half an hour, and then treated her with the medication for HITH. I took heart, because she made it through the night and this morning had some of her color back for the first time in two weeks and she started exhibiting behavior that indicated she might be getting better. In the back of my mind, though, I worried that it was the false burst of energy that sometimes is exhibited by the dying.

This evening, she really started struggling and I felt she wasn't going to make it. I told her that I was sorry, I tried the best I could but I didn't know what was wrong with her until it was too late. I told her I felt horrible, but that I loved her.

With one of her last bursts of energies, she swam up and touched her lips to my fingers.

At 6:30 PM she died.

I believe that she did have dropsy and pop eye originally and that HITH was a secondary infection. I only wish I had known what it looked like.

Now I'm worried about the rest of my tank. I did a 50% water change this afternoon and am now treating them for HITH. If I lose the rest of them, at this point in time, I honestly don't feel that I could ever get more fish. When something goes wrong, it's too emotionally draining for me. I sobbed my heart out today over the loss of that female and I do this every time I've lost one.