Phoebe's dropsy has gone down for now. I'm getting her used to water with no epsom salt, then I'm going to put her back in the 75. There's no doubt she'll revert soon, which kind of makes me feel like I'm fighting a lost cause. Fish with dropsy don't have a good outlook, and treatment just kind of postpones the inevitable. She's not acting weak or showing any signs of "death", which makes it feel wrong to euthanize her. But I know probably later this year, I will lose her.
Nano is showing veeeeeery small signs of dropsy too. The top of his body, right before the dorsal fin, looks "prickly" if you observe him really closely. And I wouldn't be surprised if Vide had it too. I'm unsure about both of them. I will wait until it "gets worse" with Nano, then I can be 100% sure and start treatment. It sucks, because Nano's like my baby.
Cogburn's had a lot of those bacterial spots going on, but that's my fault. I keep missing his waterchanges by a couple of days. That shouldn't make such a noticeable difference, but he's a big fish in a 26 gallon (which, according to online calculators, only holds 24 gallons) and working with minimums gives little to no room for error. I hope that HE doesn't get a bacterial infection and starts to dropsy too. Ugh.
In other news, I'm trying to find food that nobody will float on. I feed my goldies BRAND NEW Pro-Gold that was soaked until the pellets fell apart and Vide STILL floated! The only thing that they don't float on is vegetables and bloodworms. Which isn't bad, but I would love to just plop some pellets in there and not watch Vide flip upside down or float to the top.
I want to focus on growing Nano again. I think he's making good progress, he's starting to catch up with Vide, but he's not as big as he could/should be. I want to feed him 3x a day again; this whole dropsy fiasco's made me skip a day of feeding them every so often--which is a no no with baby fish.
Lately I've been feeling like getting another reeeeally young small goldfish and to raise them to be nice and big. But that's completely out of the question at this point in time, haha.