“Why am I attracted to sick fish?”
Because you want drama and sympathy, dumbass. Right or wrong, I buy sick fish sometimes, too. I bring them home, treat whatever disease they have and hope I caught it in time that they can recover. I don’t create frantic posts to ask for diagnostic help, and update them frequently with questions about switching medications because I think your first diagnosis was wrong. The first time, you bought fish with velvet because you didn’t know any better, and we didn’t mind helping one bit. Perhaps we shouldn’t have, since you obviously got the response that you wanted. This time, you knew better and you still bought a sick fish, and not only that, you’re wasting time that we could better spend teaching someone who DOESN’T know. You know the life cycle of the parasite because I’ve explained it to you and given you links to further reading. You know how the treatment goes because you’ve done it before. You’ve got the aquatic equivalent of Munchausen by proxy, but since sick fish are so easy to come by, you don’t have to make them sick yourself, you can just buy them that way.
December 26th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I’ve heard of Munchhousens by proxy, but this is ridiculous.
December 27th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
…and sadly, it’s true. It’s one thing to buy sick fish because you didn’t know better, and ask for help in making a diagnosis because you’ve not enough experience to make one on your own. It’s quite another to buy fish from the SAME GODDAMN PLACE you bought sick ones before, and KNOW that fish “doesn’t look right”, and KNOW that the store didn’t take you seriously when you told them their stock was sick, and KNOW the life cycle of the parasite the fish most likely has, and KNOW that it takes time before the treatment can work, and STILL post about it. If you (collectively, not you personally) can’t treat your sick fish and there’s a way I can help you learn how, I’m all for it, but this isn’t about learning to help the fish, or really even about the fish itself, this is about, “Oh, you’ve got such a kind heart! That poor little fish would be dead if it weren’t for you”, and “I just don’t know how you handle worrying about sick fish–you poor thing!” and making me waste my time typing the same things over and over again because you didn’t read them the first fucking time. I’ll still answer, but it’s for the fish, not for the attention whore who’s doing the water changes.