ice water and ocicats

Sigh. I spent all last week in Costa Rica -- getting away from my troubles, soaking in physicality (and humidity.. and a pool), and training handstands 5 hrs/day. And I wanted to post from Costa Rica, wanted to capture the languidness of only having limited wifi and a very short to-do list. But it's hard for me to get my thoughts to flow properly when tapping away on the phone, and so instead I spent a whole lot of time just being in the present, figuring I could sort out my thoughts when I got back. I was woken up by howler monkeys, and bitten by a lot of bugs, and felt appreciative of the many plants whose leaves were bigger than I was. The resort had a dog named Destiny and an orange cat named Thunder, who graced me with a lap-sit at one point.

There was handstand progress -- certainly nothing like a press, because these teachers are brutally finicky about how pressing is to be done. But I held a freestanding hs for 10 seconds with my eyes closed, and did tuck-to-pike transitions on my own, and probably my best one-arms (with spotter), and spent my time comfortably in the top half of the class overall (a bit lower for jump-ups, a bit higher for one-arms and crocs). I was also a very comfortable age for the class, which was interesting. I guess the price of a destination training skews the demographics? Our youngest was 24 and the oldest couple were definitely upper 60s.

Did some good reading of books on my Kindle, made friends, wondered how to blend this stuff with my existing distance training, stared blankly into the tropical night, drank a lot of coffee but not alcohol.

So then I came back... and while I was on the third airplane of the day, the bug was taking Hypercube to the nearby emergency vet. I found out when I landed. It was for the "usual" breathing issues -- gurgling, sputtering, general fluid sounds in the lungs, and when she coughed it was worse than usual. She'd also been resisting her inhaler and had finished a course of antibiotics earlier in the week, so I'd been expecting a downturn but maybe not that specific timing. The squirrel drove me home, while we all determined that Hypercube would stay overnight in an oxygen cage and then go to her specialist in the morning for a possible CT scan for something new in her left lung. My job. So I slept for four hours (2:30 to 6:30), took a MUCH needed shower and Lyfted over to the cat and then Lyfted us to the specialist's where all her previous records resided.

Checked her in through the ER there. And the vet came in and led with "I'm sorry about Hypercube, she is so sick" and went on with "This is going to be a hard conversation" and then kept saying things but I bet you know where this is going now, don't you. Because it didn't really matter what the CT scan might have said; Hypercube wasn't a candidate for surgery, she was already on all the asthma medications and her little lungs were just failing. The vet said she was using every muscle in her body just to breathe, in long, rippling breaths that would make a yoga teacher proud. She also said "end of the road". So I called home, and also asked a few questions of the vet. In the end, Hypercube was already at a great hospital and with a catheter in her front leg, so we decided not to prolong her efforts or make her go off oxygen or mess with her poor leg any more. The bug came up to be with her, and we had her put to sleep in their cozy "goodbye room", which she insisted on circumnavigating a couple of times before she settled down. She purred for us, and I have no idea whether she would have liked to stay with us longer or if she would have liked to die sooner, but I know she died purring. Or at least fell asleep purring, and then died. It was fast.

They let us have a few minutes with her body, and it was hard not to look for -- even to see -- her breathing. I petted her, I picked her up (she was so limp) and the bug kind of gasped when her head lolled a bit. A minute later we resettled her -- still curled "comfortably" -- in the vet's blanket on his lap, and she let out a sigh as some air escaped her lungs and I think we both reacted to that. I said "She's not--" as if we didn't both know already. Of course we knew. But it was not possible to treat her body without care, regardless, after so many years of caring for it. We pressed the button in the room one last time, and a vet tech came to take away her body, and she also treated it very carefully and held it in a comfortable fashion, and I arranged the blanket to not cover the face because again it was impossible not to.

The squirrel and Perse were just waking up, and they had us over for brunch and hugs which was very, very, very sweet of them. Then we came back home and I went back to getting the funky jungle-rot smells out of my mildewy Costa Rica laundry. Baking soda with the detergent and vinegar in the fabric softener turns out to be the winning combination.

On Monday I did indeed keep up the work momentum, staying home and slamming out a LOT. On Tuesday I slogged in to the office (through actual flooding) to have lunch with a visitor to the office and have some meetings.

And then... that was nearly it for the week, because Hypercube had started whuffing through her nose in a disturbing way and was really resisting her medications (unusual for her). On Wednesday I had a massage scheduled in the morning which I went to; then I bought an extra-nice lunch, and even let Pokeworks charge me extra for lobster, because I just had a feeling. I put that into my face before calling the vet, and getting sent straight to the emergency vet; and then sent from the nearest emergency vet onward to a different referral hospital where Hypercube is already a patient, since she was considered stable enough for further car rides. (I am, at this point, VERY grateful for the medium-term loan of Quarte's car.) Those people ended up admitting her and putting her in an oxygen cage for a night, and doing a tracheal wash in the morning for more data while also beginning to treat a probable upper respiratory infection. I drove up to bring her medicine and visit her on Thursday, then I drove up with the bug on Friday to see if she would eat for us (barely) and whether she should come home. She voted YES on the latter and now here she is, with a huge array of medications.

The week's only other news is also medical: I get to stop taping my toe, which is "healing beautifully". Once I've logged a solid week of normal walking with no pain, I can try running or jumping (insert lecture here about "99% healed is not the same as 100% healed"), and after a month I can start picking up objects with my toes. That's good. Baby steps, as they say.

But also, ugh, this is why I often feel such time scarcity. You never know when something will come along and sideswipe all your plans.

It's surgery time for my Nala, as she again has an enlarged anal gland and this time flushing didn't help. It feels to the vet like there's a mass. An irregular mass -- that word is always, always bad in a health context. So we're being referred to a specialist, who will see her for a surgical consultation on Monday at 9AM. That's about as soon as we could possibly hope for. Under the knife she will go, my 18.5-year-old kitty, at some point after that, and probably only then will I find out if the gland contained an abscess, a benign growth or a cancerous tumor.

Watching her jump around between the giant bean bag and the cat condo we recently sprung for, it sure doesn't seem like she's very close to checking out. Surgery is scary though. General anesthesia is bad enough, and surgery can so easily lead to "we didn't get it all" or "we found something else while we were in there".

My beautiful ocicat turned one year old yesterday.



Kittenhood may be over, but she doesn't seem quite full-grown yet. So I guess she is a teenager cat. Still the baby of the household though. :-)

She celebrated by sleeping and sprawling in front of the fireplace all day, while I worked from home due to snowstorm. Later on my co-worker came over to play with her, and we got fries from the local falafel place, and she got the lid of the tiny mayonnaise container to lick and move all over the floor.

Once upon a time when the world was young, I got two little black kittens for heisenbug's birthday. They were like furry little cat larvae, so we called them grubs. It helped that they looked kind of grubby sometimes, and they also went grubbing around in things when they weren't asleep in a pile.

They lived inscrutably but perhaps happily with us for eight years... and then one of them died... and then the other one got sick... and then on Tuesday he died too. Goodbye grubs. End of grub story. No more grubbing, no more grubs. :_(

As you probably remember, Hobbes left us earlier this year, in March. We are now officially down from three cats to one. It's quiet. The litterbox is disturbingly easy to clean. When I snuggle with Nala and heisenbug in bed, it gives me flashbacks to 1999, when I first did the very same thing and was sure that was all I ever wanted in a family. Really, they still are a kickass family and I love them to pieces, it's just that I was used to needing more cats on the bed before I could smile and say "wow, that's everyone"...

For a long time we were a DITCH -- that's Dual-Income, Three (or Two) Cat Household -- and now we're having a little identity crisis. But we want to keep it simple for a while. Nala likes being the only cat, anyway, her supremacy in the household undisputed. She is easy to maintain, solid and noisy and very alive.

Here's a nice peaceful video heisenbug made of Rafe and Hobbes together a couple of years ago, doing what they did best: not much of anything.

Tonight we welcome a newcomer to our family:





This collection of orange stripes comes to us from a household well accustomed to my habit of making LJ names for everyone, so we actually talked about names for a while (twice). Anyway, his name is Hobbes -- he seems to have the same dim view of human nature that the philosopher took, and the tiger stripes and sometimes mercurial temperament of the comic strip character, while his real name is also the name of a comic strip character. Good enough for me. :)

It's going to be interesting, integrating Hobbes. We haven't really done cat-to-cat introductions yet, so we don't know how that will go, and we know that our "parenting" style is going to be different than what he's been used to. One thing we do have is square footage, though, almost twice what he had in his last apartment, and I think that will help him relax.

We're a dual-income, three-cat household again!