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.

Our last day in Paris was a short one, despite getting up early. norwoodbridge and I split off from the other friends we were with, and went to Starbucks and (at last!) to a pharmacie to get the things we can't get at home -- the headache medication with codeine, and ibuprofen gel. Then we decamped to a nearby park for an hour of pre-plane stretching, super basic acro and listening to the French as they lunched and chattered around us. We agreed it was soothing to hear the babble of ongoing human activity, without the brain-snag of understanding some of it.

Then we picked up our stuff from the airbnb -- which, as I have not mentioned, was something of a cluttered disaster with no place to put our stuff or keep it separate from the hostess's, so at this point there was a bit of fighting down terror that we might have left something. And we decamped uneventfully to the airport, and thence to Boston.

Overall, that was really fun, and about the right length of trip for me. I'd do it slightly differently next time, like buying some eggs for American-style breakfasts at home in the mornings to avoid the "one big meal per day" dynamic. I would also wave my magic wand and remove the strange "push button to exit any domicile" buttons that exist there, because hello, fire codes! But we did quite well. It was friendly, we mostly didn't rush about too much, I didn't get sick, nobody wanted to look at the stupid Mona Lisa, and there was much sleeping and food and wine.