Category: Cats

Everyone should have some cats

Health Update

Another big gap between updates. Things have been real busy around here lately, so let’s try to catch up over the next few days.

Last Monday I went to see my doctor about my recent health concerns, and also to get a physical exam. Since I’d gotten blood work done on my trip to urgent care a week earlier, that meant fewer tests to do. I’m in slightly better shape than I was at my last exam 2 years ago, and have lost a little bit of weight, too. I also seem to be about an inch shorter than I thought I was, which is bizarre: I’ve always been an even six feet tall, and now I’m a little over five-foot-eleven. I’m not sure if I’ve shrunk a little (aren’t I a little young for that?) or if their measuring stick is a little off.

I talked about my health concerns with him, and he said that stress could certainly be a contributing factor, but that it could also be a case of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). He said that reflux can result in a phenomenon which feels like chest pain, as well as stomach pain, and the phlegmy feeling I’d developed in my throat the weekend before the appointment. He suggested I buy a 14-day round of omeprazole (brand name: Prilotec OTC) and see if that helps.

And, I’m pleased to say, a week into the treatment I’m actually feeling much better, with all of my symptoms being just about gone. I’m trying to cut down on coffee and caffeine a bit, which should also help. But hopefully I’ll be all better at the end of the treatment.

So that’s all a big relief.

That same Monday was Blackjack’s first chemotherapy treatment for his cancer, and yesterday was his second treatment. The vet said both times that he’s doing very well (though I’m not entirely sure what this means; are they X-raying him to examine his tumor, or just seeing how he physically is reacting to the treatments?), and the staff at the vet all seem to like having him, too. I guess he’s pretty easy to deal with. He is still low on energy compared to how he was before starting radiation treatment, but he’s been pretty friendly, has been up and around (and very happy to have had the back door open during our recent warm weather), and has been playing some.

I do miss the overexuberant Blackjack running all over the house, though. I hope he bounces back to that once we’re done with all the therapy.

But he’s enjoying all the attention, canned food, and extra treats, that’s for sure.

Blackjack’s Progress

Today we took Blackjack in for his examination. The vet said she’s very happy with how he responded to his radiation therapy! He’s even gained some weight. We can take him off two of the three medicines we’ve been giving him, which will make everyone in the house happy. (Well, okay, Newton and Roulette probably won’t care that much.) The vet does say she wants to put him on chemotherapy for the next six months, since that greatly improves his chances over the next few years, in her experience. Meanwhile, he gets another week off before he starts weekly visits for treatment.

It’s not the ideal outcome, but it’s not so bad as things stand. And we’re encouraged that she’s pleased with how he’s reacted to treatment so far.

We both took today off for the check-up, but with the rain we’re supposed to get all weekend, plus Debbi having twisted her ankle working out yesterday, we ended up spending the day hanging around at home. We took a nap in the middle of the afternoon, and had all three kitties curl up with us, including Blackjack, who’s been a bit standoffish recently, so we were happy that he was willing to join us.

We topped off the day with an evening of Batman and Justice League cartoons. A pretty good day, really. And the best part is that we don’t have to go back to work tomorrow, because the weekend’s just starting!

After Treatment

Wow, it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated.

We’ve been mostly focused on Blackjack’s treatment for cancer these last few weeks. Two weeks ago we took him in on Wednesday for his CT scan (a.k.a. CAT scan – heh-heh), and then Thursday was his first radiation treatment. The night before each treatment we had to take away the cats’ food when we went to bed. So Debbi and I each woke up to starving, ravenous, whining cats the next morning. It was especially hard for me at times since I then had to bundle Blackjack into his carrier, then feed Newton and Roulette, and then take him out the door while they were eating. Poor kitty!

I dropped him off each morning around 9, giving the technician an update on how he was doing. Then I headed to work, and Debbi picked him up at the end of the day. I understand he was knocked out for the first treatment, but then merely sedated for the later ones. I’m not sure how that worked, but he is a pretty mellow kitty.

He had Thursday and Friday treatments, and then Monday-Wednesday-Friday the next week. There was one more treatment planned for this past Monday, but it was cancelled because he was starting to get some blistering in his mouth and throat, since the mass is behind his throat.

Since then he has been getting a steroid pill twice a day, and a different pill and a liquid rinse in his mouth three times a day each (the liquid rinse contains Maalox as one ingredient). Unlike Newton, who loves pill pockets for his daily pill, Blackjack isn’t really interested, so we have to pill him the old-fashioned way. It’s getting old pretty quickly.

The vet said after treatment that Blackjack might get worse before he gets better. He has been low on energy and been lying around a lot, and harder to convince to play with us. We have a sense that he’s turning the corner, but it’s hard to tell. Especially since all the medications I think make him unhappy.

We have a follow-up appointment tomorrow, where we will hopefully find out if the radiation put the cancer into remission, and whether we have to keep giving him all the meds. Plus whether they want to do a round of chemotherapy with him, which I’m sure will be equally disturbing to all of us.

But most I just hope the treatment works and that he’ll have several more happy years with us.

Positive Indications

So Saturday we took Blackjack in to a veterinary specialist about his cancer. He has feline lymphoma, which is typically not curable but can be treated. The vet took an ultrasound of his body and it appears the cancer has not metastasized, so we are going to be taking him on on Wednesday for a CT scan, followed by several days of radiation treatments over the following two weeks. Hopefully that will put him into remission and we’ll have several more good years with him.

Apparently cats deal with radiation treatment and chemotherapy better than humans do, so he probably won’t be flattened for a long period of time following treatment. (If we’re really lucky, the actual trips to the clinic will be the worst part for him. I expect it will not be so easy, but we can hope.)

The poor guy got his belly shaved for the ultrasound, which makes him look kind of pathetic. On the other hand, it’s a lot of fun to rub his shaved belly – fun for us, that is! Not really for him.

Sunday we drove around to look at some more houses. None of the houses we looked at were ones we had high hopes for – four of the five were actually pretty far afield of where we’d like to live – but we wanted to get more of a feel for what’s on the market. Three of the five were homes which clearly hadn’t been substantially remodeled since the 80s (if not longer) and needed some TLC to make them livable. The other two were more modern and had much to recommend them – except for their location, as far as we were concerned. But hopefully some more places will be hitting the market in the next month that we can take a look at.

Today I took the day off and caught up on a bunch of project around the house. For example:

  • Went jogging. It was a hard run this morning, but I managed to finish it.
  • Washed all the bedcovers, which took most of the day. Also vacuumed around the bed.
  • Replaced a dying bulb in a light fixture.
  • Catalogued all the comic books I’d bought from the last two months.
  • Paid bills.
  • Distributed the minutes from our last homeowners association meeting.
  • Pulled up some weeds outside.
  • Even took a coffee break, walking down to Starbucks and reading for 40 minutes.

A pretty productive day, all around. Still haven’t done my taxes, though. Might work on them tomorrow, so I can send all the data to my CPA this week.

A Little Rebound

After our rough week last week we gave ourselves a low-pressure weekend.

The good news is that Blackjack is feeling better, practically his old self once he recovered from being knocked out at the vet. Debbi says the vet told her that they took a pretty large sample of the mass in his throat for the biopsy, and he’s been swallowing less – hardly at all the last couple of days – and eating and drinking more. While this is hardly conclusive evidence, I’m choosing to take it as an encouraging sign that the mass may be treatable. And more importantly he hasn’t spent the last few days in distress because he feels like he has something stuck in his throat.

The vet was closed for President’s Day today, but hopefully we’ll find out the results of the biopsy in the next day or two. And hopefully it will be good news.

On the house front we went out on Saturday to some open houses, visiting three homes. In contrast to past visits, none of these homes are presently occupied; two were staged, and one was empty. The first one was a large house with fairly dated decor. It will probably be a really nice house for someone willing to do a major remodeling job on it (which is not us). The second one was the empty house, which has been remodeled and brought up-to-date (other than the rattling furnace which would need to be replaced), but which was rather dark in the main living space and the back yard, and which had a few quirky floor plan choices. It was probably the closest to what we’re looking for, but we weren’t bowled over. The third house was just frustrating: A nearly-brand-new house on a large lot near downtown, but with an utterly bizarre floor plan and a lot of space that just cried out, “What were they thinking when they designed this?” Debbi eventually figured out that it’s a sort of showcase for the builder’s skills, but it really needed a couple of run-throughs with an architect before it was built. It will probably be a nice place for someone looking for a large house who’s willing to do some major renovation to fix the weirdnesses.

Our hope is that as we head into spring more houses will hit the market and we’ll see some more variety. But it was nice to be looking at homes with no pressure again.

We also had the trailing end of a series of storms passing through the area, and visited the open houses in the rain. Which was actually kind of fun itself, driving around and walking in the rain. I do like rain. The cold temperatures aren’t as welcome, however.

We had a quiet day mostly at home on Sunday, which I was totally ready for. And then back to work today.

And the Bad News

The second worst thing today is that we were not able to come to an agreement with the seller on the house we were interested in, so we decided to let it go. Now, this is disappointing, but when you get down to it, it’s just business: The seller wanted so much money for it, and we were willing to pay so much money for it, and the gap between those two numbers was pretty big and didn’t look likely to converge. As a friend put it when I first told him about seeing this place but not being prepared to do something about it, “My experience is that there are always other houses.” So we’ll keep looking. And at least we’ve gotten the ball rolling.

So the second worst thing is, well, just the way it goes sometimes.

The worst thing that happened today is that we learned the reason Blackjack has been swallowing a lot and perhaps occasionally horking is that he has a mass in his throat under the soft palette. The vet was unsure whether she could simply remove it, so she took a sample for a biopsy, and we should know in a few days whether it’s benign or, well, not.

There’s nothing we can do about it right now but wait, and try to make him comfortable and give him lots of love. Fortunately he’s mostly his usual self (other than recovering from being put under for the examination), but I’m trying not to think too much about it until we have more information.

Blackjack, by the way, is only seven years old. He’s been our hyper-energetic cat for years, so it’s hard to believe this is happening. Especially since we just figured he had a bunch of hair in his stomach he was having trouble processing.

You wouldn’t think that anything involving income taxes would be the high point of the day, but we met with my tax preparer today to talk about tax ramifications of buying a house together (inasmuch as we’re not married), and actually had a fine time chatting with her, even if going through all the options and running the numbers did melt our brain.

Well okay, the real high point was probably going out to dinner tonight at one of our favorite restaurants. Which after the low points we felt like we deserved.

The Kitty What Meows at Night

Debbi and I have a problem: Newton, our 16-year-old cat, has started standing in the middle of the bedroom in the middle of the night (anytime between midnight and 4 am) and meowing. What does he want? We don’t know. Sometimes he’ll come up to snuggle with us for a few minutes, and then he goes back to the floor and meows some more.

And wakes us up, naturally.

My best idea for discouraging him was to put a night-light in the bedroom (so I can see him) and squirt him with a water bottle when he starts up. But it’s not really working, partly because he’s figured out what when I sit up he should go hide under the papasan so he can’t get squirted.

I asked the vet about it around Thanksgiving (it’s gotten more frequent since then), and she said that geriatric cats do strange things for no particular reason, and she didn’t have any suggestions. So we don’t know what to do.

We can, I suppose, lock him and the other two cats out of the bedroom overnight, or just lock Newton in the other bedroom by himself. The latter seems a little cruel, and while the former may become necessary, I can easily see him meowing from the hall and scratching at the door, so that’s no guarantee.

Last night fortunately he only meowed briefly after we went to bed, and then curled up under our top blanket. Debbi has a theory that maybe his old body is uncomfortable in the cold weather and he’s complaining to us about it. It was a little warmer last night. So maybe there’s something to that – it’s as good an idea as any, I guess.

But we’re not going to be able to survive him waking us up 4 or 5 times a week, so we have to figure something out.

More Adventures with Newton

So Wednesday I had the feeling that something was not right with Newton. Now, all three cats have been in mega-sleep-overtime during my week off, probably a little confused that I’ve been around, and bored that I wasn’t playing with them. Plus it’s been hecka cold, which may have made them want to curl up and snooze.

But Thursday it had become clear that Newton wasn’t eating or drinking very much, and Friday morning he didn’t take his daily pill (for hyperthyroidism), which he always takes because he loves pill pockets. He did eat some soft food we bought, though, and he’d drink some water out of the sink. I worried that his mouth hadn’t healed well from his oral surgery, or had gotten infected, since the vet didn’t give me antibiotics for him.

So Friday afternoon we took him in to the vet. She checked him out and said his mouth has actually been healing very well. But I also said that he’d been having some diarrhea, and going on our bathroom carpets too, and she said that his thyroid meds – which we recently upped in dosage because his thyroid level had gone up – can cause diarrhea as a side effect. And of course diarrhea leads to dehydration, and he has been dehydrated.

So he’s been off the thyroid meds for the weekend, and he’ll go back to his older level tomorrow, and then go up a little – but not as far – in a week, and see how he does. But I foresee having to balance controlling his thyroid vs. disturbing his bowels. He’s also on a round of medication to help his diarrhea.

He seems to be getting better, although he’s not yet eating a lot, and he’s still kind of lethargic. So I’m still worrying about him a lot. Debbi tells me that worrying about him doesn’t help anyone, but it’s hard not to worry. I am encouraged that he still drinks out of the sink, and he is eating some things. But he’s not back to normal.

All-in-all, not really what I’d wanted to be spending my mental energy on over Thanksgiving weekend.

We did have some fun, though: Visited a couple of friends who are moving away next month, visited a couple of other friends and their infant and had brunch. Went for a walk in a part of our neighborhood we hadn’t walked through before.

Hard to believe it’s back to work tomorrow.

A Little Time Off

I’ve got the week off from work, so I’ve been hanging around the house working on various projects. My big accomplishment was to catalogue 4 months’ worth of comics and file them. (I sold a bunch of ones I decided not to keep back to my store for store credit. Handy trick, that!) The next project was to go through a whole bunch of old electronic gear and prep it to get rid of: Wiping hard drives on old laptops, figuring out which old cables and accessories to keep, and so on. It’s amazing how this crap builds up over the years.

I spent this morning reconfiguring our wireless network. I recently bought a new DSL modem (the old one died spontaneously two weeks ago), and also got our DSL upgraded, so I wanted to reposition the wireless base station to get better signal downstairs. An hour of fiddling with modem and base station configuration, and running ethernet cable across the room, everything’s working again, and indeed we do seem to be getting faster connections downstairs.

My next computer trick will be to sign up for Magic Online so I can waste time playing Magic a different way. I’ve repurposed my previous-generation MacBook Pro for this by installing Windows 7 on it, and I’ll probably sign up this weekend. It’s been a decade since I used Windows regularly, and it’s really weird: It feels like I’m flashing back to the 1990s, as other than brighter colors it seems like it hasn’t really changed since Windows 95. I imagine it will take a little experience to remember how it all works. (Not to mention that I hear the interface to Magic Online is pretty crappy. I can’t believe they haven’t written a Mac client for it; seems like Wizards of the Coast is living in the 90s when it comes to technology, too.)

I also got some good news this morning: Last Friday I took Newton to the vet for oral surgery. In addition to a tooth cleaning, he’d grown a mass on the inside of one cheek, which he had removed. I was quite worried about him, not just about the mass but because he’s had alarming drops in blood pressure when he’d been anesthetized in the past, and he’s now 16-1/2 years old, so I wasn’t sure how well he’d handle another round of surgery. Turns out he came through it fine, and today the vet called to say that the biopsy of the mass showed it to be benign. A big relief all around! He’s been extra-snuggly since he came home from the vet, too.

We’re having quite a cold snap this week: Cities in the area recorded record low temperatures last night, and it may be even colder tonight. Nothing my Boston-incubated blood can’t handle, of course. But quite a shock considering it was cracking 80 a little over a week ago.

We’re having a quiet Thanksgiving tomorrow, though we’re still cooking the full Turkey Day dinner. Most of it works fine as leftovers, after all. We can probably put them outside to keep them frozen overnight!