Excitable dog they all said, plus an update

Posted on by

Our dogs love to go for car rides. I don’t know why. The only place they ever get to get out of the car is at the vet’s. But they get excited when they figure one of us is leaving.

Zoe gets excited enough for both dogs, with some left over for a third dog, should we ever decide to get one. She knows what the door handle is for, although not how to use it, and she knows where her leash is. She thoughtfully points out both to me, just in case I have forgotten.

She is extremely sensitive to whatever signals we send unconsciously when the possibility of an inkling of an thought surfaces about taking the car somewhere. She seems to know we’re going to go at just about the same time I do.

She ran over Leah’s foot in the last clip. Leah is expected to make a full recovery.

I usually remotely open the sliding side door on our van before I let the dogs out. This is about the only time I ever let Zoe go ouside off leash. She runs directly to the car and jumps in. Sam, ever the polite dog, runs to the door and then stops. He needs to be invited before actually jumping in.

I don’t let Zoe jump out of the car off the leash. The last time I did that she led Sam down the driveway and up the street for a vigorous 15-minute workout.

I have forgotten where we went on this particular trip, but it’s the same routine for every ride.

And now the update on the as-yet-unresolved story of my lungs. I saw a vascular specialist on June 23, then a pulmonary specialist the next day. They were all reassuring. Everyone is reassuring. So far.

The regular practice for lung nodules such as I have is to watch them to see whether they grow, assuming there are no immediate indictions of malignancy. That’s what they are doing to me. I had a CT scan on July 14, about a month and a half after my hospital stay, when I had the first CT scan. I have heard nothing from it, so I assume there is nothing urgent. I don’t see the pulmonary specialist again until August 30, a month and a half after the CT scan. Is that a good sign? Someone tell me that’s a good sign.

Aside from whatever may be happening with my nodule, I seem to be OK. I’m walking with no shortness of breath, but neither the dogs nor I feel like going very far. I think Zoe’s feet may hurt because of an allergy of some sort. I am sure my knee hurts because it’s worn out. I expect to get a new one before long, but not before I find out what’s happening, or not happening, with my nodule.

Well, that was interesting

Posted on by

Early last week when I was walking the dogs, I decided to walk back up the mountain at a little faster pace than normal. Since I had recently had a shot in my knee, I was feeling good. I could tell that it had been a long time since I had done anything more than a slow walk. I was breathing hard by the time I got to our driveway, which is steep. I was breathing even harder at the top of the drive, but so what, I thought, it will be good for me.

I tried it again the next day, and I had to stop once or twice. Well, I thought, it will be a process.

The next day I stopped a lot. Not right, I thought. The day after, I could barely get back up the mountain to home. Definitely not right. I called my doctor, and he recommended that I go to the emergency room. That was Friday. I didn’t feel like going, so I didn’t. But Saturday I did feel like going, so I did. And it was a good thing.

I had multiple blood clots in my lungs. They admitted me, and I spent from Saturday night to Monday on a heparin drip. Any time I tried to breathe deeply, my breath caught in my lungs and made me cough, so I was constantly struggling to breathe. I was winded from getting up and going to the bathroom. I spent ten minutes breathing hard to recover. I could barely talk on the phone for gasping for air.

A chest x-ray and a CT scan had shown a lot of little blood clots. Although each was small, they added up to a major load on my heart and lungs. They also found a nodule in one lung. They assured me they would refer me to someone who could follow up on it. They didn’t seem worried.

But I was worried.

I had no pain initially, even when my attempts at a deep breath ended in coughing. Sunday night my back started hurting enough that I asked for acetaminophen, which helped some. But now it was back pain that kept me from drawing a deep breath. The back pain seems to be muscular, rather than associated with the clots. No one in the hospital seemed concerned with the back pain. Maybe every patient has back pain after a few hours in a hospital bed.

By Monday they figured all my vitals looked good enough, so they sent me home with a prescription for Xeralto for the clots and hydrocodone for the back pain. I was pretty much exhausted when I got home. I had not slept well the whole weekend and had missed most of my meals. Plus, getting enough oxygen into my system was hard work. So I took a pain pill and piled up in bed for a nap. Zoe jumped up, gave my face a good washing and laid down next to me. The next hour was a deep, painless, rewarding sleep. I wouldn’t do the hospital stay again for a lot of money, but I would take that nap again just about any time, for free.

I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday. He assured me that I was right to have been worried, because I could have died. He said that since I was active and had none of the normal risk factors, other than perhaps a genetic risk, he didn’t really have any idea why I got the clots. He did say that cancer can cause clots like I experienced. Nice to know that.

He said that the nodule didn’t look like cancer because it was smooth rather than spiculated, that is, looking like it has little spikes on the surface.

Apparently nodules are common in adults. One source said about half of all lung X-rays of adults show a nodule. Also, apparently only a small percentage of nodules turn out to be malignant. Also, nodules smaller than around 9 or 10 mm are less likely to be malignant than nodules that are larger. My nodule is about 10 mm. Not small. Not large. So the nodule is probably not malignant, but there is a smallish chance that it is.

My doctor said that I had weathered the first storm and had come out on the other side. He said taking an anticoagulant reduces my risk of another clot significantly. I am supposed to have an appointment with another doctor soon. They will look at my nodule and decide what to do. A PET scan might show whether it is malignant, and whether there might be other cancers lurking about. They might take a biopsy. They might wait a couple of months and take another x-ray.

I think almost anyone would be at least a little worried at this point. I know I am. I can’t help thinking of my brother, whose doctor discovered his pancreatic cancer when he did an ultrasound on his liver. He found metastases there and in his lungs. I had ultrasounds of my heart, liver and some other abdominal organs. So far no one has said anything about suspicious lumps anywhere but in my lungs, so maybe that’s one worry I should put aside. A PET scan would probably clear that up one way or the other.

I felt pretty good Tuesday, even after visiting the doctor. I can breathe much more easily, I can walk around like a normal person without panting, although I know better than to try to climb the mountain, and I can have a conversation without stopping for air after every word. I can still tell that I’m not getting as much oxygen as my body would like.

In the meantime I have tried to start talking to Leah about what she might do if I end up dead.

I am not a happy person right now. It’s surprising to me how emotional this has made me. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone dies, but not today, right? But this is like feeling a tap on my shoulder, looking around, and seeing a skeletal hand resting there.

Chloë

Posted on by

Our senior cat Chloë has gone to the great catnip field in the sky.

I have posted before about her lymphoma, and the relative success of steroid shots to help her intestines, but in the last week or so she has declined. She had lost about a quarter of her body weight in the last couple of months. She felt like a furry sack of bones. She was eating sporadically, if at all, and apparently not absorbing any nutrition from the food. Leah spent a lot of time trying different cat foods, but nothing seemed to work. Chloë spent all her time on our front porch. We put a kitty litter box out there because she was becoming careless in her elimination habits.

We finally understood that she was in enough distress that ending that distress was the only humane option. So we took her to the emergency vet clinic, four months after we took her son Dusty for the same reason.

We don’t remember when Chloë showed up at our old house. I think it was no more than a year after we moved in, so around 2006. She came complete with three half-grown kittens. Chloë was a gray tabby/calico. Two of her kittens were orange tabbies, and one was very close to Siamese. I find that cats can have different fathers for kittens in the same litter, a phenomenon called superfecundation.

I do not judge.

We tried to give the kittens away, but were only successful with the Siamese. The two orange tabbies became Rusty and Dusty. Rusty died about six years ago from FIV. Dusty died this January from lymphoma. Our other cats, Zoë, Smokey, and Sylvester, have disappeared. Zoë came with Leah when we married. Smokey and Sylvester appeared in our back yard not too long after Chloë showed up. We presume that Zoë was taken by a coyote. We found good evidence that Smokey suffered the same fate. Sylvester has been missing for nearly two weeks, and we hold little hope that he will reappear. A coyote is the most likely answer to what happened to him.

So Chloë was the last of the original six cats. She has been with us so long that it’s hard to imagine being without her.

Chloë will join her son Dusty and three dogs in our growing pet cemetery. I buried my mother’s little dog Lucy out there, then I buried Zeke. I had his friend Zeus cremated some time ago, and I put Zeus’s ashes in with Zeke to keep him company. Chloë always got along with Zeke. Now they will rest close to each other.

Nine and counting

Posted on by

Our second oldest cat Sylvester has been missing for three days. He has a history of disappearing. About three years ago he disappeared for six weeks. He spent part of that time locked up in a neighbor’s garage. He was thirsty and hungry, but apparently none the worse for wear. He has also disappeared several times for one or two days. This time seems different, maybe because we lost another cat, Smokey, to a coyote right in our front yard, and Sylvester roams the neighborhood at night.

We have posted on Facebook, and checked around the neighborhood. The current owners of the garage he spent some time in opened their garage and looked around for us. No luck.

I have not given up hope, not completely. After all, cats do have nine lives. Or at least it seems like this cat has, or had, multiple lives. We are not sure which life he is on, but it’s surely pressing towards nine.

I wondered where the idea that cats have nine lives came from. Most people attribute it to the ancient Egyptians, who had a god called Amun-Ra, which is a composite of two gods, Amun, the creator, and Ra, the sun god. When it comes to cats and lots of lives, the story is that Amun-Ra sometimes appeared with the head of a cat, and that he somehow created eight additional gods, making a total of nine from this one (two) god(s).

This is Amun-Ra, killing a snake, which seems especially appropriate for Sylvester, since he was (maybe is still?) hell on small animals. On the morning of the night he disappeared, I found a partially-eaten small animal on our driveway. A going-away gift?

I don’t think Sylvester ever used a shiv on his prey, although I wouldn’t put it past him.

It seems that a number of other cultures, including the Chinese, had mythology of cats having more than one life, although not aways nine. We are hoping that Sylvester has at least one more life left.

Our other old cat, Chloe, is on her last life, and not doing very well. Our vet diagnosed her with lymphoma, mainly in her intestines. She shows the typical symptoms of lethargy and poor appetite. She has had a couple of steroid shots that helped with the symptoms, but her most recent shot didn’t seem to help that much.

She is an outdoor cat, living most of her life on our front porch. Leah felt sorry for her a few days ago and let her stay inside. Leah had gone to bed, but I was still up when Chloe got the walkies. She ended up in our bathroom throwing up on a rug. Then she threw up in the living room. It was mostly water.

And then she got a urinary tract infection. She used to be a small cat, but now she’s just a bony memory of herself. The vet weighed her when we took her in for treatment. She had lost a pound in about a month, which doesn’t seem too bad, but it was about 25 percent of her body weight. She might disappear before she dies. I think in either case it won’t be too long. .

We don’t want to let here suffer. Our problem is that cats don’t show their pain. We have to try to read her body language when she’s trying her best not to say anything.

Elon and us

Posted on by

We have not had decent internet access for the entire 17 years we have lived on the mountain here. We couldn’t get service over cable because the cable company has gone as far as they care to go, and begging (ours or others) hasn’t convinced them to go further. We couldn’t even get DSL because we are so far from the equipment the phone company needs, plus our telephone cables were laid in the ditch beside the road up the mountain, probably sometime just after the Civil War. We have used our cell service for access, which was sufficient for email and light browsing, but this strange new streaming thing has been beyond us.

That was our sad situation until a couple of days ago, when we got a nice package from Elon Musk. It included the rectangular dish you can see attached to our soffit in this photo.

Aren’t the flowers nice? They just bloomed.

A cable runs along the soffit to the corner at the garage, then up into the attic, down the length of the house, and into a wall, from which it sprouts into a closet in the little bedroom we call our office. There it is attached to a router, which provides us with wifi throughout the house. We can sign into the wifi with our phones, our iPads, our computers, and, most exciting of all, with our television. There the wide world of streaming opens up and allows us to pour thousands of hours of entertainment directly into our television. So far we have watched several episodes of Grace and Frankie. But I’m sure there will be lots of other things we can watch.

Oh, and we can finally update our phone operating system without waiting to connect to the wifi at a restaurant. I’m almost afraid to use it for fear that Elon Musk will change his mind.

The connection process was not a particular problem. It involved climbing into the attic, but the weather was mild when I did it. It involved drilling some holes through top plates and soffits, but it went reasonably well. It involved building a satellite antenna mount, which was pretty straightforward, although I don’t think my approach is a long-term solution.

The satellite system part was painless. I downloaded an app, which allowed me to find a good antenna location by aiming my phone’s camera up at the sky and panning around. The app evaluated any obstructions and decided that my intended location was good. Once I connected the antenna-router cable and plugged the system in, the antenna itself looked around and decided which direction to point. This is pretty typical of the approach that Elon Musk’s companies take: let the system do the hard work. And it worked, just like Tesla electric cars and SpaceX boosters work.

I am not a big fan of Elon Musk. I don’t like some of the things he says or some of the things he has done with his employees, but I have to give him credit, not only for kicking the established automotive and aerospace industries out of their ruts, but also for providing good, high-speed internet to people who otherwise can’t get it. Our speeds went from around 2 Mbps to 33 Mbps measured about ten seconds ago. I have seen more than 40 Mbps, but 33 is literally an order of magnitude better than what we had before. It’s not cheap. We paid $500 for the equipment and the monthly charge is $110, up 10 percent since we put our name on the waiting list last year. I hope this will allow us to get rid of our satellite TV service, which gives us hundreds of stations we don’t watch at a high price just so we can watch the dozen or so stations we do want to watch.

So, thank you Elon.