Home

The cat is home. We'll have to do tube feeding for a while--40-50 ml 4 times a day, and subcutaneous fluids 50-100 ml once a day. The goal is to do the feedings for a while until she starts eating on her own, and the fluids every day for about a week, then every other day for about a week, and then every 3rd day for a week.

We have to take her in to get her bandage around her neck changed every 3 to 5 days (where the feeding tube goes in), and blood work needs to be done again as well--we'll see when that gets done because one doc doesn't want to draw blood since they have to sedate her until at least a week out while another doc wants to do blood work when she's in for the bandage change.

The biggest problem with all this? the fact that the Quazi doesn't even recognize Ivy and so we're having to go through and re-introduce two cats to each other, neither of them likes cats, but they put up with each other. Last night Quazi managed to get Ivy stuck on the bed by guarding the bottom so she couldn't jump off to go to the bathroom. That was a fun time at 4 in the morning.

Elevator

Overheard in the elevator on my way to my office yesterday:

"At one point last night I thought to myself, 'you know, I should really switch to drinking Red Bull and Vodkas now so I won't get drunk.' Obviously I was already hammered."

In other news, I have Ivy sitting on the chair next to me because I picked her up from the E-vet early and have to wait for my normal vet to open. She was meowing a lot which either means "don't take me there", or more recently it's meant "I have to pee now, where's the litterbox? K, thanks" so I decided to stop off at home. Sure enough, I let her out of the kennel and she first headed for the back door (oddly cats that used to be strays and are still indoor/outdoor prefer to go to the bathroom outside instead of a litterbox, no matter how clean the litterbox is). Obviously I didn't let her out, and so she then turned tail and made a beeline for the litterbox. That cat can hold a bunch of urine in her bladder.

Anyhoo, the main point of this post isn't that she's using the litterbox (which is good), but it's more that because since she's gained so much weight on the force fed diet, she's like the really overweight people you see at Walmart--you know, the ones that have to take the little invalid carriages because they can't walk around the store without getting winded? Yeah, the poor cat has to rest after every 8 steps or so because she's getting so worn out. She jumped on the chair next to me and promptly went to sleep for 15 minutes.

well, looks like she's awake, and the vet is open, so I better get her back there.

Sigh...fingers crossed that she can come home soon and we can do fluid treatments here.

Prognosis: Still guarded...I think?

today I dropped Ivy off at the e-vet for the night. Yes we're still taking the cat to the e-vet. She has gained 5 pounds. I gave them a slightly overweight house cat and they handed me back a brine filled butterball. And when I dropped the cat off at the vet, the actual vet himself asked me when we're going to be done with this back and forth thing...sounds to me like they're wanting her out of there just as badly as I want it.

Grocery Store Run

From my coworker:

"We ran out of children's Tylenol, which wouldn't have been a big deal, but of course the baby ends up needing a dose, and the toddler was already awake. So, at 4 in the morning, still in my pajamas, I take the boys with me to the grocery store because the wife is out of town. I'm at the checkout lane and the cashier asks me 'would you like to buy body wash or one of our WOW! items today?' I politely said no but I was thinking 'I'm standing here with 2 kids who are screaming, we're all in pajamas, it's 4 in the morning. NO I DON'T WANT A WOW ITEM!'"

Prognosis: Still guarded

After picking Ivy up from the E-vet this morning and driving her back to the normal vet, and then waiting all day long for the blood test results, they finally came in. The results are far from great (they're all still really high), but they are definitely better than what was expected. The expected result was that the blood work would come back the same or worse than it was yesterday, but thankfully it came back better than yesterday. Yesterday, there were 4 things that were higher than the normal ranges--Potassium, Creatinine, BUN, and Phosphorus. Of those, the Creatinine and BUN were off the charts--as in the machine couldn't even read the levels they were so high. Today, the Potassium and Phosphorus were in the normal range (elevated, but normal), and the Creatinine and BUN were still extremely high, but the values had come down enough that the machine could actually get a reading. This is good news in so much that it means she's recovering...now the question becomes whether she can recover enough to be able to survive without being on the IV drip...plus she has to be able to eat on her own.

Of course it also means that we have to do this normal vet, emergency vet dance until Friday afternoon when they do her next blood test. Here's hoping that that blood test comes out good (or she starts eating on her own by then) since Friday is my birthday and it would doubly suck if she had to be put down then since she is generally considered my cat while Quazi is Shawn's cat.

Prognosis: Guarded

Ivy is at the Emergency Vet tonight. She puked Monday morning at 4 am. Between the time that my inlaws went out for the day (1030 am) and when Shawn came home from work (530 pm), she had thrown up 4 or 5 more times. We figured that the stress of us being gone and then having guests over was a bit much. She proceeded to puke another 4 times throughout the night. I took her to the vet first thing in the morning. They did blood work and diagnosed acute kidney failure and raging bladder infection. She was put on IV fluids and baytril. They called me at 3 pm and said she was doing better, but would need to be transported to the E-vet for observation through the night. I'm then to pick her up at 630 am to transport her back to the normal vet where they'll do another round of blood work to see if her kidneys have recovered at all from the fluids.

If so, then great, she'll recover.

If not...well then...what a birthday present for Shawn. :'(

Shawn

"There are certain things I ask myself every time we go car camping: Why do we always choose the site next to the drunk college kids? Why do those people have a lantern that is as bright as the sun? And if they have that lantern, why the hell are they still wearing head lamps?"

Charles Kuralt

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

EZ Reader

While Shawn worked for NI, he did some candidate hosting. It's basically a situation where NI brings potential candidates for jobs down to Austin for a weekend. Interviews happen on Friday, there's a dinner to attend Friday night and Saturday night, but otherwise the applicants are on their own in a town where most of them have never been. So, NI has this brilliant idea where they'll pair up an employee with a candidate and that employee's job is to make sure the candidate has a good time in Austin. The employees are required to go to the dinners with their candidate (so yay, free meal), but otherwise it takes up the weekend. To sweeten the deal, NI gives the employees "hosting points" which they save up for goods and services (much like all those sales thingies we did in elementary school). Shawn has hosted on and off the entire time he worked for NI (5 years) and never cashed in his points.

Because Shawn's last day with NI was on Friday, he had to cash in all his hosting points. These points totaled enough for a $200 gift card to Fry's Electronics Store.

So Shawn went and bought himself a Kindle-type reader called the EZ Reader (made by Astak). I find this funny because he doesn't usually read books. The reason for getting that specific reader is because it's got some 100 books already pre-loaded on the thing, and it can read 20+ formats (too bad all the books you get on Amazon require that you use the Kindle, and all the books you get on Barnes and Noble require their proprietary reader), and it's Linux compatible...naturally. The best part about the books that are preloaded on the thing are of the variety that Shawn doesn't read, that is, anything that isn't of the O'Reilly technical books variety. I'm predicting that the only full book he'll read on that thing is the user's manual.

Moooo

My coworker was doing some field work the other day, walking down a creek with fenced dogs on either side.

At one point in time he started freaking out because he swore there was a dairy cow in one of the yards, and no matter what people say, he was pretty sure that city code does not allow dairy cows. So he took a picture, and that's when he realized it was just a great dane.

Looks like it's time for a new glasses prescription.

CBS

We're watching last week's episode of The Amazing Race on CBS.com. The video viewer keeps crashing.

After the most recent crash, Shawn has started threatening the viewer with death when it is sleeping.

Hmmm...

Theodore Roosevelt

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.

Debonair

What I learned today:

If you're going to call someone debonair, you should do it to their face.

And don't believe a small company when they say they'll be open 'til 5pm on the Friday afternoon during ACL.

George Burns

Happiness is having a large, loving, close-knit family in another city.