A Month of Kittens!

July 14, 2014 Timothy Sanders

A month ago yesterday we picked up a couple of kittens from the local shelter. I've tweeted a few pictures but I thought it was time to introduce them here on the blog. I also pulled my DSLR memory card and got around to looking through the pictures I took the day they came home.

First off, here's Shenanigans:

And here's Hijinks:

If you like those images there's a bunch more on Flickr

I'll call out them meeting up on that first day:

and wrap up my photo love-fest with a picture of them from just a few days ago:

It's so good to have cats around the house again!

Farewell Schrödinger

January 24, 2014 Timothy Sanders

(sigh) There were days where I worried about posting too many cat pics, or too many cat stories and turning this blog into a "cat blog". Well here we are in 2014 and there is probably some question about why I have a blog at all, as much as I use it. There was only one post in 2013 and it was my post about Heisenberg dying. Now I have to write about Schrödinger dying and it's not just a cat blog it's a cat death blog, which is a hideous idea. But still, I feel I should write something about my best little girl.

Two weeks ago I noticed she was having some trouble peeing and that she generally seems a little listless. I needed to schedule a checkup for her in January anyway so I went and scheduled her an appointment for the following Monday. She seemed better but not 100% on Saturday and Sunday and so I took her thinking she probably had some sort of low-grade illness. The doctor said she was constipated and so they gave her an enema. I had to leave her for most of the day but I picked up her up in the afternoon. She seemed upset, but understandably so and we spent a fairly stressful evening and night with her sleeping alternated with complaints and more … let's just say evacuation.

Tuesday rolled around and she was very listless and I couldn't get her to eat anything. I talked to her doctor, and we confirmed that she had a bladder or urinary infection. Her doctor said the listlessness could be discomfort from the enema as well as pain from the infection so we started her on antibiotics and a painkiller. Wednesday she still wouldn't eat and I was planning on bringing her in to see the doctor in the afternoon but before that she had a seizure. After the seizure she was almost completely paralyzed so I rushed in for the doctor to see. She was dehydrated and her body temperature was low so they kept her overnight on an IV. Thursday she was still cold and they warmed her up but she never really regained consciousness. Best guess now is that she suffered brain damage during the seizure and by Thursday afternoon it was clear she wasn't coming back and we had her put to sleep.

When Heisenberg died I was worried that Schrödinger was going to take it poorly and I thought she'd be very negative about any new kittens. I have to admit she stepped up to the plate and was more than willing to snuggle with Karin like Heisenberg had all his life and she generally did a bang-up job of being the only kitty in the household. We'll have cats again around here again, I'm not sure when but for now we'll get used to being a family of two. We need a bit of a break before having cats around won't be a painful reminder of the two we've lost.

Seventeen years ago I saw this tiny little runt of a fuzzball bossing around all the other kittens and I fell in love immediately. Since then I was privileged to be bossed around the the mouthiest little cat I've ever known and to learn her increasingly intricate little rituals. I learned how to make a fort out of pillows, an armchair and a blanket that she could sleep in when she was cold. I learned when she needed a snuggle, when she needed to be chased up into one of her "safe bases", and when she just needed to sit on the back of an armchair while I read a book. Well, I've made her last fort, I've given out her last piece of crinkly crepe paper to tear up, I've taken my last instruction from my bossy girl, and I've snuggled my last snuggle with my mouthy, smart little sidekick and companion. She's followed her brother off on their last adventure.

Farewell Schrödinger.

State of the (Boy) Cat Address, 2011

January 10, 2011 Timothy Sanders

So about that darn cat. He's diabetic again. We've known that for about six weeks now but it took a month to establish that he was just not going to respond to glipizide this time. At least now I've learned that "Hey I'm going to start peeing in weird places" means "I've got diabetes, check my glucose levels", plus I had the glucose meter on hand. All that means I'm about a week into giving him insulin injections. Hard to say what's that's doing for certain. I haven't done a full glucose curve for him (we're supposed to wait two weeks for his blood chemistry to stabilize), but I have been peeking roughly daily. Truth is halfway between his breakfast and his dinner the numbers still seem bad, which probably means I'll need to up his dosage. But then there's the anecdotal side of it - the pee volume is down (locations are still wrong, damnit cat!), and he's definitely more active since the injections started. I hate to read too much into his behavior when it might be just that I'm watching him more carefully, but this really was a matter of the day I gave him the first injection he was considerably more underfoot and playful that day. So maybe the insulin is giving him good numbers for a big chunk of the day, and just at the nadir between injections the numbers are bad again. I'm no expert …

For reasons I don't quite understand, the doctors insist that there's no interaction between any of these diabetes treatments and the Metacam (for his walking). Which I would believe – it's not that I don't trust them – but the thing is that the reason I thought there was an interaction was that they told me there was back in 2009 when all of this diabetes & walking stuff started. As far as I can tell they didn't want to start him on Metacam while he was having diabetes because kidney function is weird in diabetics. But now that we know Metacam is OK with his chemistry it's OK to add the glipizide or the insulin on top of the Metacam - even though they weren't willing to add Metacam on top of glipizide before. Either that or something new is known in 2011 that we didn't know in 2009. I'm not sure which.

At any rate, that's the deal now. He still gets his Metacam syrup every three days and he gets a shot of insulin with every meal. I was dreading that but the truth is that he doesn't notice the needle. He appears to think it's normal for me to pet him after each meal and so he's more than happy to come over and sit with me and get the shot.

Of course, the first time I won't be around at the feeding I'll have to convince Karin that the needle isn't "gross". We'll see how that goes …

Carpe Diem, the Cat Version

February 4, 2010 Timothy Sanders

One of the stranger artifacts of working from home is that Heisenberg has decided that I should throw his little ratty ball-toy down the hall at least four or five times every day. He has a special little cry that amounts to "Hey, come play with me" that he often makes while holding the ball in his mouth to get my attention. What's funny is that he makes the same call sometimes when he just wants me to watch him play with the ball and doesn't actually want me to do anything. Sometimes I can just talk to him about what he's doing and sometimes I need to come throw the ball myself. I haven't been able to figure out the difference so far. My first reaction is sometimes to be annoyed and to say "Hey I'm working here". It takes a conscious effort to remind myself that he won't be here ten years from now and I won't care about what esoteric Python feature I was reading about, but that I will remember the two minutes I took aside to play with one of my cats. Which is weird because I'm used to thinking that Heisenberg is a stupid little idiot but sometimes he reminds me that I can learn from him. Speaking of which I hear him calling now. I'd better go throw that scruffy little ball of junk down the hall for him while I have that privilege.

About that Cat Blogging

October 19, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Has it been two months since my last blog about Heisenberg's health? It has! (And there were only eight posts in the last two months. Meh. I've been busy.) But I've been delinquent in posting about the goober and that's especially a shame because we had good news. The funny thing is I posted that last post on August 17th. Well, that 21st was his monthly "glucose curve" where I checked his glucose level every two hours for twelve hours. Now remember, I said something from 80 - 170 mg/dL was "normal" for cats and he was considered "managed" at numbers around 250. Well that Friday his numbers were between 67 and 88. Yes that's right his numbers are now low. See cats can go into spontaneous remission from diabetes and just start producing insulin again. Nobody really knows why. So yeah, he hasn't taken glipizide for about two months now. I still spot check him occasionally and I haven't seen anything higher than 87 mg/dL in that time. He still had the neuropathy walk and I eventually asked the vet about it (and about the possible vertebrae fusion). What they originally said is that any treatment for that would interfere with the glipizide and we couldn't do that. So now he's on a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory called Metacam. Metacam is a scary thing to Google for felines: it's not approved for cat usage in the US, and it can cause renal failure. So I watched him really carefully as we started him on it. It definitely makes a big difference in his gait. He's not walking like he did last year but he's faster and more agile on the Metacam than not. Just to keep the roller coaster going last week he started peeing inappropriately again, and I immediately thought "Well crap, that could be renal issues with the Metacam" so we took him into the vet Saturday so they could get a urine sample and do some tests. Word is that he's doing just fine, all of his levels are what we want to see and he can stay on the Metacam. So he's just peeing on the floor to spite me. (sigh) I did rearrange his access to the litter box to see if that made him happier, we'll see over time. Anyway, the main takeaway is that he no longer has diabetes which is good. He's on a medicine which has been bad for some cats and you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence about cats who couldn't take Metacam on the internet. But that's not science, and my anecdote is that he seems to love taking the Metacam - he'll even come over and sit in my lap while I'm obviously holding the syringe (it's a syrup that you squirt into his mouth). He's got stable levels in his blood and he's been taking it long enough that it was going to cause problem it would have by now. We still have to keep a close eye - if he got sick from something else that could break the equilibrium and then we could have trouble. But for now he's a solid little guy and he may not have to go back to the vet for another four months. Which is a good thing.