Cat-astrophe

My cat got sick. At first, he was reluctant to eat. A week later, it progressed to vomiting. I caught him in the act after cleaning up two previous vomit piles, and later that day that he was very reluctant to socialize. He is a snuggler and a food vacuum, so this was very worrisome for me. A friend convinced me to take him to an animal ER immediately, so off we went.

After taking his vitals, drawing a blood sample, and doing an x-ray, I decided to take him home. Poor Tig was freaking out a little, shedding all over the exam room and jumping every time someone touched him unexpectedly. He was more energetic than I'd seen him in days though, so it seemed like he might have been improving. I had instructions to withhold food and water overnight, and isolate him from the other cats.

In the morning, I checked to make sure he hadn't vomited overnight. Since he had been okay, I followed the instructions to feed him a little bit of bland food. He licked the serving spoon, and might have eaten some from the bowl, but in the time it took me to cap the remainder in the can and come back, he had already started to vomit again. So I took him back to the ER.

The out-patient care already failed once, so I let them board him for up to two days. They monitored him, trying to feed him sporadically, but he refused all food. He had no bowel movements, either the night before or the night at the hospital, but since he hadn't eaten anything in at least that long, the doctor was not too concerned. He was peeing normally, since he had been hooked up to IV fluids. This morning, they did an ultrasound of his abdominal region, verifying that there were no obstructions in his gut. The blood work from Saturday also came back fine, ruling out serious kidney and liver diseases.

He's being treated for inflammation of the pancreas currently, as the remaining most likely candidate that's making him sick like this. There's another blood work out to verify if it is pancreatitis. There's not much they can do for him if it really is pancreatitis, only supporting him through the illness with medication to stimulate his appetite, relieve nausea, and promote healthy bowel movements.

I hope my poor kitty gets better and can come home soon.

Park Place

We decided on a name for our house. It is still in renovation. We're still crammed into four little rooms on the first floor, but we have storage now in the barn and in the basement, so we've gotten ourselves settled a little more comfortably. I'm looking forward to the end of spring, when we'll hopefully have the second floor finished. Fingers crossed. :)

Moving, but not grooving

We moved to our new house over the weekend. Everything is crammed haphazardly into the four rooms on the first floor. The hurricane meant we didn't want to risk storing things in the barn, lest they become soaked and damaged. The basement floor was not poured yet either so that storage was also off-limits.

Life is going to be exciting for a while, until we figure out where everything goes. In the meantime, the cats are getting into everything. They seem fairly excited by this, if their energetic little romp at 3am was any indication. I'm hoping we get everything sorted out soon, so that I can go back to getting real sleep, instead of having to wrestle with cats on the bed all night long.

Mercy

I saw a sad thing today. In front of the tire of a parked car, a sparrow was lying on its back, fluttering its wings and kicking its feet. Though it struggled mightily, it was unable to right itself. I noticed that its head seemed to be stuck twisted around to one side, and its tail was mangled at the base.

J tried to flip it over onto its feet, hoping that this would give it a sporting chance at survival, but it was unable to retain its balance. Each time he tried, it toppled immediately onto its back again. J stepped on its head and ended its pain. I watched through its spastic final burst of motion, watched as the blood oozed and bubbled from its head, and stayed with it until it lay still.

May you find safer travels in the next life, little sparrow.

TEDxBoston and Adventures

TedxBoston happened recently. I missed the first session, sat in for the live simulcast for the second, and streamed it from my laptop for the third. There were some really interesting and exciting talks... and some not so thrilling talks... but all in all, I'm really glad I participated.

Prior to the talk, my husband and I went on the Coral Reef Adventure at the New England Aquarium. It was a walking tour of the Aquarium's corals, and the guide told us about how to distinguish live coral from dead (it's harder than it sounds), the types of coral, and everything about corals that an untrained layperson could possibly want to know.

Window to the world

It rained today. Inside my office. There I was, sitting by my big, beautiful window, when suddenly I realize that the pitter-patter of rain had gotten a lot more... intimate. I glanced over and, to my horror, found that splatters of rain had covered half my newly issued laptop. Following the drip to its source, I discovered a veritable lake forming on the ledge between the lower window and the upper window. Sopping it up was actually quite difficult, as any disturbance of the lake would cause a sheeting waterfall to descend upon my desk!

I jammed a wad of paper towel in the offending leaky corner of the window, and put a garbage can underneath it, but the subsequent drip-drip-drip of water falling onto loose plastic started driving me crazy pretty quickly. The people nominally in charge of problems in and around the office building came by to look at it, and told me that the building managers would have to deal with that one, since the leak is not actually in the sealant around the glass, but a deeper flaw in the building's exterior and window frame. Le sigh! I really hope the garbage can doesn't leak or overflow. :(

Corporate Overlords

I got a new job at a much smaller company a few months ago, but then it got bought up by another corporate overlord. *sigh* I wonder if there's some sort of karma that says I have to always be working for some giant megacorp. Of the companies I've worked for, 1 was a megacorp in its own right, and the 2 that weren't got bought up shortly after I joined. Am I a harbinger of acquisitions?

Anyway, everyone is super distracted because we're all getting issued new equipment, and there's a lot of training for it, and so on and so forth. It's pretty tiring to keep track of all this stuff that I have to attend, and I'm totally not getting any work done. It's kind of fun, but mostly I'm finding it irritating. Oh well, that's life under our new corporate overlords. Hopefully things will get less hectic soon.