Tag Archives: pet

I’ll never be accused of wanderlust…

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A million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I would burn off vacation time to go places and do things. It could be as simple as taking an extra-long weekend at the beach or as involved as heading to the Caribbean or spending the better part of two weeks knocking around Europe. It’s been a decade at least since I used my vacation time to really “go away.”

There are lots of factors intervening. Buying the house put a real stretch on finances there for a couple years. The idea of finding someone I trusted to take care of the various dogs, cats, and tortoise in residence for more than a day or two away was always daunting – and often nearly as expensive as the trip itself if I opted to hire it professionally versus relying on the less budget busting kindness of local friends. Added to that, the recent experience of returning home to find Hershel unexpectedly hovering just short of death’s door despite all reasonable precautions and care has left me more than a little angsty every time I need to leave the house to get groceries, let alone think about being away for days or weeks at a time.

The other insurmountable problem with going places is that when you arrive where you’re going, they’re inevitably filled with people. I can muster up the patience for dealing with the masses in small doses – perhaps the length of a concert – or a bit longer if really pressed. Contending day after day with long tourist lines, jostling for every meal, and a sea of people milling around oblivious to everyone and everything around them simply doesn’t sound restful or relaxing. Maybe I’ll be motivated to do that kind of travel again someday, but 2023 doesn’t feel like the year.

I’ll be using my upcoming time off to launch some strategic day trips to a few of the Mid-Atlantic region’s great used and antiquarian bookshops, get some vetting done for Anya, and otherwise just knocking around the house a bit. It’s not a plan smacking of wanderlust, but it feels like precisely the level of peace and tranquility I need at the moment.

Better than buying magic beans (probably)…

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Having cut my teeth with a cat who was essentially a small dog, I obviously missed some of the fine points of raising felines. After losing Hershel to a urinary blockage, my slightly obsessed tendency towards doing extracurricular reading and knowing things let me down a number of intellectual rabbit holes. One of those research projects led me to discover that most domestic cats tend not to drink enough and hover constantly near a state of dehydration. It explains at least some of what makes male cats so damned prone to urinary tract issues.

Knowing something, having the information, is only worthwhile when it leads to improved decision making, I’d always kept Hershel on high quality dry food. While that most likely wasn’t the outright cause of his demise, it could easily be a contributing factor – and something I’d done unwittingly because at the time I lacked better information.

Now, with a bit of upgraded knowledge, Anya and Cordelia have their own filtered water fountain as well as access to the other strategically placed water bowls around the house. I’ve also opted to augment their kibble with twice daily wet food. They seem to enjoy it and the extra moisture is supposedly to their advantage. Aside from what feels like an absurd price for big boxes filled with three ounce cans, I’m reasonably satisfied it’s better for them overall than the way I use to do things. I will, however, refrain from naming specific brands here because the internet is an utter shitshow of people who want to dive in and criticize every choice and brand if it’s not precisely how and what they do themselves. That’s mess enough on Reddit that I won’t invite the same kind of engagement here.

In any case, the gang is eating and appears to be performing all other bodily functions normally so if nothing else, this change in process meets the baseline standard of doing no harm. I may never know if going over and beyond very basic feeding and watering makes a difference. If it does, that’s terrific and I’ve bought Anya and Cordy a marginally improved quality of life. If it doesn’t, I’m only out some money… and I’d have probably just pissed that away on magic beans or something anyway.

I love them for it…

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Every morning, beginning Monday of this week, between the time my alarm goes off and I flop over to turn on the lights, a certain gray kitten has taken it upon herself to jump up on the bed and give me a headbutt and demand about 45 seconds of ear scratches before she hops down and goes on about her day. Given the trials and tribulations of the last two months, it ranks well up on the list of best possible ways to start the morning.

On Wednesday evening, for the first time, Cordy found the courage to jump up on the recliner to join Anya, who was already well practiced at keeping my legs warm. Through my own twitching, and Jorah’s close quarters investigation, she stayed put until it was time for me to close down the house for the evening. It was a big day for a kitten who was so recently content to spend 95% of her waking hours holed up under my bed.

That this week, among the 51 other weeks of the year, is the one that’s most filled with utter bullshit, it’s been entirely fortuitous that they’ve decided to really make the effort to settle in as full members of the household. Unsurprisingly, they’ve made Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday bearable – and I love them for it.

On cats and making assumptions…

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I’ll hold the major update on Anya until the end of the week, when we’ve met with the ophthalmologist for her follow-up visit and evaluation. Based on the feedback I’ve been getting from her temporary caretakers in Pennsylvania, her eye is looking good and most of the surgical trauma has resolved successfully. Thursday will, hopefully, release her from the daily regimen of a metric shit ton of drops and pills and leave us with something more manageable in terms of ongoing care. 

While Anya has been gone, I’ve had a fair amount of time to work individually with Cordelia. She’s been challenging in her own way and it’s been slow going. We’ve progressed, though, from her spending all daylight hours under the bed to at least some level of comfort in prowling about the house when Jorah and I are awake. If I plop down on the bedroom floor, she’s quick to break cover to come over for pets. In the last few days, she’s even taken to curling up on my lap. 

It’s a big improvement for a cat who six weeks ago was abjectly horrified if I so much as brushed against her. I’m cautiously optimistic that eventually I won’t have to sit on the bedroom floor if I want to interact with her. Getting this cat out of her shell is a real work in progress. I’d very much like to get her comfortable enough that I can reliably lure her in, if only so I can get her first vet visit in the books and get her scheduled for a spay. Even now she’s too likely to bolt to her favorite hiding place to guarantee delivering her up for a scheduled appointment.

Assuming Anya is, in all likelihood, coming home on Thursday, I’m mentally preparing to take a step backwards with both of them. Anya spent six months in the shelter, a month here, and then two weeks with the vet. Getting her reintegrated into the daily rhythm of the household, I’m sure, won’t be instantaneous. Having her back in the mix will be an adjustment for all of us – but I’m ready to get it started and finished. It feels like it’s about time to settle in and enjoy some time together that isn’t an ongoing low-grade medical crisis from day-to-day. Hopefully. 

Not for the faint of heart…

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Anya is scheduled for eye surgery next Tuesday. The plan is to remove some of the conjunctive material currently obstructing her left eye as a result of the repeated eye infections she went through early in life. The underlying eye is mostly undamaged and this operation is intended to remove the existing trouble areas in order to prevent them from eventually adhering to the eye itself. It’s not inexpensive, but it’s work that needs done that should improve both her long term health and her ongoing quality of life.

She’s expected to be discharged Tuesday afternoon with a new round of oral medication and eye drops. Some of these could need to be given as often as every six hours for the first several weeks as she recovers. How a normal person who has a job or any other commitments can arrange to do such a thing is entirely beyond me. I get that the discharge instructions present the optimal course of action, but expecting an owner to be able to pin down a cat and deliver these meds on 16 separate occasions every 24 hours strikes me as perfectly absurd. Each drop, after all, should be followed by a 5-10 minute waiting period, so it’s not as if you could grab her up just 4 times a day and apply everything in a single go. I’m not embarrassed to say that I may have hit the panic button when I caught wind of what the coming weeks could look like. There’s simply no way I could sustain that level of post-operative care for any length of time.

Over the last four or five days, Anya has gotten increasingly combative and has started running away any time I walk into a room. She’s actively avoiding me, cowering, and essentially seeing me as an enemy. With most shelter cats, the advice and expectation is that they’re going to have some amount of time – weeks or months – to decompress and acclimate themselves into their new home. Anya never got that time. Three days after her arrival, I had to start holding her down and pouring meds into and onto her. It’s little wonder she’s losing whatever little bit of trust we may have developed.

Mercifully, I’ve got a friend who helps run a large veterinary practice outside Philadelphia. She’s going to arrange medical boarding for this poor gray fur ball for the duration of multi-time a day treatment. There, the techs will be doing the heavy lifting of keeping up with the schedule seven days a week and the on-staff vets will be around should something need to be addressed immediately. So, as soon as she’s released from surgery, we’ll be taking a short road trip through southeastern Pennsylvania to her temporary home.

Since Anya’s particular flavor of eye infection is often triggered by increased stress, boarding isn’t entirely ideal. It does, however, feel like a better option than having this poor animal at home with me stressing her out and inevitably missing doses of the medication she needs to recover from the surgery in a timely manner. It’s a real devil’s bargain.

I asked the doc yesterday if waiting until Anya was more settled here at home and more comfortable being handled was a reasonable option. He was of the opinion that although the eye isn’t currently an emergency, addressing it was something better done sooner rather than later as it created less overall risk to her sight in that eye.

I absolutely hate the thought of her being gone for two weeks or more, but I hate the thought of irreparably damaging what needs to be a trusting relationship with her even more. I’ve never shied away from getting my animals the best possible medical treatment I could find, but damnit, this one is hard because I don’t have the skills, nor the ability to learn them fast enough, to even be a part of the recovery process. Even if I did, Anya isn’t in the right headspace with me yet to give me the benefit of the doubt.

I know she’s going to be in good hands. The friend who’s helping me by arranging all this for Anya was also responsible for bottle raising Hershel before he came to live with Winston, Maggie, and I. I couldn’t possibly trust anyone more to keep a proverbial eye on my girl and make sure she’s getting everything she needs to get well. Still. The next weeks are going to be tough in a whole different way than the last month was hard. There’s a mile of difference between knowing what’s best and actually wanting to do it. It’s one of those times when the best interests of the animal have to be pressed well above my own selfish desires.

When all this is over, I’ll be putting on a masterclass about the hazards of taking on “project animals” from the shelter. She’s mine now. I’ll see it through. But Jesus, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Lack of supervision…

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Today was the kitten’s first full day at home unsupervised. I was pleased to arrive home to find things more or less in one piece. I was almost expecting furniture to be destroyed, shelves emptied, and every exposed wire in the house chewed through, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. A few things are askew and that seems to be the limit of their adventures today.

Based on the film, I’d guess they spent most of the day loitering under my bed since they didn’t turn up in any of the camera-friendly rooms for large swaths of the day. That’s almost assuredly a harbinger that sometime around 7:30 tonight, one or more cats will go batshit crazy and race through the house periodically with little or no notice.

It occurs to me that living with these girls is a lot like having a new dog in that a tired critter is often a good critter. Since I wasn’t available to make them tired, I’ll pay the price overnight while they entertain themselves. It is, of course, also hard to tire out a cat who isn’t particularly interested in doing anything much beyond laying under the bed keeping an eye out for any unwelcome approaches.

I’m not at all sure I did the right thing by giving them the run of the house. Between Cordy’s determined hiding and Anya’s increasingly determined resistance to being caught when it’s time for her medicine, I wonder if it would have been better to leave them confined in the bathroom. At least there they were easier to corral and handle as necessary. While they’ve proven, so far, to be non-destructive, having the freedom of the house has simply made working with their various needs much more challenging.

As an animal person, I’ve often found myself challenged by making decisions of what, really, is the right thing to do – both in terms of their best interests and my own. Experience informs a lot of those decisions, but sometimes it too is deep, echoey silence.

Still better than the average Tuesday…

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Anya had her first checkup with her regular vet this morning. It was about as successful a visit to the vet as one can reasonably expect from a cat. They caught her up on shots and gave her a once over. Aside from the eye, they didn’t find any areas of concern. She’ll go back in late May for her spay surgery. It was nice to talk to the vet about “normal cat stuff” instead of emergent situations needing immediate and decisive intervention. 

After that, it was a quick trip home to drop Anya off and reset a bit before running off to a couple of appointments of my own. There, we largely talked about things I already know since there were no appreciable changed to anything since the last time I was there. Checking in periodically seems to keep the sawbones at least reasonably satisfied. Plus, it’s nice to get an occasional confirmation that my innards are still plugging along in spite of what I’ve done to them. 

I knocked a few other things off the list while in transit. It wasn’t a particularly restful day off, but it was full of stuff that needed doing. Then again, even if the whole thing had been pissing away time on stuff that didn’t need doing, it would still have been time better spent than the average Tuesday in the office. And on that happy note, the week drives on.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 24 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 24 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Scheduling. Short of hiring an assistant there simply isn’t a mathematical way to give Anya her medication as scheduled on days when I can’t avoid being in the office. I suppose I could take a two hour lunch every day and double my commute to two 40 mile round trips a day. Maybe I could do that for a week or two, but if the meds end up running for a month? Longer? Yeah. No. I’m fairly fanatical about getting these guys the best care I can find, but after all these years and all these animals, I’ve never cracked the code on how the hell to give them medicine every eight hours, or worse, god forbid, every six. At least three times a week there’s a middle-of-the-day dose that just doesn’t happen, so if you’ve worked out a solution, I’m all ears.

3. Russia. Are we really supposed to take a country that rolls out 60-year-old tanks to replace their “modern” armor lost in combat and then uses a manned fighter jet to sideswipe an unmanned drone seriously as a country? That’s before we even consider their questionable standing as a regional power, let alone their once held status as one of the world’s two superpowers. The Russians, like the Soviets before them, have always been a little bit “different.” Maybe it’s just me, but lately the tired old antics of the ailing Russian bear seem to make it much more an object of mockery and scorn than any kind of fear or intimidation. If they haven’t been doing the work to maintain even their most basic equipment in fighting shape, I’m left to wonder what are the chances they’ve had the time, expertise, and money to maintain anything more than the illusion of a strategic deterrence force. 

Making introductions…

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Tonight, we bid hello and welcome to the two newest members of the family. Both were adopted Saturday from Cecil County Animal Services. 

Anya, (AKA Anyanka; AKA Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins; AKA Aud), is a gray shorthair with very subdued tabby highlights. Her age is estimated at 6 months. She’s named for a powerful vengeance demon largely because she clawed through and escaped her temporary cardboard carrier on the drive home Saturday and promptly laid her vengeance on me while I tried to extract her from the truck. She then made a break for it and sent me on a 30+ minute wild goose chase through the garage, only to be apprehended when she snuck into the laundry room for the food I put down as a lure.

Cordelia (Cordy), is a brown tabby and about 3 months old according to the shelter staff. Her name derives from her being attractive, popular, and thus far, entirely untouchable. Her modus operandi for the most part is to burst out of hiding for a mouthful of food or a drink and then retreating immediately back to her spot. I get it. It’s a process.

We’re working through all the usual new home issues, but also fighting a pretty nasty eye infection for Anya. In the last 36 hours it went from a minor concern that we were going to address through the shelter’s vet partners, to being outright alarming to the point that I decided couldn’t wait. As of early this morning, we’re working with the local veterinary ophthalmologist to try getting things under control. I’ve got four prescriptions that’ll need to be given three times daily for the next two weeks. I fully expect to need a blood transfusion by the time we’re done with this effort.

I’m obviously quite insane to take on this project, but with my long history of pets with medical problems, at least I had some forewarning about what I was letting myself into – with absolutely no chance that she’ll just get turned back to the shelter for being too much of a project for someone and thereby further diminishing her chance of finding a permeant home.

For now, our newcomers are sequestered in the guest bathroom until they decompress and now recover. I’m willing to let that phase of things take as long as it takes. Jorah has been interested and makes regular trips back the hall to investigate all the new smells. So far, though, he has been unfailingly polite with not much undue barking or whining.

This wasn’t exactly the plan, but here we are. With no regrets and a whole lot of nerves.

Together again…

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It’s Thursday and I know this space is almost fanatically reserved for What Annoys Jeff this Week. However, the call from the vet’s office this morning to let me know that Hershel’s remains had been returned by Pet Memorial Services effectively pushed every other thought out of my mind.

Another trip to Delaware to bring home a member of the family. That’s the 3rd one of these drives in the last four years. I hadn’t really added up those numbers until last night… though it explains at least some of why this one hit so hard. It’s a lot of punches to the gut across a not very long amount of time.

In any case, Hershel is home now and safely tucked between Maggie and Winston in the living room. That makes for a hard day, but I’m glad to have everyone back under one roof and together again. It doesn’t make everything right in this little corner of the universe, but it’s something.