More Cat And People News

I tried to post an ad for a shirt that says "Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris" on fb and was denied. It depicted a tabby cat in Rosie the Riveter regalia and pose.

 We have a Slack channel for cat people at work. Several of my favorite cats were affected by the layoffs that concluded yesterday. It's been so deeply sad. Half of my girl band was laid off -- people who I never thought would leave unless they wanted to. One of the company's biggest cheerleaders, who is like the beating heart of the factory, also left. It's the end of an era in a certain way. Everybody feels it. Yet our current forklift is our most popular model yet.


Amidst all of this crud the boy cat's doctor prescribed Orbax, which worked on his sinus infection previously, and he is officially bouncing back. Two days ago I was thinking dire thoughts about how he could barely breathe through his tiny nose, and today he is running around (literally) smelling things. It's obvious that he can breathe better. He's trying to bite his papa's chin, and he started trying to chew my hair. I'll take it! Such a relief.


This is the week of testing. I was not worried going into the PET scan, because I can tell that mrguy feels better. He's still hella weak, but no more coughing (some of his lymph nodes that were affected were behind his lungs, and that might have been the culprit). This week we had a PET/CT (mid-skull through mid-thigh) on Wednesday, he had a CT (abdomen to mid-thigh on Friday. Today we take the long drive for labs prior to having chemo on Monday, supposedly. The results of the PET are already in, and I feel optimistic. There are good words, like "resolved" for some of the things that had been cancerous. The brain blood clots seem better? Basically what you don't want to read is that there is uptake in a certain area, because that means there is cancer.
This is esophageal cancer, so that's the primary location. But in his case it's not a single tumor -- his version of EC is diffuse, and it had traveled pretty far away by the time we found it. That’s why it is considered Stage IV. And that will continue to be his stage, even if some day he is found to be NED (No Evidence of Disease). 

New news hot off the press is that the lymph nodes in his neck now seem clear. His esophagus still looks funky but "The previously identified uptake within the distal esophagus is not seen today". That sounds pretty good. And this: "Compared to the prior exam, there has been interval resolution of the previously identified hypermetabolic activity within the distal esophagus, mediastinal and right hilar lymph nodes as well as retroperitoneal lymph nodes. Today, no worrisome FDG avid lesions are identified." That would seem to indicate that there aren't tumors. But he didn't really have tumors, so we'll see what the doctor says when we talk to him on Monday.

My aggressively laid-back husband says "Let's leave it to the experts", and so we will.

The Seemingly Indestructible Cat

That big boy keeps ticking. 

In addition to mrguy's health situation, we've also been managing cat things. Our sweet boy has had a series of sinus infections, and then paw cancer. He had surgery to remove the thing on his paw and biopsy it. I took him out of his cone during breakfast and he savaged the incision and ripped out the stitches in a matter of seconds when we looked away for a sec.

Then we took him back to the doctor and she wrapped the paw. Mr boy was not happy -- stump, drag, stump drag, and we replaced the bandage a few times. Much to the surprise of the doctor, it started healing.

During this month he's had 3 regular vets and an oncologist because it's summer. Pet guardians, do not let your charges need complicated care during vacation season. Oy.

In the middle of this the respiratory thing came back and so he's being seen for that also. Cerenia and fortiflora usually do the trick but are not doing the trick. Now we're on a nasal steroid. The vet we started with is back from her vacation (she went on vacation after she did the biopsy. then we were seen by another of our vets who was one day away from her vacation, and then she handed off to our regular regular vet, then back to our vet #1).

Last week vet #1 handed off to the oncologist. She'll handle his respiratory thing and the oncologist will do the cancer. But first the oncologist wanted to do a second opinion on the slides. I got close to crying but did not while wrangling this.

Our regular vet is a client of Lab X, where the biopsy samples were being held. The oncologist uses Lab Y. Our regular vet is not a client of Lab Y, that needs the slides. Our regular vet said that the oncologist would handle the situation once I call them and ask for it to be done, and I gave my permission to our vet to release the slides to the oncologist. The oncologist said that they were not allowed to transfer the slides to Lab Y. I had to figure it out. Lab Y said that I needed to call my regular vet, find out where the slides were, and then...I dunno. I said that I'd pay for whatever and deliver whatever, as long as I knew what the steps were.

I called the vet. One of my friends at the front saw my caller ID and picked up. Oh thank goodness. She consulted with her manager and the manager untangled the mess. They got the slides in a few days, and on Wednesday I left work, drove to the vet, picked up the refrigerated package, took it to the oncology office (about halfway back to work), drove home and was back online working in about an hour and fifteen. The traffic gods were with me, somehow.

The next day I get home and mrguy tells me that there were actually supposed to be *two* packages of slides. The vet was sorry for the mistake and were going to drive the package to the oncologist for us.

I'm writing this down mainly because it's insane and I want to remember. But here's where it gets weird.

Our boy has a history of weird lymphatic system stuff. When he was five or six, the lymph nodes under his jaw started to swell. They took needle biopsies and weren't able to tell why they were swollen. They didn't seem to be painful but they were a bit disfiguring. They decided to remove them and biopsy and they never figured out why he had big old lymph glands.

Which brings us to today. The oncologist called yesterday to discuss the results of the second opinion on the slides. They're sure it's cancer, but that's all they know. They want to do more tests on the slides (an $800 value). Know that I have spent more than that in the last week on my kitten of gold. I asked "How would what you learn from the test change how you treat him?"

She tells me that their whole office is intrigued. As you can imagine, our boy has a fat file of info related to his crazy lumps and other medical history. She does say that this is a cancer, but the kind of cancer it appears to be moves quickly. In the month we've been dealing with it, more bumps should have been appearing. Not our boy. She thinks that it might be related to the same "disease process" that he had in his lymphatic system.

How's his appetite? Really good.

How is he feeling? Aside from the sneezing, he's feeling pretty well. The steroid nose drops are helping a bit. And he really does seem to be perking up.

What about the paw? It's healed, finally, but we have him in the cone so he doesn't rip into it again.

We've decided to watch and wait. Oncologist wants to see him in a few weeks, and we will take it from there. Gratuitous cat photos below:    

Hey Brenda / Shannon

I'm sorry. 

Sorry that I was a 90s cackling mean hyena about you. Being a star probably sucks. I bought the zine that said it hated you.

You did not deserve that.

Was I jealous? Certainly.

It definitely wasn't worth it because I did not know you and you did nothing to me. I lived for outrage and irony and 90210, and now I get to live with the memory of my meanness. 

I'm sorry that you suffered. Nobody deserves that either. 

In the end I was rooting for you.

Umeshu Update

Just in time for the July basho, the umeshu is ready. I had made it once before and it was flavorful but not tasty, so I made this batch with a fair amount of skepticism. And I was pleasantly surprised.

This batch has recently turned slightly amber. Clam and I had some last week and pronounced it delicious.

fyi: I tried portrait mode for the photo and it looks so teensy, but is not. Those are full sized ume (think green Japanese apricot) and there used to be 750ml of shochu in there.

Bear City

We are big fans of SNL. To this day. And we keep saying that we'll put together a playlist some day of our favorite bits. Some of our favorites are pretty obscure, and they're part of our family language.

Example!

The last time we visited the neuro opthalmologist, we exited through this door:

and mrguy said "Thank you for visiting Bear City".

Which is funny to nobody but us.

Bear City was a series of little films on SNL a jillion years ago about bears doing banal things in a world of bears. Maybe 30 seconds worth of things, bracketed by an intro and outro narrated by Fred Willard.

I can't seem to locate a clip of my favorite, about a bear whose wife calls down to the bar and tries to get her husband to come home. If you substitute bears for humans, it reminds me of my parents in the 1960s. 

And bar but not bear related, while we were visiting our family in 1980 we needed to find one of our cousins, who had left the house a while earlier. Our family lived in a tiny town in New York where nobody locked their front door or their cars. This town was able to support three bars, however. One was the Bucket of Blood, one was Gallagher's (I think) and I can't remember the third. Anyhoo, the best way to find one of our cousins was to call one of the downtown bars, since everybody knew everybody. One cousin calls the bar and finds a sibling there, who talks to him, puts down the phone, goes outside, comes back in and says "Well I'm downtown and I don't see him". 

Thank you for visiting Bear City.

The Coat

There's a mystery jacket in the front closet, clearly left by a visitor. It is not ours. 

It does not belong to that nice boy.

It does not belong to our bandmates.

It does not belong to the precious nephew, but while I was showing it to him I reached into the right hand pocket and found this well-loved commemorative beer koozie.

Mazel tov, Jeremy and Danielle!

We do not know Jeremy and Danielle.

Broadening the search, neither do any of my FB friends know Jeremy and Danielle.

And at first, my prodigious research skills did not help me locate the happy couple, either, which was frustrating because I knew I should be able to find them.

Archives of The Knot do not go back to the year of Jeremy & Danielle's wedding (which I photoshopped out of the image).

I looked in newspapers.com and ancestry and familysearch, just because I wanted to see if I could identify them.

Then it occurred to me that while a beer koozie might list the groom's name first, the name on a wedding site is more likely to start with the bride's name. Duh. When I tried that search with the date of the wedding there was precisely one hit, for a photo booth session, that must have been "our" Jeremy and Danielle.

Such an adorable couple!

I still do not know them. Nor, giving a look at the hundreds of photos of their friends and family wearing festive crowns and hats and mustaches and making silly faces for the camera, do I recognize any of the guests. None of the guests was wearing the coat, which was much too casual for the occasion.

I now know the email address of the photo booth vendor, which takes me one step closer to Jeremy & Danielle. But really -- what am I going to do? I'm not going to ask the guy if he's still in touch with Jeremy & Danielle who had a wedding many years ago who might know a guy whose coat is in my closet. For all I know Coat Guy got the koozie in a white elephant exchange and is completely unrelated to the happy couple.

As a last resort I sent an email to our old contractor to see if it's his. We are such hermits. Other than the electrician and the plumber and the contractor, who has been to our house and could have left it here? UPDATE: not his.

In the meantime, I kinda like the coat for those cool foggy nights on the lanai. 

Maybe I'll keep it.

Happy Days

There has been brightness this week. Mrguy has been off chemo in preparation for his eye surgery, but then it didn't happen yet and I hope for chemo this week. His mood is brighter, he's been less sleepy and it's been nice to spend time together. He watches baseball and I sit nearby communicating with the world and learning new things as all introverts do, on the computer.

Oh look! What I'm doing now!

We just had visits with that nice boy on Saturday and with Cack and Blick yesterday. It was rejuvenating to just hang out and be normal with old friends. And there were baked goods. That nice boy brought coconut bars (recipe c/o Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk), and C&B brought an entire effing chocolate cake. Mrguy was pro on both accounts! Tomorrow we have a visit from one of our nephews.

In the meantime, there have been other pleasant things. Today we woke up to lots of fog, and the heat has subsided.

We just finished an omelette made with only green eggs. Our friend Junior gives us the ones with funny shapes because she knows we appreciate them:

Yesterday I went to the market and there was much joy. I am filled with love when I see the little touches made by the young ladies who work the cash registers and wear rock tshirts. Clearly they were in charge of the chalk when this sandwichboard was made. I told them I loved it, and they were so happy that at least one person got the Korn reference. Note the potato doorstop in the background, and then the close up in which I bring you a favorite thing -- when the potato doorstop gets super floppy. This potato-as-doorstop is a tradition that predates the young ladies.

Another bright spot in the week was taking Tiger Brown to the drive-thru car wash. When I went with M&R the other week the $7 three color foam car wash had no colors. On the way out I mentioned the lack of colors and suggested to the man operating the car wash might want to check the soap colors in the drive-thru because in the words of M&R I am "a crazy white lady". Guessing they were mortified. 

This week I chatted him up about his day and we talked about how you're not supposed to go through the drivethru if you have certain kinds of roof racks (i.e. don't take your construction truck through the wash -- it tears stuff up). Noted!

On this fine day all 3 colors of foam were represented. Man, I love the car wash and the three color foam. Pretty recent realization. Also this place is super old school and budget. It won't always be there, so I will enjoy it while it is.

Finally, I had a few moments in the garden yesterday and gathered some bits in order to make a flower arrangement. This little cast iron planter is probably my favorite thing from my grandmother's and my mom's house. It's just the right size for putting on the shelf with a bunch of mismatched foliage. Sometimes I don't exactly hit it out of the park with my composition, but whatever. My friend J's lavender helped perk things up and then I went straight for the suburbs with geranium.

There is one day of the weekend left, and I'm glad that it is here. It's going to be a busy week.

Musical Knives

Years ago when we were in Aukland, our friends took us to a restaurant called Musical Knives, run by a guy who had been Madonna's tour chef. I always wondered about the name.

Today I was served a spammy FB post about musical knives. Who knew? I did an image search, hoping to post the original here, and found really interesting information at V&A (love their cataloging!!) and you can listen to some of the music on the knives here.

Cat Litter

The big glamour boy is back from his latest vet visit. He has paw cancer. After he chewed his paw and opened his stitches (again) they started wrapping the paw. It finally started healing, and I'm super stoked. 

Of course now his sneezing problem has reasserted itself. About once a month he goes on antibiotics and probiotics and it clears up.

There's always a catch with the vet. They treat us and our cats fabulously -- really. And I give my free forklift theme park tickets to our friends at the front desk because a) I don't use them and b) it makes me happy to see them happy. We have known them since they were young adults and now they are adult adults. They cried with us when Nose died, and one of our friends invited us to her wedding (which happened when mr guy was first sick). One of the doctors recently admitted that we are some of her favorite patients and that she still has a picture of Nose above her desk. These are our cat people.

With that said, there is always a catch. Like recently when they said that the big glamour boy would have to come back every 3 to 4 days to have his paw re-wrapped and seen by the doctor. It worked out fine, but I worried at first about how I'd manage to come back in that frequency and do all of life's other stuff.

The catch last time was a good one. The doctor came out and said "I have some good news, for once." That really threw me for a loop. The good news being that she and the big boy's other main doctor looked at his paw and agreed that it was forming granulating tissue, which is vet-speak for healing. He would need one more wrap and then he'd be free to walk about the cabin.

He still has cancer, but this was good news.

This time the catch was that his paw is looking good but we need to not use clumping cat litter and preferably use torn up newspaper for the cat boxes, and he'll be seen again on Tuesday. This visit was free. So mrguy and I cut up the Sunday Times and I decanted the clean litter from the cat boxes into the box downstairs which we will now not use for the next week.

Operation cat box is complete for now. Unless they balk. We'll see!

In the meantime, while researching the proper way to tear newspaper for cat box puttin', I found instructions on how to make litter pellets from newspaper. It is so hot right now in the aku room that I'm sure it would not take long to accomplish this. Gets my crafty nerves tingling just thinking about it, and should I endeavor, I will certainly post.

In the meantime, the big glamorous boy is sleeping on his future toilet.