Coffee heat rising

Angst

Open the Window and Let the Damn Sunshine In!

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Okay. I admit it: my mood has become altogether too goddamn glum. But…helle’s belles. Why not? We have a clown in the White House. California is burning down (and believe me: whither goes California, thither goes Arizona. Every time!). The ice caps are melting. Common sense has gone the way of the dinosaur…which, speaking of thither, is the general direction we can expect our near descendants to go. Hate has become stylish. Our educational system is in the trash heap. Decent jobs are to be had only in China, for those willing to work for prison inmates’ wages. Our idiot leadership and their bigoted fans imagine this will be fixed by blocking cleaning ladies, yard workers, and agricultural laborers from entering the country. You can’t buy a decent cup of coffee for love nor money. And my dog is dying.

Grump!

Somehow I’ve got to find a way to come out of the present blue funk.

This challenge usually involves spending more time around people. Though I must admit, people are not my métier. SDXB and NG wanted me to go with to the Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival, which I really would have enjoyed doing. But some other demand superseded…I believe it was that I had to take the dog to the vet. Again.

Nor, really, could one responsibly have left the poor little beast alone in the house all day.

If I were sane, I’d get off my duff and go for a hike in the mountain park. Except…well…the Phoenix Mountain Parks are no longer what you’d call a joy to visit. They’re SO thumped by the sheer volume of humanity tromping through them that you’d probably do better to go for a walk in a parking lot. Plus with everybody and her little sister yapping on cell phones everywhere you go, the endlessly annoying background chatter has become downright aversive.

Alternatively, I suppose one could accomplish something constructive. That’s always cheering. I could…

• Get the chipped paint on the entry to the living room matched, buy a can of it, and touch up the dinged wall.
• Do the laundry. Wheee!
• Post this week’s The Complete Writer chapter and update the TofC for that thing
• Retrieve the book proposal I left to languish out of brain-banging laziness, find a new potential publisher, write a new cover letter, and send it off.
• Go to the nursery or the Depot and buy some winter flowers to replace the summer blossoms that have croaked over.
• Or better yet, since  I now can’t afford to buy so much as a loaf of bread, beg borrow or steal some flower seeds.
• Figure out how I’m going to get enough coffee to last the rest of the month. Gets more and more cheering, doesn’t it?
• Prune the roses. A thrill a minute!
• Lock up Cassie and take Ruby for a very long walk.
• Bake some bread in the grill.
• Feed a few of the local homeless drug addicts.

Precious few of these are free… I do have some flour in the freezer, I think, so I could make bread. And a mess to clean up… Posting bits of various magnum opi is free, except of course for the web hosting charges. Mailing off book proposals: free, thanks to email…well, except for the associated connection charges, which, we might add, cost one helluva lot more than a couple of postage stamps, even at today’s inflated rates.

Hm. Precious few seem especially cheering.

Think I’ll go sit in the hall closet with the vacuum cleaner and close the door behind us…

My little pal…

 

Black Cloth and Ashes

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Two funerals in the past week or so, and now we have to sing at another on Friday.

California is burning down. Friends who live near or in the fire areas are, if not fleeing for their lives, in an uproar of terror for those whose lives are being upturned.

Yesterday I made an appointment to take Cassie the Corgi in to the vet to be put to sleep. Monday morning. She was in such bad shape she could barely walk, and could not step up over the threshold of the back door without being lifted over it.

Forthwith my son appeared, to argue against it. She was in such terrible shape, though, that I couldn’t take very seriously the argument that she might not be so bad off. He actually offered to pay the $1,000 it would cost to do surgery to remove the supposed tumor on her adrenal gland (without realizing, I think, how complicated and iffy that surgery is).

But…

But today, she’s sprung back! The limp is almost gone (she’s always had a little limp, but yesterday she was crippled). She’s barking again. Though she still has a bit of a tragic expression and she’s still bloated (a sign of Cushing’s disease), she seems relatively…cheerful, I suppose. She’s about 80% of normal.

So…now I don’t know what to do. It’s possible she was injured…maybe her back got twisted while she was being lifted onto and off of the bed. Or maybe something happened that I didn’t observe.

If she continues at 80 to 90 percent, I suppose on Monday I’ll have to cancel the appointment. Or maybe take her in and ask the vet if she can come up with something to treat her. There are a couple of drug treatments for Cushings that can extend a dog’s life. But they have nasty side effects that probably will make her plenty miserable in their own right. So…what? I substitute one horror for another? Why?

Meanwhile, the effort to freeze the supposedly benign tumor off my hand seems to have failed. It’s healed up and the scab has fallen off and it still itches frantically. At night along about 1 or 2 in the morning it starts burning, awakening me with pain radiating up the arm. Lovely. So I guess we’ll have to jump through that hoop again…or actually do surgery on it, after all, which probably is what should’ve been done in the first place.

So…helle’s belles. Who knows?

Doggy Update

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Cassie lives.

I’d put an exclamation point after that, except that she doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about that development.

When I got home from choir around 12:30, she was…uhm…ambulatory. She looked a little perkier. She’d lost the Tragic expression… Now she has the “This Is All Your Goddamn Fault” expression. No kidding: she’s giving me a Look that would curl your toes.

On the other hand, at least “All Your Fault” is better than “Go Dig My Grave.”

So…okay. She’s still alive. She’s still lethargic. But she is moving around to a degree, which is better than she was doing before. Clearly she’s not well. But she seems possibly, perhaps slightly LESS not well than she was some hours ago.

We shall see what happens as the effects of the doxycycline and the Benadryl wear off — if they wear off.

So I have to go sing at Compline this evening, and before then the dogs and I are climbing onto the bed for a little nap, since the human cannot be accused of having collected much sleep last night. Cassie will get fed again before the human exits and will NOT be dosed with any drugs. That will give us 24 hours without dope. If we’re no less miserable then than we are now, the human will take that as a moderately good sign. Then, if we live through the night, it will be interesting to see what state (if any) she’s in tomorrow morning, after 36 drug-free hours…

Thanks to everyone for your kind comments, emails, and phone calls! ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Go to Sleep, My Little Baby

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So after seeming to get better for a few days, yesterday Cassie the Corgi essentially crashed. This poor little dog is terribly sick. She’s not coughing as much, but her breathing is labored and she’s distant — “foggy” is the word for it. Yesterday for the first time she seemed less than interested in food. And she’s barely moving around. At times she appears to be in pain.

Last night I thought she might pass in her sleep, but no. Actually, I kind of hoped that would be the case. If it were me and I could lay me down to sleep and never wake up, that’s the way I’d want to go. This morning she’s still with us, just. But she’s immobile.

So, pretty clearly, tomorrow I’ll have to call the vet and arrange to have her put to sleep. If she lives that long.

Isn’t it odd how the most difficult crises invariably occur on the weekend, when there’s no way to get help? You get sick, the dog gets sick, the cat gets sick: everyplace is closed. When I called the vet’s office yesterday (Saturday morning), a recorded message told me to call one of those chain “emergency” veterinaries. Those places charge  you $1400 just to walk in the door.

And y’know…after spending $1,000 on the present crisis, I just don’t have $1,400. That’s more than my monthly income. It’s well over half of what I have to live on per month. And no, I’m not charging my dog’s demise on a credit card.

Dog, Pool

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Cassie the Corgi: still alive. Vet whose diagnosis I question thinks she has maybe another three months. Could be. She has her ups and downs…except…with each passing day she has more ups than she has downs.

She’s definitely not cured. Still coughing out of the blue…as just now: she’s just sitting there and hoff hoff. Yet before, she couldn’t bark without falling into a coughing frenzy. Now she barks, as before, constantly — and pretty much cough-free.

So I had this idea of tracking her ailment in Excel. Score symptoms on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 10 (back to normal). Observe result:

Hmmmm…. So what we have here starts on September 28 — about three weeks after this doggy ailment began, or at least after it registered as a serious problem in the human’s estimation. She’s really sick at that point and has been for awhile. About the 26th is when I take her off the fluconazole (the fungicidal Valley fever drug) that has made her very sick, indeed. By the 28th, she’s still incontinent, unable to eat, almost inert. Late in the day on the 29th, she revives. Then the next day she shows signs of a UTI…not just incontinence but blood in the urine. She has lost a lot of weight. I continue to dose her with Temaril-P, which contains prednisone; she continues incontinent. Incontinence is a side-effect of prednisone. But she starts to eat as the effects of the fluconozale wear off.

On the 4th I take her off the Temaril; on the 5th the new vet says the urinalysis shows the dog has a UTI; the original vet says the test doesn’t show anything very serious, but the new vet begs to differ, remarking that the numbers are as high as they can get. Vet 1 wants me to put her back on the drugs. I demur. She continues to cough and wheeze, but once regaining her appetite eats robustly. On the 7th I finally decide to cut back the Temaril and on the 8th have the idea of trying Benadryl. At that point she improves significantly, even attaining to a “10” a couple of times. I start the new vet’s doxycycline for the UTI on the 13th (it takes that long to get the results of the urine culture), and on the 14th she hits a “10.” She relapses on the 25th but then rebounds on the 26th. Today her condition has been mixed but never much below an “8.” That, I would suggest, is one helluva lot better than the scores of “1” that occurred on the 30th, the 3rd, and the 5th. She has a coughing spell at 4:00 this morning, but otherwise has been at the 8 to 10 level all day.

So…what? She seems to be trending better despite an occasional backslide. But does that mean anything? If it does, what does it mean?

Well, I guess all this comes under the heading of “we shall see.”

Meanwhile, pool guys have been in and out all week. They spent a full day jackhammering off the plaster. And the better part of half another day cleaning layers of calcium scale off the tiles….

A-N-N-N-N-D HOLY Shit!

Ruby just had a reverse sneeze episode while she was inhaling her doggy dinner and started choking on her food. I had to run to the kitchen (where she’s fed separately from Cassie to keep her from grabbing Cassie’s food) and for GODSAKE had to apply a Heimlich maneuver to save her little doggy life!

IS this EVER going to stop?????????

Well, she seems OK now. They’re both OK now. For the nonce.

Yes. So. The pool guys. The tiles look essentially brand new. I’m really glad I didn’t have them removed and replaced. They not only look great, of course they’re very mid-century modern. Perfect.

And to gild that lily, the guys who came in today succeeded in replacing and reviving the line that will allow me to attach Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner to a pipe in the wall, instead of having him occupy the skimmer inlet. This means that as leaves and flowers are blown into the pool and settle on the water’s surface, most of them will be sucked into the skimmer basket rather than falling to the bottom to be vacuumed up and inhaled into the filter. And that means the filter will stay cleaner a LOT longer and will run a LOT better.

In the course of chatting, I remarked to one of the men that I consider the pool very easy to care for. He said this will make it even easier to take care of. Most of the time, all I’ll have to do is keep the chemicals balanced.

Now that is an amazing concept.

Here’s how the giant bathtub looks at this stage:

And here’s how the not-yet-deceased damn-near-choked-to-death puppy looks just now…

Holy Mackerel! It’s NOT…

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CANCER! To coin a phrase: WTF?

This morning I called the dermatologist’s office to ask if they had the results of the biopsy and whether, even if they didn’t, could we please make an appointment to have this THING on my paw excised because it hurts and it itches and it’s driving me fricking crazy.

Silence ensued. Eventually the office spokesindividual came back on the line: Yes, they did have the results. No, it is not squamous cell cancer, as diagnosed by not one but two medical professionals. It’s “just” (heh) a fairly extreme actinic keratosis. It can be frozen off with the application of iced nitrogen.

Well. Sumbiche.

In the aftermath, comes the weirdest feeling. It’s not “a great weight lifted from your shoulders” (gimme a break!). I mean, puhleeze…after having both boobs lobbed off, I am not frightened by slicing away a small lump from the back of my hand, thankyouverymuch.

It’s more like…

Suddenly, after six or eight goddamn nightmarish weeks, the hassles and the worries and the effing nightmares come to a DEAD STOP.

Abruptly, I realized about two-thirds of the “gotta-do-it-today” To-Do’s do not have to be done today, fuckthemverymuch. It was like…a door to normalcy flang itself open.

Cassie was coughing when she woke up this morning and plainly isn’t well today. Call vet, hurry her over there, rack up another thousand bucks? Maybe not so much. The world didn’t end for me; quite possibly it’s not ending for the dog. Watch dog; see what happens. Open back door: dog flies out like a rocket. If that was Death’s door, she seems not to have minded.

Am I broke? Yeah, I am broke. BFD. I’ve been broke before. Remember the time when I was stockpiling canned goods whenever I could find them on sale? Perhaps that predates my blogging period.

Today I do not give a damn that I am broke.

Today I am not calling the vet yet again.

Today I am not spending another hour or two online with an Apple tech trying to figure out why my MacMail doesn’t work.

Today I am not driving halfway across the city and paying to have the half-baked ID card (NOT) from the Medigap provider encased in plastic.

Today I am not posting a damn thing to Plain & Simple Press.

Today I am not finishing the chapter I was writing to post to Plain & Simple Press.

Today I am not depositing Crystal’s check for the latest paid post I published at FaM.

My son gave me four packages of chicken parts, thighs & drumsticks, which have been residing in the freezer. Remembering these and then remembering, from many MANY years ago when I was a young thang and had a young husband for whom I cooked dinner every evening, an accidentally marvelous chicken recipe that involved braising in a LOT of garlic and white wine and chicken broth after laying slices of lemon across the pieces of dead bird, I thought: I’m celebrating with this.

Trot down to AJs, pick up a bottle of cheap white wine, a new chunk of overpriced cheese, a package of made-in-Italy pasta, and some other delectables.

Drive home. Chow down on freshly made rye bread and overpriced cheese and a glass or two of said cheap wine. And am now about to put the dog and myself on the bed. Whenever we roll out of the sack: it’s on to chicken in garlic (one hell of a lot of it) and wine and Meyer lemon. And…oh, yeah…the rest of the bottle of wine. 🙂

Onward.