EPIC FAIL

This post is going to have to be a two-parter.

On the first day of the New Year, I already failed at one of my New Year's resolutions: to wit, keeping all creatures in the house, two- and four-legged, alive.

Christmas week, the cat's appetite seemed to be down. She didn't come right away at the sound of my tapping on the can, and she left servings unfinished. (If you knew anything about Demmy, you knew that she did not hold back on food.) On the evening Monday the 29th, after several straight days of her seeming "off her feed", I decided I would call the vet the next day.

Around midnight my husband came across Demmy, lying on her side behind our bedroom door, meowing but unable to move. She was stiff, but wide awake. Oh crap, I thought, she's having some kind of seizure. I paged the vet, wrapped the cat in a towel, and tried to coax her into drinking or eating something. When I told the vet what was going on, at first she said,'bring her by first thing in the morning.' Then she asked if the cat's ears or paws were cold. I told her it was hard to tell since I'd had her bundled up, but maybe a little cold, yes. 'Bring her in now,' said the vet. I was hoping she would say that.

I will spare you the gory details. Feline phlebotomy is not fun for anyone. I was there till 3 a.m. Her blood sugar measured at 14. I don't know what the scale is exactly, but 14 is close to rock-bottom. She would have died that night if I hadn't brought her in.

It turns out that all we did was buy her two more days, which she spent at the animal hospital. They re-hydrated her and got her blood sugar stabilized. She was drinking and peeing, but it was water in, water out. Her blood chemistry was completely out of whack. On New Year's Day, the vet called, having concluded that her kidneys were starting to fail. Not uncommon in cats over 15 years old, even less so in diabetic ones.

I knew last fall, once they said "diabetes", that it was unlikely Demmy would last more than one year. I didn't think it would be so soon, though.

And it was a miserable way to start off 2009. But things can only go up from here, right?

And here's where I stop Part One.

And I resolve not to get any houseplants until after we move back to the mainland.

An Opinion Formed in Twenty-Four Seconds:

Scene: Our Living Room, Friday night. TV is showing the Celtics playing in Cleveland. Husband watching with great interest. I'm doing needlework and checking in to the background noise periodically (i.e., was that a fan in the crowd screaming, or do I need to check on the kids?)

In between stitches...

Me: Honey, is LeBron James the next Shaq?

Him: [starting to decipher my question...]

Me: As in, am I going to hate his guts on principle, regardless of his skill set, because the commentators all sound like they want to fellate him?

Him: Yes.

Me: Okay, thanks Honey.

Well that was easy.