Author Archives: Mark P

Randomness

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It’s been a while since I last posted, but, fortunately, not much has been going on. Leah is still having pain issues. I am still here. The dogs are still here. And one cat is still here.

Fall has fallen here. We have had lows in the lower 30’s. Thursday morning it was 39F, a little warmer than the previous night. One of the people I see on my dog walks stopped Thursday morning and told me they had 29F and lots of frost in the valley. Leah still hasn’t quite internalized the temperature workings of a mountain top. It seems counterintuitive, but on the coldest, stillest, clearest nights, it’s not unusual for us to have lows 10F higher than at the base of the mountain.

I have been semi-busy trying to get firewood for colder weather. I was afraid we were going to fall short, but it looks like maybe we won’t. A large hardwood that smells like an oak fell last year down the hill from the house, and has been seasoning in place ever since. I took my old Mule — the Kawasaki type rather than the four-legged type — down to cut some wood. It’s a rough ride down, and a somewhat concerning turnaround because of the slope. Here the Mule is, waiting patiently for me to cut and split some wood.

The photo is a little misleading, because the slope of the hill is not really obvious, but I was pointing the phone camera pretty much level, so, aimed below the Mule. The slope is steep enough that it’s kind of hard to walk on.

There is a stump just below the left rear wheel of the Mule. That was a standing dead tree I cut on Wednesday. The top of the tree got caught in a fork of a nice-size green tree and wouldn’t let the dead tree fall any further. I had to cut the green tree, which I don’t like to do, to get the dead one down. They both resisted, but I managed to get both on the ground. Unfortunately the standing tree had been dead for a while, and was pretty rotten in the middle. The tree I was originally working on has also been dead for a while, but most of its soft, punky wood in in about the outer inch, leaving some nice, hard wood on the inside.

That kind of wood makes me think of my brother, who would have loved to get some of it for his shop.

Here is our current hardwood supply in one of our firewood racks.

It’s nearly half full. There is an empty rack the same size behind it, and a third rack almost filled with pine as well. I don’t like to burn pine, but I was afraid that’s all we would have, so I got some.

I’ll get more Friday, when this should post. Eventually I think I will have to make a new rack for the hardwood, but that’s a problem for another day, one when I actually have a truck to haul material.

I couldn’t get firewood without the Mule. It’s 13 years old, and has done a lot of hard work. It wouldn’t run last summer. I replaced the carburetor twice before I discovered a leaky fuel line coming out of the gas tank. Now it looks pretty rough, but it runs well. I wouldn’t buy a 13-year-old UTV like the Mule, and I wouldn’t sell it either.

But about that Fall. We have several patches of morning glories around the yard, slowly fading away. They’re a messy plant, but I leave them because I like them. Unfortunately, ours don’t have much in the way of blooms. Here is one by the driveway.

That’s my finger pointing at the flower. It probably looks impressive to an ant. And here is one down across the corner from our lot.

Why don’t these grow in our yard?

Speaking of yards, our front yard has been mowed only once this summer. I chose to plant zoysia specifically because it looks good unmowed. It’s deep, probably eight inches at least. Sam is up to his knees in it. Zoe finds it comfortable for a quick nap.

The grass is actually greener than it looks here, but it’s on its way to brown. Once it’s fully browned, I’ll mow it short so next year’s grass won’t have to fight its way up.

And, finally, it’s stinkbug season here. They light on sunny surfaces and window screens, and sometimes they come inside. They are not particularly troublesome, but they are a pest. I was glad to see this on Thursday night.

It’s a granddaddy longlegs eating a stink bug in our garage. Granddad’s body is the short oval on top, and the defunct stinkbug is the longer, horizontal oval on the bottom. I didn’t know granddaddy longlegs preyed on stinkbugs, but now that I do, I’ll be especially careful of them.

And that’s the news from Lavender Mountain.

Excitable dog they all said, plus an update

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Our dogs love to go for car rides. I don’t know why. The only place they ever get to get out of the car is at the vet’s. But they get excited when they figure one of us is leaving.

Zoe gets excited enough for both dogs, with some left over for a third dog, should we ever decide to get one. She knows what the door handle is for, although not how to use it, and she knows where her leash is. She thoughtfully points out both to me, just in case I have forgotten.

She is extremely sensitive to whatever signals we send unconsciously when the possibility of an inkling of an thought surfaces about taking the car somewhere. She seems to know we’re going to go at just about the same time I do.

She ran over Leah’s foot in the last clip. Leah is expected to make a full recovery.

I usually remotely open the sliding side door on our van before I let the dogs out. This is about the only time I ever let Zoe go ouside off leash. She runs directly to the car and jumps in. Sam, ever the polite dog, runs to the door and then stops. He needs to be invited before actually jumping in.

I don’t let Zoe jump out of the car off the leash. The last time I did that she led Sam down the driveway and up the street for a vigorous 15-minute workout.

I have forgotten where we went on this particular trip, but it’s the same routine for every ride.

And now the update on the as-yet-unresolved story of my lungs. I saw a vascular specialist on June 23, then a pulmonary specialist the next day. They were all reassuring. Everyone is reassuring. So far.

The regular practice for lung nodules such as I have is to watch them to see whether they grow, assuming there are no immediate indictions of malignancy. That’s what they are doing to me. I had a CT scan on July 14, about a month and a half after my hospital stay, when I had the first CT scan. I have heard nothing from it, so I assume there is nothing urgent. I don’t see the pulmonary specialist again until August 30, a month and a half after the CT scan. Is that a good sign? Someone tell me that’s a good sign.

Aside from whatever may be happening with my nodule, I seem to be OK. I’m walking with no shortness of breath, but neither the dogs nor I feel like going very far. I think Zoe’s feet may hurt because of an allergy of some sort. I am sure my knee hurts because it’s worn out. I expect to get a new one before long, but not before I find out what’s happening, or not happening, with my nodule.

Well, that was interesting

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Early last week when I was walking the dogs, I decided to walk back up the mountain at a little faster pace than normal. Since I had recently had a shot in my knee, I was feeling good. I could tell that it had been a long time since I had done anything more than a slow walk. I was breathing hard by the time I got to our driveway, which is steep. I was breathing even harder at the top of the drive, but so what, I thought, it will be good for me.

I tried it again the next day, and I had to stop once or twice. Well, I thought, it will be a process.

The next day I stopped a lot. Not right, I thought. The day after, I could barely get back up the mountain to home. Definitely not right. I called my doctor, and he recommended that I go to the emergency room. That was Friday. I didn’t feel like going, so I didn’t. But Saturday I did feel like going, so I did. And it was a good thing.

I had multiple blood clots in my lungs. They admitted me, and I spent from Saturday night to Monday on a heparin drip. Any time I tried to breathe deeply, my breath caught in my lungs and made me cough, so I was constantly struggling to breathe. I was winded from getting up and going to the bathroom. I spent ten minutes breathing hard to recover. I could barely talk on the phone for gasping for air.

A chest x-ray and a CT scan had shown a lot of little blood clots. Although each was small, they added up to a major load on my heart and lungs. They also found a nodule in one lung. They assured me they would refer me to someone who could follow up on it. They didn’t seem worried.

But I was worried.

I had no pain initially, even when my attempts at a deep breath ended in coughing. Sunday night my back started hurting enough that I asked for acetaminophen, which helped some. But now it was back pain that kept me from drawing a deep breath. The back pain seems to be muscular, rather than associated with the clots. No one in the hospital seemed concerned with the back pain. Maybe every patient has back pain after a few hours in a hospital bed.

By Monday they figured all my vitals looked good enough, so they sent me home with a prescription for Xeralto for the clots and hydrocodone for the back pain. I was pretty much exhausted when I got home. I had not slept well the whole weekend and had missed most of my meals. Plus, getting enough oxygen into my system was hard work. So I took a pain pill and piled up in bed for a nap. Zoe jumped up, gave my face a good washing and laid down next to me. The next hour was a deep, painless, rewarding sleep. I wouldn’t do the hospital stay again for a lot of money, but I would take that nap again just about any time, for free.

I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday. He assured me that I was right to have been worried, because I could have died. He said that since I was active and had none of the normal risk factors, other than perhaps a genetic risk, he didn’t really have any idea why I got the clots. He did say that cancer can cause clots like I experienced. Nice to know that.

He said that the nodule didn’t look like cancer because it was smooth rather than spiculated, that is, looking like it has little spikes on the surface.

Apparently nodules are common in adults. One source said about half of all lung X-rays of adults show a nodule. Also, apparently only a small percentage of nodules turn out to be malignant. Also, nodules smaller than around 9 or 10 mm are less likely to be malignant than nodules that are larger. My nodule is about 10 mm. Not small. Not large. So the nodule is probably not malignant, but there is a smallish chance that it is.

My doctor said that I had weathered the first storm and had come out on the other side. He said taking an anticoagulant reduces my risk of another clot significantly. I am supposed to have an appointment with another doctor soon. They will look at my nodule and decide what to do. A PET scan might show whether it is malignant, and whether there might be other cancers lurking about. They might take a biopsy. They might wait a couple of months and take another x-ray.

I think almost anyone would be at least a little worried at this point. I know I am. I can’t help thinking of my brother, whose doctor discovered his pancreatic cancer when he did an ultrasound on his liver. He found metastases there and in his lungs. I had ultrasounds of my heart, liver and some other abdominal organs. So far no one has said anything about suspicious lumps anywhere but in my lungs, so maybe that’s one worry I should put aside. A PET scan would probably clear that up one way or the other.

I felt pretty good Tuesday, even after visiting the doctor. I can breathe much more easily, I can walk around like a normal person without panting, although I know better than to try to climb the mountain, and I can have a conversation without stopping for air after every word. I can still tell that I’m not getting as much oxygen as my body would like.

In the meantime I have tried to start talking to Leah about what she might do if I end up dead.

I am not a happy person right now. It’s surprising to me how emotional this has made me. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone dies, but not today, right? But this is like feeling a tap on my shoulder, looking around, and seeing a skeletal hand resting there.

Chloë

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Our senior cat Chloë has gone to the great catnip field in the sky.

I have posted before about her lymphoma, and the relative success of steroid shots to help her intestines, but in the last week or so she has declined. She had lost about a quarter of her body weight in the last couple of months. She felt like a furry sack of bones. She was eating sporadically, if at all, and apparently not absorbing any nutrition from the food. Leah spent a lot of time trying different cat foods, but nothing seemed to work. Chloë spent all her time on our front porch. We put a kitty litter box out there because she was becoming careless in her elimination habits.

We finally understood that she was in enough distress that ending that distress was the only humane option. So we took her to the emergency vet clinic, four months after we took her son Dusty for the same reason.

We don’t remember when Chloë showed up at our old house. I think it was no more than a year after we moved in, so around 2006. She came complete with three half-grown kittens. Chloë was a gray tabby/calico. Two of her kittens were orange tabbies, and one was very close to Siamese. I find that cats can have different fathers for kittens in the same litter, a phenomenon called superfecundation.

I do not judge.

We tried to give the kittens away, but were only successful with the Siamese. The two orange tabbies became Rusty and Dusty. Rusty died about six years ago from FIV. Dusty died this January from lymphoma. Our other cats, Zoë, Smokey, and Sylvester, have disappeared. Zoë came with Leah when we married. Smokey and Sylvester appeared in our back yard not too long after Chloë showed up. We presume that Zoë was taken by a coyote. We found good evidence that Smokey suffered the same fate. Sylvester has been missing for nearly two weeks, and we hold little hope that he will reappear. A coyote is the most likely answer to what happened to him.

So Chloë was the last of the original six cats. She has been with us so long that it’s hard to imagine being without her.

Chloë will join her son Dusty and three dogs in our growing pet cemetery. I buried my mother’s little dog Lucy out there, then I buried Zeke. I had his friend Zeus cremated some time ago, and I put Zeus’s ashes in with Zeke to keep him company. Chloë always got along with Zeke. Now they will rest close to each other.

Nine and counting

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Our second oldest cat Sylvester has been missing for three days. He has a history of disappearing. About three years ago he disappeared for six weeks. He spent part of that time locked up in a neighbor’s garage. He was thirsty and hungry, but apparently none the worse for wear. He has also disappeared several times for one or two days. This time seems different, maybe because we lost another cat, Smokey, to a coyote right in our front yard, and Sylvester roams the neighborhood at night.

We have posted on Facebook, and checked around the neighborhood. The current owners of the garage he spent some time in opened their garage and looked around for us. No luck.

I have not given up hope, not completely. After all, cats do have nine lives. Or at least it seems like this cat has, or had, multiple lives. We are not sure which life he is on, but it’s surely pressing towards nine.

I wondered where the idea that cats have nine lives came from. Most people attribute it to the ancient Egyptians, who had a god called Amun-Ra, which is a composite of two gods, Amun, the creator, and Ra, the sun god. When it comes to cats and lots of lives, the story is that Amun-Ra sometimes appeared with the head of a cat, and that he somehow created eight additional gods, making a total of nine from this one (two) god(s).

This is Amun-Ra, killing a snake, which seems especially appropriate for Sylvester, since he was (maybe is still?) hell on small animals. On the morning of the night he disappeared, I found a partially-eaten small animal on our driveway. A going-away gift?

I don’t think Sylvester ever used a shiv on his prey, although I wouldn’t put it past him.

It seems that a number of other cultures, including the Chinese, had mythology of cats having more than one life, although not aways nine. We are hoping that Sylvester has at least one more life left.

Our other old cat, Chloe, is on her last life, and not doing very well. Our vet diagnosed her with lymphoma, mainly in her intestines. She shows the typical symptoms of lethargy and poor appetite. She has had a couple of steroid shots that helped with the symptoms, but her most recent shot didn’t seem to help that much.

She is an outdoor cat, living most of her life on our front porch. Leah felt sorry for her a few days ago and let her stay inside. Leah had gone to bed, but I was still up when Chloe got the walkies. She ended up in our bathroom throwing up on a rug. Then she threw up in the living room. It was mostly water.

And then she got a urinary tract infection. She used to be a small cat, but now she’s just a bony memory of herself. The vet weighed her when we took her in for treatment. She had lost a pound in about a month, which doesn’t seem too bad, but it was about 25 percent of her body weight. She might disappear before she dies. I think in either case it won’t be too long. .

We don’t want to let here suffer. Our problem is that cats don’t show their pain. We have to try to read her body language when she’s trying her best not to say anything.