Saturday, April 12, 2008

Sneakers 1992-2008


A sad time for me and for all who cared for her. Considering the disease she had, we did the best we could and gave her the lifetime of a normal kitty instead of it having it get cut in half. For that I'm grateful. She certainly deserved more, at least I tend to think that due to our two previous cats having lived to be 20. I guess we've been a bit spoiled and I know I was kinda hoping we could beat the odds, but she just got more and more sick over the last few months.

I know that at times like this, it can sound cliched to say how sweet and lovable she was, but she truly seemed to have heavy duty traces of the cute gene. Hopefully this comes out in the slideshow. I only wish I could've said good-bye to her in person, but was unable to for reasons cited below.

Wish I could say that this latest round of postlessness was just due to losing my assigned kitty or to my usual procrastination, but this time it's more along the lines of the crappiest month of March I can remember having. At about the same time Sneakers was entering the final stages of the feline CRF she'd had for about 9 years, I had to go under the knife. Seems I had a little (i.e. painful) problem with my gall bladder and had to get it removed. A serious condition in itself, which ended up being complicated by the fact they had a hard time FINDING the damn thing.

See, many ages ago when I was but 4 days old, my pancreas had grown around my intestine, causing a blockage. The doctors had to conduct bypass surgery to correct it. No problem, except that now when they went down my throat, they couldn't find the duct or whatever where the gall bladder empties into my GI tract. This apparently was due to the bypass surgery altering my anatomy somewhat; they had to take an extra day or two to conduct an MRI and also to contact the hospital I was born in in an (vain) attempt to track down any records from the surgery I had three freaking decades ago. Meanwhile, all the bile that was building up in my system was giving me jaundice, turning my skin and eyes to a similar shade o' yellow as Yellow Bastard from Sin City.

Finally they wheel me into surgery, but not before I managed to cut up my face in a foolish attempt to shave using the cheap POS razors they had at the hospital. This resulted in me having 3 Band-Aids stuck around my mouth and neck, so must've looked like hell going into ER. Right before I went under, the doctor said that they couldn't remove it via the modern method,which seems to involve three small incisions, due to my prior surgery and that they'd have to do it old school, which involved open surgery and a larger scar. Fortunately, I'm happy to report the surgeons did a wonderful job and everything went more or less smoothly. He said afterwards that he had to take some time cutting through old scar tissue to get the thing out, but other than that, it was all good.

As of now, I'm pretty much recovered. The doctor says that no change in my diet is needed, except that my body will be slightly less efficient at breaking down fats, so I should have less of them, which is what I've been doing anyway.

Oh, and did I mention that I had my birthday in the middle of all that? Nothing makes you feel older on or near your birthday than going into surgery to get something removed. That and being stuck in a hospital alone with all your immediate family being 500 miles away, with the thought that something could go wrong and not being able to see them again beating around your head. I've never been comfortable being so far from home and these experiences just seem to underline that feeling in a big way.

Good news is that Dad flew down and managed to pick me up from the hospital. We hung out in the hotel and watched as much crappy TV as I had in the hospital, except that the Day's Inn had no AMC channel, which was the one lone beacon of slightly decent programing amidst a vast sea of unending crapola. Nevertheless, we made the most of it. We even managed to drive out to Annapolis and go over the Chesapeake Bay bridge, which is supposed to be five mile long. Then we saw the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, which had more to do with fishing than with any major maritime history. Dad saw most of it while I was too tired to do much walking and just hung out in the fornt office. Still it was good just to get out of that hotel room.

I've gone on a bit with this, and I don't want to bore the handful of readers I may or may not have, so I'll cut this short (guess it's too late for that though...:P) . There's more, but I'll save that for yet another angst-ridden rant somewhere down the line. If you gotten to this point, thanks for sticking around.
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