Saying Goodbye to Gray Kitty

With great sadness we say goodbye to our Gray Kitty today. It's was a joy and an honor to have had him share his life with us. 

A devastating day.

Six Days

May 20th:

 Not sure where the days go, but they go. What have i been up to? 

I've been doing some sewing. I bought a book on sewing clothes without patterns and I actually made a shirt, but it is comically large because I am not great at taking my own measurements so I just guessed and ended up with a Dolan sleeved shirt sewn from rectangles that is 40 inches across. I used cheap white muslin to make it (didn't want to spend much money on an experiment) and when I tried on the shirt, it so reminded me of the boxy white scrub tops I had to wear during nursing school that I was disgusted. I took it off and haven't touched it again. 

I never wrote much about nursing school, how much I hated it, because when I was in the midst of it the stress was so awful that I was having heart palpitations and more than one ended up in the ER. When I was done with school I just wanted to be done, to put it behind me and never think about it again. I wanted to burn my uniforms, but I settled for throwing them in the garbage. 

So when I put on the huge, boxy white shirt I had just sewn and I looked in the mirror and saw the huge, boxy white scrub top staring back at me, I was done.  I still want to sew clothes, but I don't think I'll ever again use white muslin or sew any boxy tops.

May 26:

Some excitement yesterday after my mother fell and broke her arm. The doctor set it in the emergency room but she has instructions to follow up with orthopedics. They can see her on Friday. She stayed with us last night and will again tonight. 

Today Gray Kitty has to go to the vet.  He has ascites, fluid build up in his abdomen and chest. They don't know the cause yet, but they took x-rays and did labs to try to determine the cause and how to treat it, but for now we are just to help him stay comfortable. 

Dave and I are out running errands. We went by the walmart pharmacy and now we're at the grocery store. 

It's stormy weather, raining and thundering right now.  I stayed in the car because this weather makes my head feel not great. (Migraine headache medication sales go up during storms, so I don't think it's just me.) 

In the Wild (Random Catch Up)

I started this quilt in January, as a way of keeping busy while prepping and waiting for my surgery date. It's made mainly from fabric I didn't like, a way of keeping the stakes low. 

I was just over halfway done with it when we left for Florida and when we got back, I didn't sew for weeks and weeks and weeks. When I did get back to sewing, I moved this project off to the side and worked on small projects instead. Finally a couple of days ago, I took it out again to work on and this morning, finished it. I called it "Boob Quilt" and made a label with that title, an explanation, my name, the surgeon's name, and the date of surgery.

 

After I finished all that, I tossed it in the washing machine and then asked Dave to transfer it to the dryer for me. When it was dry, he held it up so I could take this photo. Now it's folded up and sitting on a pile of finished quilts on my cutting table. (Which is next to a pile of quilt tops, some of them years old, that need to be either quilted or sent off to be quilted.) 

On to the next quilt.

 

Before that though, there was this: 

Gray Kitty got his sub-q fluids this afternoon (normally we do this at night, but he was pretty dehydrated today) and then Dave gave him a few bits of whipped cream cheese as a treat. Poor Gray Kitty has had a rough time of it lately. His arthritis is getting really bad and he has trouble moving around. He sleeps most of the day on his heated pad in the bathroom. (We tried putting heated pads all over the place, but for some reason he only took to the one we put in the bathroom--which we put there because he was already sleeping on a bathmat.) When he's not sleeping there, he begs to go outside and then he sleeps outside. (He can go onto the back patio by himself, but Dave still accompanies him when he wants to go out front, where there is no fence or gate to keep him contained.)

 

After all that, Dave went off to his PT appointment. (I had my PT appointment this morning with a really wonderful PTA. I cried on the way home, from having physically and mentally shifted some of the horror of the surgery and infection and recovery.) 

 

What else? 

 

We went by my aunt's house to have lunch with my mom the day before Mother's Day. Did I get pictures of us together having lunch? No, of course not. I got this photo of my aunt's refrigerator magnet collection instead.

Lunch was good. We brought barbecue and Dave made scones which he turned into berry shortcakes with whipped cream. We had a good visit and then came home and got into our pajamas and spent the rest of the weekend doing absolutely nothing. 

What else is going on? 

Dave's sister Sara had a recent medical scare but is thankfully on the road to recovery now. We sent flowers and a get well soon note. In the middle of that, they found out that their aunt, their mom's sister, had suffered a series of heart attacks and was in the ICU and not expected to recover. (She has improved somewhat, is off the ventilator but still in the ICU.) Dave's mom was not particularly close with her sister (I think they might have been half sisters?) and so Dave and his sister were not very close to her either. She had a half-brother (or step brother?) who is not in the picture, and she never married and has no children. 

It's a lot. A lot going on. 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I Hope Never To Do Again

I'm here for jury duty. 

It's our lunch break and rather than wandering around I'm sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. It's quiet here. I had a sandwich and a bottle of water and before we go back in an hour or so I'll have a granola bar. 

I was not selected for this jury, thankfully.  But because my term is through the end of June, there is a chance that I might be selected for a different jury. 

So Far

Here's something I forgot to write about in my last entry, complete with plenty of cursing:

Remember how I wrote about the hospital sending a check PDQ after the credit card company opened an investigation? We deposited that check and when it cleared our bank, we called the credit card company to let them know.  Then a couple of days after that, we got a notice that the check was rejected by the hospital's bank. Yes, they tried again to fucking scam us out of that same two-thousand dollars. So Dave called the credit card company back and turns out they expect that kind of shit because they had not closed the investigation. They again took the charge off our account and they are going to contact the hospital. It could be as soon as forty five days or it could take up to ninety days before they have an answer for us. 

I hope the fucking asshold doctor who demanded that payment from us has to pay it back out of his own pocket. I'm so fucking mad about this shit. 

Welcome to healthcare in the U.S. 

On a calmer note: 

Yesterday for our outing we ended up at the mercantile where we bought some new cat food for Gray Kitty. 

He goes through cycles with food, where he'll eat something for a long time and then one day he just rejects it. (I think this happens because his stomach hurts--he's an old kitty and has many health issues--and then he associates the stomach pain with the food so he stops eating that food.) This new food (which he's had before, but not for a long time) we picked up at the co-op five or six days ago (another one of our outings) and he liked it. A small can was almost three dollars--co-op prices are always high--so we checked online to see if any of the big pet supply stores carried it. (I realize that this story is not interesting, but I am committed to finishing it, sorry.) One did, but they were just as expensive and one of the two varieties was out of stock. The online pet store only had one variety and only sold the large cans by the case. We checked on the local mercantile's website. They are in our village, about eight minutes away from our house, and they mostly sell horse-related things and plant/garden supplies, but they also stock a small variety of dog and cat foods. Luckily they had it and it was less than half the co-op price. So that was our outing yesterday.

We came home via Freddy's where Dave got a milkshake (a mini size of the caramel crunch something or another that was way too sugary and somehow tasted stale) and I got french fries. I do not need to be eating french fries, but I like them, so. After that, we came home and I got back into my pajamas.