Sep 282009
 

As mentioned here, Koshka is unwell. And at this moment, extremely unwell. I’m just back from the vet; I had them do double duty today, spaying Fingers, and rechecking Koshka and dealing with dental issues. They sedated her and extracted her two lower canines… she’s now half-fangless. They also pumped her full of fluids. But she’s having a hard time coming out of sedation… it’s hours later, and she’s still barely able to move. I have her on my lap as I type, a soggy, motionless ball of misery. Every few seconds I look down to make sure she’s still breathing. This is not turning out to be a good day.

Since ObamaKittyCare hasn’t kicked in, I had to pay up in cold hard cash… near to $200 for both cats. So if anyone wants to help out, I’m certainly not above accepting charity.

 Posted by at 5:54 pm

  12 Responses to “One *VERY* sick kitty”

  1. How is the critter doing now?

  2. I like cats. Hope she feels better.

  3. Same here; despite having hay fever and being highly allergic to cats, I’ve never run into a cat that I didn’t find really lovable.
    Best hopes to you and Koshka in this stressful time.

    Pat

  4. As of about 10:30 PM, she is finally sorta awake. It took here damn near *half* *a* *day* to come to in a meaningful way. She is currently in hiding… which was better than the first few hours, when she’d stagger off in a random direction, her hind legs not really working, until she encountered an obstruction such as a wall… at which point she’d just sorta slump up against it and whine in misery for a few minutes. Her eyes have finally un-dilated. She even tried eating, though that resulted in little more than lapping up a CC or so of the “gravy” on top of the food.

  5. Sounds like they didn’t measure out the the required dose of sedation to her body weight very well, or her ability to metabolize it in a given period of time.
    Sloppy.
    Thought for a second there I was going to have to send you over to the movie “The Three Lives Of Thomasina”, which I loved as a kid after our Siamese cat died:
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057579/
    Raedthinn is still my fave though; that last photo suggests a vital cat lesson:
    “If you are going to jerk off, you had better damn-well hope you are declawed.” 😀

  6. > Sounds like they didn’t measure out the the required dose of sedation to her body weight very well

    Dunno. Being unwell, and her kidneys not being quite up to code, no doubt played a part.

    I’ve been knocked out by doctors precisely twice within my memory. And both times I woke up *bad.* According to witnesses, the second time, in 2005 (are you in your thirties? Do you still have your tonsils? Do you want to experience two weeks of pain unlike anything you can possibly imagine? Then cut them suckers out!), when I woke up I was hallucinating or raving or something. And what I was yammering on about was fear that I was going to harm Koshka, now that I was forever going to be a drugged-out psycho nutball.

    That little experience was jsut one of many over my lifetime that have convinced me that I’ve got no use for mind-altering substances.

    But it also made me pretty empathetic towards poor Koshka.

  7. Boy, I wish I was back in my 30’s. 😀
    I’m 52, heading for 53 in the next few months.
    I predate Sputnik 1.

  8. I sent what I could, I’m at the bottom of the cash curve right now

  9. “I’m 52, heading for 53 in the next few months. I predate Sputnik 1.”

    I have to admit, I kinda envy anyone who was alive to see the space race, especially Apollo. I especially envy anyone who actively participated in the space race and Apollo. Space exploration is a pale shadow now (with a few exceptions) of what it must have been like during that first decade.

  10. Scott;

    Hope she’s feeling better soon. Sedation can be tricky a LOT depending on the health and natural ability of the body to metabolize the stuff.

    Having been a “lifer” in the Air Force I have been under more times than I care to count for various “issues” (tonsils? Piddly-stuff… try googling “testicle torsion” when you have some free time :o) no really “bad” reactions though I was quite sick from the stuff they gave me when they took out my remaining wisdom teeth. I clearly recall the dentist and nurse being very ‘concerned’ when they asked me to count backwards from 100 and I reached single digits. At which point the nurse found that the little plastic ‘roller’ that controlled the sedative flow was built backwards and had cut off, rather than started the flow as they expected. They fixed the issue and asked me to count again, I recall getting as far as 98 this time :o)

    On the feline side when we took our two newest “room-mates” in to get them “adjusted” the fairly large and lethergic male cat came out of the sedation before we got him out of the vet’s office. (That would be Kalua, or “clue-b” as we lovingly call him… I always wanted to hand my wife a “clue” ;o) Meanwhile the smaller, more energetic (who am I kidding? that cat has ADHD AND thinks she’s imortal :o) actually went from sedated to sleeping and barely budged from one or the other of our laps for the next 24 hours. (“Roadie” short for “Road-Rash” or “Road-Kill” depending on which one of us you talk too… Interesting story there, ask me about it sometime :o)

    Brianna;
    (Nice name BTW :o)
    I haven’t hit my half century mark yet but I’m close :o)
    I recall clearly watching the big black and white TV we had being allowed to stay up to watch Apollo 11 and Armstrong stepping out onto the moon. Being only 8 I STILL knew that something major had happened and I followed every mission I could whine my way into getting my parents to gather information for me on. Apollo-13 had me going a bit nuts so my parents cut me off, so I was quite surprised when I asked in church that people pray for the astronauts that they had already landed safetly.

    The problem for me was I could see that while “I” was excited and moved by the events unfolding, my parents were not. They and their friends who were over for a weekly card game and socializing came in to watch the landing, and then again to watch Armstrong but they didn’t stay. Nor did they talk about it much or even seem interested as time went on. They, like so many others in my “little” home town while proud that American’s had landed on the Moon saw little “use” for the space program and even less as new mission launched. It simply didn’t MEAN that much in the overall scheme of everyday life in a semi-rural agricultural based town in the middle of California in the early ’70s.

    While you might feel that Space Exploration today is a ‘pale-shadow’ of what it was please recall that the Space Race itself was a shallow and specificly goal oriented program that was unable to sustain itself once the goal of ‘beating-the-commies’ was completed.
    I’ve noted that there is a lot of complaints about the ‘lack’ of the current manned space program in specific goals and how it is compared to the “Glory Days” of Apollo but the rather sad truth is the Space Race days’ were no “Golden Age” of space exploration. Rather they have appeared to me now as I think back to be an attempt to ‘leap-frog’ an actual “space program” in favor of a quick-and-dirt “get-it-done” program that left no time and spared no effort to establish an actual presence in space.

    The Space Race failed utterly to establish an human presence in space, for the United States we ‘won’ so we quit trying anymore. The Soviets acted like they had never actually BEEN racing us to the moon but even while they “concentrated” on orbital missions and began launching space stations their’s was not a program designed to ‘establish’ themselve in space but to ensure they had equal access and could match any later attempts by the United States to ‘claim’ space or use it to gain superiority during the Cold War.

    The BIGGEST failure in my opinion has always been that no one has ever come up with a GOOD reason for people to GO into space, let alone look to colonizing and staying there! But that is an assumption that space program advocates make automatically whether they are “Old” space, “New” space or just “space” advocates.

    I am of course guilty of making that assumption myself, until recently I tended to “latch” onto whatever “reason” was in vouge to justify the NEED I felt for getting into space. Space Solar Power Satellites, Asteroid Mining, Asteroid Defense, Lunar H3… I fell for them all but I couldn’t sustain the “faith” because I also tend to see the underlying infrastructure that will be needed to exploit any of these “reasons” for space exploration, and I tend to make more ‘faithful’ people more than a little angry when I start asking questions about how to get from point-A to point-B instead of just “believing” that things will come out to get us from point-A to point-C.

    I’m not happy with the ESAS architecture. IMHO the Aries-1 Launch Vehicle is a waste of time and money. I happen to live right where having it (and/or the Aries-V) cancled would be a major source of economic hardship so I truely DO understand why some people are fighting so hard to keep the program going. But I find “I” can’t fight for it, actually I DON’T want to fight for it. We COULD have an actual “shuttle-derived-launch-vehicle” that would have fit the bill in covering a majority of the shuttle jobs both here in Utah and in other states but the decision was made to proceed with two NEW launch vehicles that had little commenality with the actual Shuttle hardware and to do so while stipulating there WAS no other choice.
    The ESAS program is trying to revive the ‘glory-days’ of Apollo which to me were not so ‘glorius’. For the same reasons I find I can’t attend the local NSS chapter meetings or the other space advocacy groups from the local area. To a one they have been meetings of like minded people who see NASA as the ‘sole-source’ of manned space flight and anything done during Apollo as the ‘highest’ human acheivment of space flight.

    They are so focused on espousing the glory that was Apollo and the ‘old’ NASA that they are for the most part totally unaware of what has been happening for the last couple of decades. I mentioned “Yuri’s night” to them at one meeting and they had to have me explain that it was a world-wide event AND who this “Yuri” was!
    (At some points I felt that several of the older folks at the meeting were actually confused that there where space flights BEFORE Apollo 11 landed on the Moon!)

    Having a supposed “space advocate” look me in the eye and tell me that they don’t keep up on ‘commercial’ space launch business because they haul ‘cargo’ and not ‘people’ was I think a very telling point. And the one where I decided I wasn’t going back, I wasn’t going to work for a goal of glorifying the past at the expense of stopping looking into the future.

    What really floors me though is this same group of people apperantly managed to snag the honor of putting on a major space industrial conference a few years ago! Utah is host to a major conferance on small-satellites and microgravity industrial applications every year which boast international recognition! Yet they feel that Apollo was the height of space exploration?

    The space race pushed the world ahead bringing the landing of the first person from Earth from the “distant-future” of the 21st century which is what most experts were predicting prior to Sputnik to the 20th century and only a few decades after the first man-made object was placed in orbit.
    But it was artifical, we had no reason to stay, no reason to actually commit to space as a ‘frontier’ and few reasons to go beyond the Moon, none of which was compelling enough at any rate. So the PROMISE of the space race, the wonderful future(s) envisioned by those who made it happen and those who were inspired by it were lost. It has been 40 years since the first person from Earth set foot upon the Moon, and that HURTS, a lot.

    The future I was promised never showed up, the wonder and excitment have had to wait and now I experiance most of it through machines wandering around rather than in person. But it’s taken ME decades to realize that we as a species were probably not ready to take a real leap into those futures we saw during Apollo and the Space Race. We really didn’t have the knowledge or know-how to make things like those Martin ad-art pictures that Scott’s been putting up. Our understanding of space as an environment and what we really needed to live and work there were flawed in many respects and we had a LOT of “assumptions” that turned out not to be true.
    We could have easily pushed on beyond the Moon after Apollo, had the public and governmental will be there. I’m not so sure that would have been a ‘good’ thing though, but it’s hard to look at what we did during the Space Race and the pace at which our capabilities moved ahead and not believe that we lost something of an oportunity after the last man left the Moon.

    Randy

  11. The whole space race moved really fast when I was a kid, and all my friends sported crewcut hair, said “AOK” a lot, and we all wanted to eat lunch out of toothpaste tubes when we grew up. 🙂
    The country was rocket and astronaut crazy, and I would sharpen my pencils with a little Mercury capsule shaped sharpener, and wash with bath soap that came in the shape of a multistaged rocket, with each stage being a differnt color soap bar.
    The earliest spaceflight I can halfway clearly remember is Carpenter’s Mercury flight.

  12. […] eldest cat, Koshka (who is about 9 or 10 now), has been unwell for a while. Eating causes her pain (there is an ulcer or some such in the back of her mouth), and it’s a […]

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