Two Years Later...

And now there are six! A fourth child, second girl, Punkie, was born at home, peacefully in water in October of 2010.

Now that i have found my way back, I wonder if I can keep posting this time...

Good News!!!

Moon is on her off the juice (living without insulin) trial! Today is day 6, so there are only eight left!

She dropped very low on .1 unit of insulin a few days ago after only 2 days on such a tiny drop. And that was that (antijinx).

The kids are on fall break right now, so yesterday and today is the first chance I've had to take full advantage of not having an injection schedule. I'm still testing her twice a day, and I'm still carefully controlling what kind of food she has to eat, and I will continue to test her every month for the rest of her life. Once a diabetic cat, always a diabetic cat. But being diet controlled is SO HUGE!

I still can't believe we've gotten to this point. It's incredible to look over at my sweet furbaby sleeping on my bag on the floor, all poofy and sweet. And alive...

One If down, only a couple more to go! :)

If all goes well...

Madame McFluff only has 6 days (13 doses) of insulin left!!!!

If all goes well, I should be able to get my online store up and running by Thanksgiving!

If all goes well, I will have another story finished by Christmas!

If all goes well, I will actually manage to handcraft nearly all of my Christmas presents!

If all goes well, I'll be in bed by midnight.

If all goes well, I'll stop typing this ridiculous post before long ;)

Oh look, things are going well.

HOLY CAT!

It's been entirely too long since I last posted here.

Quick update:

Got ready to start the etsy store, and it got derailed by life for a bit.

Tried writing for a contest, but it got derailed by life until after the deadline.

Kids are in school. It's been a weird year for them. Van is doing really well this year, which is a change for him, and one I'm DELIGHTED with. DC is, well, she's being a Demon Child. *sigh* There was some kerfluffle at the beginning of the year in her class, and it's taking her a bit to catch back up, I think. She's doing a bit better now, but her grades were NOT good at the first 5 weeks. *sigh* I say again...

And then there's Madame McFluff. One morning in early August, I came out to find an incredibly sick kitty. It gets a little graphic here. Stop now if you're squeamish.

Did you stop? No? Okay. You were warned. There was blood in the floor of the kitchen, and on the carpet in the living room, and also in the laundry room. I finally saw what was happening. Madame was walking around, squatting, and peeing blood. She was obviously in pain. I offered water, and she took a few laps. Then she would go repeat her rounds (thankfully, she left the carpet alone after the first bit). I was pacing behind her, cleaning up after her, desperately waiting for the slowest two hours of my life to pass so I could get her to the vet. I would have taken her, right that moment, to the emergency vet, but the kids were still sleeping, and needed to sleep.

Finally, she passed a stone, large enough to see when I went to clean up a puddle. After that, the blood faded and faded and faded a little more. Then she ate some and drank some and curled up to rest. I started breathing again.

If you don't know, Madame McFluff was around with my Meezer boys, Piddles the Cat and Lumpy. They're both gone ahead now, and sometimes, when Madame is strutting through the house, I see the little tricks they taught her in the early years. Lumpy taught her to fetch. And to break up fights between other cats. Piddles the Cat taught her the best place to sleep on the bed (I used to find them curled together, close enough to warm my feet, far enough to keep from getting thrown from the bed when I rolled over). He also taught her how to soak up tears in her fur. And she saved his life after Lumpy left us so suddenly. Without Madame, Piddles the Cat would have followed his brother, his best friend, his constant companion.

Madame carries a lot of weight for so tiny a cat.

At the vet, she was taken back to have a large series of tests run. When they carried her out of the room, Tyrannosaurus began to cry and wail: Madame! Bring back Madame! Want my Madame!

I laughed, because it was funny, and I cried, because I felt the same way. Please bring back Madame. I can't lose her yet! She's only 8 years old, and she's my baby, too!

She was so dehydrated, and so very, very sick, I had to leave her in hospital. It lasted a week.

The final verdict was that she had a nasty cystitis flare up, and that aggravated what was hiding beneath: Feline Diabetes Mellitus. She was on the border of diabetic ketone acidosis, and her prognosis was unknown.

She survived. And the vet and I had a bit of an argument about what type of insulin to start her on, and how to best treat her. Because, of course, the first thing I did on diagnosis was hit the 'net.

I am so, so lucky I did, too. I found this site and its message boards, with wonderful, kind, sympathetic people, willing to bend over backwards to help me, to help Madame. They saved her life. Literally.

Today, she's poofy, sassy, sweet and high energy. It's like she's three again! What's even more exciting, she's down to incredibly small doses of insulin, and I have high hopes she'll be weaned all the way off of it very soon (antijinx).

It's like some kind of giant miracle that I've done nothing to deserve, making up for all the horrors Madame has survived which she has done less than nothing to deserve. I have my furbaby. And I'll have her for a long time to come :)

And now for the downer news: Less than a week after Madame had come home, just as her treatment was getting under way, the Kitchen Cat took a major turn for the worse. She couldn't walk well one evening after I had made a trip to the store. She had gone blind. She just seemed so very, very tired.

The next morning, she could barely walk at all. She would take a few steps, then sit down to rest. She didn't want to eat. She took a small tonguefull of water. And then she laid back down under her chair and let each of us humans, including Tyrannosaurus, pet her. She purred for all of us. She nosed our hands gently, purring and nuzzling.

And that, more than her condition, told me it was the end. She has never, never willingly let the kids pet her. She would occasionally accept a small pat from pesimst, and she would often get in my lap when we were up alone in the wee hours. But this time, she accepted all the love we were offering, and then asked for more. We spent a long time telling her goodbye that morning.

After the big kids left for school (Van called across his shoulder as he ran out the door "Tell KC I love her"), I made the call to the vet and prepared to take her in.

Kitchen Cat didn't freak out in the car. She didn't say much to the vet. At the end, she leaned her head against my hand, let me stroke her soft belly that I had never before touched. She kept her nose against my skin, since she couldn't see me, and I whispered in her ear all the messages I wished I could send to those who have gone before. It seemed she left before they gave the injections. One minute she was in my arms, letting me comfort and love her the way I had always wanted to. The next moment, she was in the arms of her beloved first mother, who had been taken away from her so cruelly by Alzheimer's.

I can bear it. I am, of course, very sad. I miss her. I miss having the table and kitchen chairs growl at me. I miss making her growl while she was drinking, so she made that sound like a waterlogged motorboat. I miss our quiet moments when her unbelievably loud purr was the only sound in the house.

But I can bear it. Because she's back with her person now. They're together, and neither one is old, or sick, or tired, anymore.

It's been a long three months. I'm sorry I haven't kept up posting. I did well for awhile, and then it got overwhelmed by other things.

I'll try to be better. I'll try to have more laughs and fewer tears next time I post. But for now, not all tears are evil things, and some are from triumphs worth sharing.

Hurt

I found out tonight that someone that was once one of my very, very closest friends has died.

He died two years ago, and I never knew.

I cannot process this. It's too big to sink in.

I'm sorry, L. I'm so, so sorry. I'm sorry that you were so sick, and I knew that you were, but I couldn't do anything to help you. I'm sorry that this illness, this monster in your head, kept us apart, kept me in hiding, so I wasn't there for you. I'm sorry it won. I'm sorry I wasn't there for your family, who, in spite of your fears about them "turning people against you," I always liked, and know they loved you so much. I'm sure they still do love you. I wish you could have seen that as clearly as I did.

And B, I owe you such a big apology, too. I should have called you. I should have explained what had happened between L and I, and why I had to back so far away from him. I should have trusted you enough to give you a chance to understand. But I was afraid you wouldn't, and I was afraid that, if you did, it'd change your perception of him, and you'd pull away from him. I didn't want that for either of you. He needed you.

I'm also sorry I wasn't there for you when we lost him. I should have been there for you! You are the only person in the world who could possibly have felt a similar grief. I don't mean the depth of pain or any other comparison like that. I can't imagine what his family must have felt and what his other friends felt. But you and L and I, we were a we, and you knew that, even if no one else ever got it. I'm sorry that hiding from his disease meant I ended up hiding from you, too. Please forgive me?

L was a wonderful person. He was funny and smart, a fantastic writer, and passionate about his favorite music and movies. He had a classic movie quote for all occasions, and he was one of the best listeners I ever knew. He was always too hard on himself, never giving himself credit for the talents he had. He was often stubborn, but that kept him going through lots of nearly-impossible tasks, as well as making him butt his head against the walls of the truly impossible. He made the best brownies, and I can't ever taste any without comparing them to his.

I missed him all along, and I miss him most of all now. I wish I had gotten to say good-bye. I wish I had gotten to tell him just how much I loved him. I wish I could tell him I'm sorry.

I wish I could tell him I understand.

Weariness and other excuses

Why is it that writing takes so very much out of me? I got sleep last night, but, while I'm engaged in a frantic bout of creativity, "enough" sleep just isn't.

I wish more people understood that, when I'm writing, I can't really do much of anything else. My mind is not here in the everyday world. I'm gone. I'm away. I'm busy.

And I'm very, very tired!

Tyrannosaurus and The Blue Train

Tyranno-Manz is extremely fond of a certain bright blue train and his associates. He has quite a few of the wooden variety, plus a length of track. And he loves them. He talks about them all the time. He details tiny plot points of episodes as only a two-year-old can. He lines other toys up to pretend they are trains and spends quite a lot of time smacking one toy with another and shouting "Biff!"

He loves trains.

So yesterday morning, I woke to find Tyrannosaurus lying behind me on the bed, his head rammed against my backside. He was saying something, but I couldn't quite understand him, because of that whole being asleep thing. So I shifted away from him, and settled back down. Only to find his forehead pressed, once again, against my rear. I finally woke up enough to hear what he was saying.

As he rammed his head into me, he was muttering to himself, saying "Shunt, shunt, shunt."