Snips and Snails

Inspirational song: Dogs With No Tails (The Pale)

As an abstract concept, amputation wasn't so bad. Murray has been paralyzed since he was a tiny puppy. He sometimes seems to wag his tail, but then he also kicks his feet when they are touched in some way. The docs at the veterinary school at Colorado State University explained to us that it's an involuntary reflex. He has no control over those nerve impulses. I've seen video of other dogs with their feet in the slings of wheelchairs, also kicking away non-stop like Murray does. So it stands to reason that on the days when his tail seemed to be held high, moving independently, it probably wasn't really on purpose. Just like he won't suddenly start feeling his feet and building muscle control and strength, he wasn't going to wag his tail in excitement like Elsa does every time she's around people or thinking about being around people or thinking about food.

The tail wasn't just a neutral component of Murray's paralyzed state. It was a bit of a detractor. For all its floofy beauty, it got dirty a lot. When he spends time in the back yard, not in wheels, he bounces around on his bottom, "running" along the fenceline to bark at cars and pedestrians in the alley. His tail fills with mud and stickers and poop. Especially poop, outside or in on his bed. Murray takes a lot of baths, compared to your average dog. He lives his life in a constant battle with bacteria, and he has eaten more antibiotics hidden in dog food than just about any other canine in the state.

Even with all the difficulties, we weren't going to go cutting off the parts of Murray that didn't work. I paid close attention to the saga of Cassidy, the internet-famous tuxedo cat in British Columbia who lost his back feet shortly after his birth, and I learned how much physical therapy he had to go through to keep his tendons from shrinking up inside his leg stumps. Amputation is a very serious business, with repercussions that last long past healing of a stump. We would never have taken a decision like this lightly. But when he fractured his tail so badly, we were left with little choice. The tip of his tail had already started to die by the time he went in for surgery this morning. His papa thought he had wrapped the bandage too tightly, and that was causing it to turn purple. Au contraire, it was not his fault. The tail was no longer getting a healthy blood supply after the fracture and necrosis was setting in. If we hadn't agreed to the surgery, we risked systemic problems (I assume sepsis or something equally serious).

For two days, I was compartmentalizing what was going to happen to Murray. My rational mind accepted that amputating his tail was necessary and reasonably safe. But as I drove to my sales meeting this morning, right as he was being dropped off for the surgery, it kind of hit me all at once. This was a change from which there was no going back. My little buddy was having his tail docked, and he would never look the same again. I spent most of the drive mourning for something he probably would never miss. I worried for him going under anaesthesia, and for his recovery over the next few weeks.

He and I got home right around the same time (because I wandered every aisle at Costco before coming home, and he was ready to come home far sooner than I expected). He is taking this like a champ. I know they probably gave him a block so that he wouldn't feel anything even if he could for two to three days. Even so, he's looking perky as ever, like he has no idea his rear end is any different. I found myself unable to try to pull him out of his wheels this evening when it started to get too chilly for dogs to be outside in the cold. I brought him into his heated garage, and I asked him to stay in wheels until his father got home. I'm terrified of hurting him, even if he can't feel it, because I don't lift him, I more dump him on his bed and drag the wheels away. (Best I can do.) It's probably better that I left him like that. The less chance he has of eating off his bandages, the better we will all be in the long run.

Gotcha Day

Inspirational song: With Cat-Like Tread (Pirates of Penzance)

For all the times I really wish I could dump Facebook, every once in a while it does great things for me. Like today, when it popped up with my "most liked photo of 8 years ago." It was a picture looking down into the cardboard box in which we brought home Alfred and Jackie. Things like that are guaranteed to melt my heart. I had wondered how close we were to Gotcha Day. All I could remember was that it was near to Veteran's Day.

It's a story I remember fondly and love to tell. We had recently bought our house in North Charleston (the Original Smith Park), and I had been obsessing over wanting to bring home a black girl kitten to the new place. Mr S-P made sure I didn't adopt a new baby while we were still living in an apartment, house-hunting. We closed on the house in the middle of October, on my birthday. After three weeks, we had cleared the apartment, but had only begun to set up the house. We drove out to Summerville one weekend to go to PetSmart. We needed cat food for the three cats we moved to Charleston with. As we parked the car, we saw two giant tents set up in the PetSmart parking lot, with big signs announcing an adopt-a-thon. He looked accusingly at me, insisting I must have known this was happening. I truly didn't, but no way was I going to pass up an opportunity to see if that black kitten I'd begged for was in the cat tent, waiting for her new mommy to show up and take her home.

The tent was jam-packed with cats of all ages, from shelters and foster homes from the whole tri-county area. While I was sympathetic with the older kids who had less of a chance of getting homes, I was laser-focused on the kitten I had dreamed of for months. I looked at all of the faces. I picked up a few, and struggled to find the little love I knew was in there somewhere. I was trying to make eye contact with a little tuxie who wanted nothing to do with me. Mr S-P plucked her out of my hands, and put a different black and white kid in her place. Immediately this new kitten relaxed in my grasp, sprawling across my forearms. He looked right in my eyes, gave me a lazy blink, and immediately I knew he was my boy. I said he was the one, and meant it.

I had to go over to the dog tent to fill out the adoption paperwork from the shelter who had guardianship of him to that point. I didn't want him to be freaked out, so I left him with Mr S-P while I went to submit my application and pay inside the PetSmart. It took something close to half an hour to accomplish all of it. By the time I returned, the boy kitten was stuffed into the front pocket of Mr S-P's hoodie (and loving it), and the man was announcing that we were getting a second baby. While I left him alone in the tent, he made eye contact with a pair of pumpkin-orange eyes (or so they appeared in dim light). The owner of those eyes enchanted him, and she has been doing that over and over every day since then. And for the record, her adoption was a breeze. That shelter just scanned his credit card, and it was a fait accompli.

Both Alfred and Jacqueline (previously called "Alfie" and "Turtle") were so small they fit in the same cardboard animal carrier. In the car, we could hear the tiniest growls coming from the closed cardboard box. Jackie was not sure she wanted anything to do with that stinky boy she was trapped with. She got over it. I've never seen a more perfectly matched set.

I looked at the comments under the original Facebook post. My mother's comment was something like, "I'm starting the betting pool for how long until they're both fat." Boy, she was prescient. It didn't take Jack long to turn into a bowling ball. Alfred is longer than her, but they both have giant cat heads. These are easily the biggest cats I've ever raised, and I've had some bruisers in my day. Jackie still has her daddy wrapped around her finger, and her day is ruined if she doesn't get at least two hours of combined cuddle time with him, usually getting between him and grading papers or drinking his coffee. Alfred is still my own Dr Love. He drapes himself across my lap at every opportunity. Until I started this paragraph, he was on my hip. I tried to take a picture of him today, as I reclined with my feet up, taking a short break from cooking. It was all I could do to hold the phone far enough away to get all of him in the frame. He's my Big Kitty Soft Paws.

Happy Gotcha Day to my Minions of Chaos. My life has been brighter these last eight years by virtue of them being in it.

Doggie Care Day

Inspirational song: Into the Fire (Dokken)

Among the reasons I stubbornly resisted writing much of substance last night was that I wasn't ready to discuss at length what's going on with my dogs. Just before I started to write last night, we discovered something that Murray is dealing with that's unpleasant and I was a little sad for him. I wanted to wait to write about it until today, when he had a chance to see his doctor and get a treatment plan.

I believe I mentioned before that a few weeks ago, our neighbor put him in wheels when I couldn't. It was early in the morning, and he was sleepy, and didn't notice that he had tucked Murray's tail underneath him. It rubbed against his wheel, and over several hours made a raw spot. When he got home and found out about it, Mr S-P trimmed back all of the fur on the lower half of his tail, so that he could clean and bandage it. Murray promptly ate the bandage, and had to get rushed to the vet to make sure he hadn't clogged himself up with gauze. (Quite the opposite, we learned that ingested Neosporin has a bit of a freeing effect, if you will, but that's neither here nor there right now.) He was checked out and given the okay to go home and let the wound heal on its own.

A few days ago, I was fretting that the tail was still bald, and I wondered whether he would ever leave it alone so that it could heal and get fuzzy again. I wasn't the only one worrying over him. Mr S-P had noticed that the tail had a scab on it, and last night he was in the process of trying again with fresh gauze (we'd given it air for a couple weeks), he realized the whole thing was way worse. The tail is actually fractured, badly. A little piece of bone was sticking out. I know Murray doesn't feel much, but he does have a vague sense of when something below the dislocated vertebrae is seriously wrong. I was horrified that he might have been dealing with this for weeks, but the Mr swears it wasn't like this before. This implies the wheels got him twice in the same spot inside of a month, which I find a bit incredulous. But it's possible these were two separate events.

Murray went back to the vet first thing this morning, and the doc said what I predicted last night would be the correct course of action: he has to have his tail amputated. They are going to end up docking it very close to the base. I mourn for his glorious plume of a tail, which I haven't seen in weeks, but I think overall this will improve his quality of life. If nothing else, it will be easier for him to relieve himself, and he will drag it through his own ick much less when he is out of wheels, bouncing around the back yard. (Perhaps properly it's that there will be much less tail to drag.) It's going to change his look significantly. He'll have more of an Aussie Shepherd butt instead of a rough collie mutt's behind.

The doc is great about follow up calls, and she always calls my phone instead of the Mr's. So when she called this time, she and I had a long talk about Elsa rather than Murray, and how the current brand of pancreatic enzymes are not doing enough to keep her plump and happy. I told her how every time Elsa is in the house, she's like a shark, constantly swimming with her head down, searching for the slightest crumb on the floor, or trove of cat barf, always agitated, never calm. The vet thinks that a stronger dose of pancreatic enzymes (or even actual pancreas itself from a butcher) and vitamin B-12 supplementation could sooth the never-sated shark behavior. If increasing the dose of the kind she's getting now doesn't help, we might have to switch to a brand that costs more per month for one doggie supplement than I'm paying for two lupus prescriptions and a long-term cancer med for myself in the same time frame. Yay, dogs.

Stubborn

Inspirational song: Devil Woman (Cliff Richard)

Look. I know I keep coming back to this. But I'm having recurring problems digging deep and filling my page on days when I just don't want to write. It's not necessarily on days when nothing of value happened to me. I occasionally flat-out do not want to share. My reasons vary. I am sometimes in a bad mood. Sometimes I am too tired. Sometimes it feels repetitive. And sometimes I have secrets I don't want to accidentally spill. Wherever the writer's block comes from, it's very real, and muscle memory to do this only goes so far.

So even though just a few nights ago I had a brain dead night, I've already circled back to a stubborn night. I just want to watch late night TV until I fall asleep, and while I wait for that, I'll crochet and cuddle with Athena on my hip and Harvey on my feet, as usual. At least Athena mostly stayed in place while I carefully reached for the camera. Harvey would sleep through a bomb blast at this point, but that end of the bed is poorly lit for pictures, and turning on lights would spoil the vibe.

Repair

Inspirational song: When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around (The Police)

"I'm starting to see why people throw things away." By the time Mr S-P uttered those words, he had been prying loose staples for well over an hour. If he had been a professional, he theorized, he would have been charging a ton for the labor he was putting in this evening. It did seem like a lot of work to save a few hundred bucks, but surely it will prove worth the attempt, even if the money gets spent later.

Every member of our D&D group hates our dining room chairs, myself included. They used to be passably comfortable, but that was years ago. With us playing games every week, with adults (several of us on the big and/or tall side) sitting in those chairs for two to three hours at a stretch, they have compressed, and some have practically collapsed. A few have permanent dips, while others pretend to still be in their original domed shape on the seats. When we moved the weekly game downstairs, and took a handful of these chairs down to the new area, my daughter and my neighbor flatly refused to sit in them. We have cheap plastic folding chairs from Target that they prefer. These upholstered chairs were cheap too, if I'm being honest. I got a great deal from World Market back in Charleston, when a department manager had to take a return from a difficult customer, and was so angry about the whole thing, he offered me all six chairs for something like 150 bucks, just to make them go away. Naturally I jumped on that offer. It's the reason that now, six years down the line, I am not all that upset when the cats scratch them daily, or when they are showing signs of deterioration at such a young age.

When Mr S-P first took a look at one of the chairs, he flipped it up on the game table, and pulled back the lining on the underside. I was so excited that it was held in place with Velcro. This will be so easy, I thought. Oh, no. Not at all. To get to where we needed to be, he had to pry loose about a thousand staples, just on the one chair. He had to disassemble the whole thing, which meant he had to find an Allen wrench of the proper size. He sent me for a Phillips head screwdriver, and I got to take out a couple of pocket screws, so I felt like I helped. He also took a knife to scrape the thin foam padding from the sides of the seat base. Only then, once he had exposed the woven webbing that had once had a little elasticity but was now permanently stretched out, did he stop to wonder whether we had access to a staple gun to reassemble the whole thing. His is on the mountain, out of range until around June of next year. T's was lost in his garage, and although they looked for it, it was not to be found. So we ran off to Lowe's, where I talked him into an electric staple gun, so that I have a hope of being able to use it some time before I die. (My hands are just done with foolishness, and I can't squeeze the handle trigger on a standard one, not a single time. I always said I had wimpy artist hands, but it's de trop now.)

I got distracted by making a late dinner while he finished reassembling the seat base. I have no idea whether he got all of the upholstery back in place, or the chair legs and back put back on. He did warn me that if I was serious in my musing about reupholstering them (as I had said absent-mindedly while running my fingers where the cats had scratched it raw), it had better be now. He wasn't about to do this again, ever. I need to decide soon. Because if I don't do it now, we will probably end up throwing the whole kit and caboodle out to the landfill, and get a whole new set of chairs. And then I really will be part of the problem, not the solution.

Take Off

Inspirational song: Over the Hills and Far Away (Led Zeppelin)

The mountains were calling today, and we had no choice but to answer. A trip wasn't in the plan for this weekend, at least not as far as I knew, but it was a perfect chance for an impromptu drive. The Mr had a couple of tasks to accomplish at higher altitudes, and when offered the opportunity for a ride-along, I said yes. He will be taking a group of kids he volunteers for up for an afternoon in one of the canyons, and took today to go check out the site. After a brutal, snowy week, he needed to make sure they'd be able to get to their chosen location. The road was paved most of the way, but that last little bit was slick and scary. Hopefully all of the adult chaperones have vehicles equipped with four-wheel drive and high clearances. This next week will be beautiful and sunny to melt some of the snow, but the road might still be dicey next weekend.

While we were up that high already, we swung past Rocky Mountain National Park to get his parks pass updated. Most of the really cool roads are already closed for the season, like Fall River and Trail Ridge. The trip through was really just a glancing blow, and we zipped back out the southern route to get back downhill. It's weird being at the Park when it's this quiet. There were cars full of tourists, yes, just not that many of them.

I was a little distracted by the crochet I brought along in the car, and when we went past Mary's Lake, I looked up and didn't recognize where we were. It wasn't until a little farther along the road that I even remembered I'd been there before. It seemed so unfamiliar at first. It got a little better, but as we drove past road signs that pointed toward peaks and trails that I have heard people discuss for years but never visited myself, it hit home how long it has taken me to grasp the intricacies of these mountains. I still struggle. When my friends talk about hiking trails where I've never been, they might as well be describing the moon. It has taken me years longer than it ought to build a reliable map in my head. I am getting up there as often as I can, and eventually these places will be more real to me. I just have to jump on every chance I get to go up, no matter how last minute, like today.

Pink Cheeked

Inspirational song: Walking on the Moon (The Police)

Hey, did you guys know that snow is super reflective? I'm sure you did. I'm sure I did too, but that doesn't mean I prepared for it. I went wandering around today, without sunscreen. I really wasn't out that long, but it was long enough to turn me fuschia and trigger the usual lupus reaction. I had plans to go out and replace our mutilated plastic snow shovel with a classic metal one, and maybe pick up a bag or two of clearance Starbursts to take over when I can't face another mini chocolate bar. Instead, I settled on a little nap, still promising to go out to fill a shopping cart with fruit-flavored candy. I told myself the lie until at least seven this evening. And then I admitted defeat, that the sun won this round. Even after dark, I was drained, more mentally than anything. It took me almost five hours to pick up the computer and fulfill my nightly commitment to myself. With my brain thoroughly toasted from a few minutes of reflected sunlight, one poorly-written paragraph will have to suffice.