The Dog Doesn’t Die

Before we get down to business being silly, here is an important announcement: Eddie’s tube is out! Yay! If that doesn’t make sense, see the previous two entries.

Today’s silly stuff deals with the concept of flight, or failure to fly, or reasons not to fly.

This illustrated story of office workers saving ducklings is pretty funny, and cute as well. In fact, it comes from Cuteoverload.com . Ducklings can’t fly. They can plummet off the side of a building, and they can waddle, but they can’t fly. Fortunately, there were people around to help these particular ducklings survive the plummeting and the waddling. Let’s hope the ducklings grow up to be smarter than their mom.

Rabbits normally don’t fly, but in Denmark, bunnies do take to the air in the sport of show jumping.

Finally, David Owen writes about a fantasy airline. It won’t cost you $50 to read about it, although he’d probably like that very much.

He’s so much better!

Doesn’t he look good? His energy is back and he’s eating on his own a bit. In fact, last night Dr. Carter and I decided to transition him back to feeding himself. Since he’s gained weight on a combination of a high-calorie prescription diet and an appetite stimulant, I’m going to give him fewer tube feedings throughout the day in hopes that this will become the secondary source of nutrition. We’ve got an appointment on Friday to see how it’s going, and if he hasn’t lost weight, we’ll just use the tube feedings as a medication delivery system with a few extra calories tossed in.

Speaking of medication, Eddie is taking mitrazapine (which I often see online as mirtazapine, too) as his appetite stimulant, which is a common veterinary use for it. However, this drug is used primarily for people as an anti-depressant, and one of the common side effects is wild dreams. I have found stories of mitrazapine-induced dreams all over the Internet, and some of these seem borderline hallucinogenic. For example, one man dreamt of airplanes on streets and another person compared the dreams to being on a recreational drug. So what does this do to Eddie’s dreams? All I know is that he is only supposed to get this drug every 72 hours, and the night after he gets it, he’ll wake me up and want to “talk” to me. I think he’s having some vivid dreams that he wants to share somehow, but I’ll never know for sure.

Finally, I sent these Dancing Deer brownies to the vets and staff, and they loved them. As Dr. Carter said last night, “we like flowers, we like fruit, and we love chocolate.” So next time you need to send a gift for a special occasion, consider the Dancing Deer brownies to have an informal endorsement from my cats’ veterinary practice.

I visit a wonderful veterinary clinic, the Sacramento Veterinary Hospital, which has three skilled and creative veterinarians, and a helpful and compassionate staff. They’re all lovely people, but I’ve had to spend way too much time with them during the past three weeks.

In a nutshell, both of my cats, Eddie and Priscilla, had loose stools for a couple of days. Priss recovered, but Eddie ended up with stools of just blood and mucous, so I took him to the clinic. Eddie is also diabetic, which means his health is somewhat fragile to begin with. And, to make a very long story short, a few days after I first took him in, I dropped him off first thing in the morning so he could go on an IV. I expected to be called to return so that he could have that last injection we never want to give our pets.

Instead, our veterinarian, Dr. Carter, called later than planned to tell me she’d stabilized him and to ask what I wanted to do. The thought was that if she and the other vets and staff could get him through the next several days, they could send him home with some chance of a full recovery. But I would have to tube-feed him for at least a couple of weeks. She asked if I would be willing to do this. I said yes. She asked how I would feel if, after tube-feeding him, he died anyway. I said I’d feel terrible, but I’d at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I’d fought for him.

Since then, I’ve learned that people are often reluctant to tube-feed their pets in a medical crisis. So I feel like I have to take a stand. As Dr. Pierson says on her page discussing tube-feeding, this is a very valuable method of getting a cat through a temporary medical crisis. Just as you can’t leave a pet in the veterinary ICU forever, you can’t tube-feed long-term. If your cat has incurable cancer, for example, that’s not likely to be a situation appropriate for tube-feeding. But if your cat is likely to recover, then why not do it?

So I’m going to detail my experience of tube-feeding Eddie, complete with pictures. Tube-feeding is not for wimps, but it’s not hard, either. I am easily frustrated, so if I can do it, most people can do it as well. After you give a couple of tube-feedings, you start to figure out what works and what doesn’t. It is somewhat time-consuming, and it will dictate your schedule for 2 to 3 weeks. But if you have some flexibility, it’s worth it.

The first couple of times I did it this time, I was very frustrated. Tube-feeding has potential to be messy, and I got food and water all over the place. I also had trouble getting food into the syringe without a lot of air. But I quickly got past those issues, and now it’s just routine.

Here is a picture of Eddie sleeping in the bay window, which is about 3 feet from the floor, and which he jumped onto himself. Notice that you can’t see his feeding tube, which goes into his esophagus through his neck. He’s sleeping on the tube, in fact, which is one of many indications that it doesn’t really bother him.

In this picture, there’s the basic “stuff” that I need for the tube-feeding. On the left is a red t-shirt, machine washable and baggy enough to throw over whatever I’m already wearing. The potential for mess is always there, and instead of changing clothes, it’s easier to keep using the same large shirt as a sort of smock. There are also syringes, one for food and one for water, plus a mortar and pestle for grinding up pills that go into Eddie’s food. This time the food is already liquified, but you may end up having to use a blender.

Dave took a few pictures of me tube-feeding Eddie. It has to go slowly, because you can’t dump a lot of food into a cat’s stomach all at once. I’m giving him about five 25-30 cc feedings a day, since the usable food from his can comes to about 140-155 cc’s of high-calorie, high-quality, prescription cat food. A 25-30 cc feeding takes me about 12-15 minutes, plus 3-5 minutes of preparation time. So we’re talking about just over an hour and a half a day. Eddie is worth it.

I am looking forward to Eddie’s full recovery. He’s begun licking but not eating the regular cat food, which is Wellness canned food. He’s behaving normally and seems to be regaining his energy, although his weight is still down from the trauma of his medical ordeal. The veterinarians are optimistic, so I’m optimistic, though it will be a huge relief to have him eating on his own again. And if for some reason that doesn’t happen and I lose him, at least I will have made the effort.

With all the personal drama of the past few weeks, I’ve accumulated quite a backlog. So today I’ll review two books that have little animal involvement and are both Mostly Safe for animal lovers. I don’t have a lot to say about these two books because I wasn’t wild about either of them, though I found the first mildly entertaining.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is a comic novel set in a struggling Chicago advertising agency. The narration is in first person plural, which is a device that Ferris pulls off nicely but isn’t worth repeating. It sort of works and sort of doesn’t. Since most of the action takes place at the office, there are very few animals. However, there is one reference to a character not taking his mother’s cats when he moves his mother out of her apartment. Another character worries about what happened to them, and we never find out. I’m projecting here, but my experience is that neighbors in apartment buildings don’t just let yowling cats suffer without calling maintenance or building management. So I imagine the fictitious cats were soon rescued by a more responsible party, though what happens after that would be unclear. Another character has cats and talks to them briefly, but that’s it.

The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears, got great reviews but wasn’t quite what I expected. Three stories that take place in the same part of France at different times in history are woven together, but they weren’t all equally good. It mostly fell flat to me, although there were sections that were excellent. In any case, there is a reference to one character tormenting cats and dogs as a child, as if this is a standard childhood activity. No, it is not. And there are many references to horses and donkeys as beasts of burden, including a brief scene in which a donkey in peril is saved.

I have another book on my pile that has lots of animals, while the book I am reading has none thus far. I will review both of them in several days.

Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost is told in the form of a hilarious gardening advice column written by the main character, Mertensia Corydalis. Mertensia is opinionated and in possession of a very dry wit. She also has a much softer heart than one might think, but Abbott takes her time in revealing that side of her narrator, as she also takes her time in spooling out a clear plot line. This extremely funny book, one of my favorites, is MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers and would be entirely safe but for the preventable demise of a few fish.

Mertensia is wise enough to understand the need to train her dogs, Jasper and Jennelle, while at the same time not expecting them to think like people. When Jennelle does something that is destructive from a human point of view, Mertensia allows that Jennelle, being a dog, was thinking like a dog and was therefore blameless. Mertensia also advocates on behalf of birds, mice, bugs, and butterflies. And it was a rare page where I didn’t laugh out loud. I heartily recommend this book.

Let me start by saying that I love, love, love Christopher Moore. Some of my friends find his writing a bit over the top, but I think he’s great! So needless to say, I enjoyed A Dirty Job immensely. And it is Mostly Safe for animal lovers. Moore’s absurdist style makes it hard to take the occasional cartoonish violence very seriously, though some of his books have a message. Fluke, for example, is about the need to protect marine life, and in Coyote Blue, Moore advocates for Indigenous Peoples’ rights more effectively than any article or white paper I’ve ever encountered. (And given the nature of my job, I encounter a lot of that stuff!)

A Dirty Job is about death and our inability to deal with it. Making that funny is quite a trick. The book starts off with a human death, and it’s rather sad, actually. Most of the remaining casualties are pretty comic, but not that first one. Anyway, in terms of animals, Bummer and Lazarus are dogs loyal to The Emperor of San Francisco (just trust me on this), and one of them is rewarded for intrepidity towards the end of the book. However, another character has trouble keeping pets alive for a while, given certain powers that take a while to sort out. Those pets aren’t really given much discussion, and they are briefly mourned. Then the hellhounds show up. The hellhounds are indestructable and the epitome of canine loyalty. They’ll eat anything. As one character says “Okay, you’re hellish beasts from another dimension, and you like toast.” A named pet dies in the middle of the book, but we don’t learn much about him and, in typical Moore fashion, he is briefly mourned. Past that, I can’t say too much, except that the dogs are prominent among the good guys.

I highly recommend this book.

Last week, I came across three things I wanted to post on this blog. And now I find that two of them are sweeping across the Internet. So there’s no point in waiting, I guess. I also have a brief message of encouragement for those of you who land on this site looking for info about diabetic pets, but that’s at the end.

Have you seen the extremely popular YouTube video, “An Engineer’s Guide to Cats” yet? If you haven’t, you eventually will because it is all over the place. You can watch it now by clicking on this link. You’ll be glad you did, because it’s quite funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXBL6bzAR4

Have you seen the creepy video of the guy stuck in the elevator for 41 hours? No, the video is not 41 hours long, it’s about 2 minutes. It’s worth watching. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/2008/04/21/080421_elevators/?yrail

Accompanying the video was a well-written article, which is not being passed around the Internet quite so much. I read the article in a hard copy of The New Yorker, a magazine I dearly love. It explains all about poor, trapped Nicholas, as well as discussing elevators in detail. They’re safe, they’re more complicated than you might imagine, and they generate much of their own power, kind of like a hybrid. Here’s the link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_paumgarten?/yrail

And now we’re all caught up. I had planned on putting up a book review tomorrow and some diabetic cat success stories later on in the week, but I’ll have to revisit that schedule now. In the mean time, if you’re one of the people drifting in to check out my periodic references to diabetic pets, here’s the bumper sticker version: Yes, it can be treated, and no, it’s not hard. You can do this and you’ll be glad you did. Giving 2 shots a day to my diabetic cat, Eddie, takes about 5 minutes total, and for my trouble I have kept him alive and in very good health since Sept. 2004. More on this at the end of the week or beginning of next week.

I try not to review books from memory, but I will make the occasional exception.

I like Bruce Wagner as an author, but some of his books are NOT SAFE for animal lovers. Specifically, he does have a character kill a hapless, harmless pug in Still Holding. And one of the Amazon reviews for Memorial, another Wagner book (and the “half” because I didn’t read it myself), indicates that a pet dies. I don’t recall a problem with Chrysanthemum, which was my favorite of the Wagner books I’ve read thus far, but again, I’m doing this from memory. If an animal death really disturbs you, be wary of Wagner. Otherwise, you might like him. Check some of the more in-depth reviews online.

On the other hand e, by Matt Beaumont, is pretty funny and I don’t recall any animals in it. So I will deem it SAFE for animal lovers. The book is told through a series of e-mails, which I thought would be off-putting but actually worked extremely well. I highly recommend it.

If I ever establish an Honor Roll of authors who write books that animal lovers will appreciate, Julia Glass will be the first name on the list. Her second book, The Whole World Over, is not only SAFE for animal lovers, it is recommended. Glass can barely bring herself to imperil an animal, let alone hurt one. Among the many animals mentioned, a  horse sustains a bruise, a placid bulldog gets shuffled around a bit, and a character worries about who will take over feeding some feral cats, but that’s it. There is also one human death that’s reported but not shown.

Glass also proves the point that you don’t need real villains if you can get “good” characters in conflict with each other. This is a long, gentle book told from several perspectives. Is there a plot? Sort of, but it’s mostly a matter of how these good characters work out their differences. Anyway, I loved reading this book, and I recommend it. For anyone who also read Glass’s first book, Three Junes, there are a few recycled characters, including Fenno the Scottish bookstore owner and his bird, Felicity.

I normally don’t celebrate cat birthdays beyond putting out an extra treat, but Priss turned 19 today, and that’s very old for a cat. It’s the equivalent of 92 in people years. And under the circumstances, she’s doing pretty well. Notice I didn’t say “great,” which would not be true. She has a thyroid condition, she’s had a couple of grand mal seizures, her kidneys are borderline, and she’s underweight despite being on two appetite stimulants. But she hangs out on the sofa or on the porch, sits on my lap and purrs, enjoys her food and treats, and generally seems to have a good life for an old lady.

I adopted her from the animal shelter when she was 5 1/2, so I haven’t had her the entire time. She’s a long-haired dilute calico and absolutely gorgeous. When I first saw her, I thought she was almost as beautiful as Rabbit, my Turkish Angora cat who had just died a few weeks before. Later, I came to think she was as beautiful, or moreso, and then I quit comparing. She’s also very affectionate.

I think if you click on her picture it will come up larger. That particular shot is from a few years ago, when she was in her prime.