Yeah, He's a Keeper

I have two daily calendars (one is a Book a Day and the other is a Cat a Day) that I sometimes get a little bit behind on tearing off pages. This morning, I was catching up on this very important duty when I found the notes that Bryan left for me.

The first one was on the Book a Day page and said “Did you see the note in the cat calendar? No? You might want to take a look.”

When I went to the cat calendar, I found this note: “Happy Valentine’s Day! There just so happens to be a little something in the closet behind your chair in the library…”

Isn’t that the sweetest thing ever? 

He somehow manages to not only give me a Valentine’s Day gift when he’s half way around the world (literally, he’s in Australia right now) but he did it by getting into a closet that requires moving furniture into the middle of the room – all without me knowing about it in my own house.

The heart-shaped box was waiting for me in the closet, just like he said it would be. It’s big, too = about the size of an old-fashioned hat box. Inside are all sorts of goodies from my new favorite store, LUSH.

I got the following items: 

     Sex Bomb

     Tisty Toasty

     The Kiss Lip Scrub

     Ro’s Argan Body Conditioner

     Love and Light Hand Cream

     Soft Coeur Massage Bar

     Roses All the Way Soap

Animals I have known

Animals I’ve had in my life:

Thing & Djuna = my current cats.

The Alien, Floyd, Mildred and Gracie = all cats.

Ssadi = a corn snake

Grendle = a leopard gecko

Shakespeare = a Chinese Box Turtle

Athos, Aramis, and Porthos = frogs

Chaeron = an iguana

A multitude of mice (all dinner for the snake)

While living with my family, we had:

Honey, a cat, plus Wookie, Winnifred, and 4 other kittens

Pookey, originally named Ebony = a cat

Patches = a feral cat we “tamed” who promptly had 5 kittens under my bed

Jacob, Albert, Buster, Mamma Dog, Little Dog, Sasquatch, Puppy, Rabbit, Sam, Ninianne, and various other dogs

William, George, and Martha = rats

Teddy = a hamster

Numerous fish

Katie and various other rabbits

Thomas, Winchester, Shoshone, Baby, and various other horses

Jiminy the burrow

About half a dozen pigs

The same number of cows

Dozens of chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, peacocks, and guinea hens

Possibly six (if not more) goats

I seem to recall a few sheep in the mix, too

How many animals did you grow up with?

Djuna: my little girl

My resolution to write at least one blog posting per week has not exactly been kept: I only got 3 written last month. That’s not bad, but I can do better. With that thought in mind, I figured it would be a good time to talk about my little girl, Djuna.

As most of you know, Djuna is a Devon Rex cat who is 13 years old. About 4 years ago, she was diagnosed with Kidney Failure, but then proceeded to surprise everybody (the vet included) by doing just fine, thank you very much. I even dared hope they were wrong and she was going to live forever.

Sadly I was being overly optimistic.

About two weeks ago, she got really sick again and had to spend four days in the hospital at Pet Emergency Treatment. Those people are so nice; they immediately fell in love with Djuna (as they should) and took such good care of her. I saw continued improvement each time I went to visit her, so that by the time I got to take her home again her blood work showed amazing progress!

When they do blood work on a cat (well, on anybody, actually) with the purpose of checking their kidney functions, they look for three things: the Blood Urine Nitrogen (BUN) levels, the Creatinine (CREA) levels, and the Phosphorous (PHOS) levels.

For a cat:

Normal BUN should be from 16 to 36

Normal CREA should be from .08 to .24

Normal PHOS should be from 3.1 to 7.5

When I originally took her to the hospital on the 16^th:

Her BUN was at 211

Her CREA was 7.0

Her PHOS was at 19.5

When I brought her home on the 19^th:

Her BUN had come down to 85

Her CREA was down to 4.8

For some reason they didn’t look at the PHOS

When I took her to the vet’s on the 29^th:

Her BUN was at 61

Her CREA was at 4.1

Her PHOS was at 7.0

Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that she will not last much longer. When pressed for a prediction, the vet said it was a matter of months, not years. I am helping to prolong her life by giving her a bi-weekly treatment of IV fluids with several other medications injected into the bag while she’s hooked up to it.

She hates her treatments, by the way, and so do I. I can’t do them without help, and Bryan has been wonderful in being there to hold her while I administer her treatments. Unfortunately Bryan is going away for a month, so I have had to scramble to find somebody else willing to help me; Lauren would gladly help out but does not handle needles well at all, so thankfully my neighbor across the way has agreed to help.

I will keep a close eye on her to insure “quality of life” is as good as it can be, and will not let her suffer unduly – but am very grateful that I get some more time with her as she is a sweetie pie.