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Posts tagged as “The Cats”

On Her Way Out

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In theory, mast cell tumors of the skin don't kill cats, at least not directly. They can lead to lesions that can't heal and further infections, but its MCT of the spleen or gastrointestinal tract that are really dangerous. For Lenora, our precious little wimp cat, this cancer is aggressive enough that we may need to take proactive steps. She's gone from one lump to 10 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 70, with a brief dip back to 40 after her surgery to remove her spleen ... but now the MCT has exploded, going from 80 to 100 to probably hundreds at this point, many of them showing lesions and scabs. The first two combinations of cancer treatments failed; this one does not seem to be having an effect. Lenora is still active, but she no longer wants to spend time indoors, instead choosing to find high spots on the exterior podium or the fence. I think she thinks fleas are eating her alive. I fear she's on her way out. I'd love to say "I know" but everything I've learned over the years tells me (a) you don't really know and (b) foreclosing an opportunity in your mind is a precursor to getting it foreclosed in real life. We sometimes like to think that we're tough minded people making hard decisions in the face of difficult circumstances, but if you're that guy or gal, I have bad news for you: you're selling yourself a line of bullshit. Far too often we get tired of dealing with something and choose to perceive it as hopeless, then take all the bad decisions we need to in order to make the bad outcome we've decided upon happen, then telling ourselves "there's nothing else we could have done." This is particularly common with cars: cars rarely die until we decide to kill them by not maintaining them. It's even more common with politics: the other guy's plan rarely fails on its own until we take steps to sabotage it, just so we can then say "we told you so." With your health, or the health of a loved one, what does this translate into? Never give up. Stephen Hawking lasted something like five decades after his doctors told him he'd likely be dead, and he didn't last that long by crawling into a bed and not fighting every step of the way. Sometimes heroic measures are not called for, but just giving up hope will make things far worse far faster. So we're here for you, Lenora, even if you're on your way out. Have a scritchy behind the ear. Yes. There you go. -the Centaur

The Cats You Save … and the Cats You Make Comfortable

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SO RECENTLY I had a very vivid dream in which my veterinarian said to me "There are some cats you save … and some you make comfortable." I think the context behind that dream is worth a little unpacking, don't you? Loki the Loquacious is a cat that we saved. I came home one day to find him yowling and lethargic, sensitive to the touch yet unwilling to move, with a bloated feeling to the touch, and after a brief search online we rushed him to the nearby animal hospital who quickly diagnosed him with a urinary tract blockage, put him on a catheter, and nursed him back to health. Now, he hates the urinary tract pet food we feed him and the occasional water droppers when he’s not drinking, but unless this outdoor cat gets too adventurous, he’s probably got a long life ahead of him. Caesar the Conqueror is a cat that we made comfortable. He’d been made frail by a long battle with a thyroid condition when he decided to start peeing inappropriately indoors, so we had to make him an outdoors cat; but we were able to set up a relatively nice outdoor area for him. But then some nasal obstruction began interfering with his breathing, and he ultimately wheezed himself to death. We kept him comfortable, of course, until he took a rapid turn downhill, and then we had him peacefully put to sleep in my arms. As for Lenora the Cat … the jury is still out. She’s a healthy-looking, happy-looking, active cat, and even though she from time to time got pencil-eraser sized moles, and once even a larger lump on a back leg, they were always benign … until a month ago. Then a new mole appeared, and another, and another, until she had dozens of the tiny, not-itchy, not-bleeding, not-discolored bumps all over her body. We took her to the doctor, who found two more walnut-sized lumps in her abdomen; biopsies revealed these to be mast cell tumors (MCT or mastocytoma). Our doctor’s recommended regimen - a cortisone shot, followed by predisone and possibly other medications - tracks with what I’ve been able to research. Cortisone and similar drugs are recommended, and sometimes even can cure it, especially if it’s on the skin; but prognosis for lumps in the internals are more guarded - and she’s gotten another lump since the biopsy. So now we’re researching, weighing the options of continuing treatment vs seeing an oncologist now (our vet is of the opinion that we’d have to wait a few weeks for an oncologist to get good readings on bloodwork because of the cortisone shot, but if I was an oncologist I’d want to see that third lump right now). Cats with this condition can last three years with surgery, a year with palliative care … or can die within weeks if it’s serious. We don’t yet know if Lenora’s a cat we must make comfortable … or that we can save. Here’s hoping. -The Centaur

Dereliction of Duty

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The following was written just before I left on Christmas vacation. The fact that I’m posting it three weeks later I think says something about the very point I was making in the article … so I’m going to let it stand as I wrote it the day that it happened. Here goes … — So, my cat died in my lap today, and while I didn’t kill it, I made it happen. I’d love to say I have a lot of feelings about that. The truth is, for me, departures leave a void. I don’t know what to feel, or don’t feel anything. Our precious little fraidy cat Caesar is gone, just gone, and the event passed without the reactions that movies and literature tell me happen when people go through life-changing events. And this is a change, make no mistake. Almost twelve years ago, I and my wife agreed to adopt two rescue cats, Nero (the big black butch one) and Caesar (the skinny Holstein-cow one afraid of crinkling paper). They’d been turned out onto the street by a couple who got on drugs, and were being fostered by one of our bridesmaids, who already had three tiny, frail, elderly cats, and was forced to keep both cats in a bathroom. We had Nero and Caesar shipped from the East Coast to the West, and made them a part of our lives. Nero’s long gone, victim of coyotes, but Caesar, with a different behavioral inheritance, survived and thrived, until a few years ago thyroid problems caused him to start to lose weight. He wasted away from twelve pounds to seven over the years, but we were mostly able to control it with medication, even when we ultimately had to put Caesar outside when, in his old age, he decided it was just fine to pee, like, wherever, because he’d reached the age where he didn’t have to give a damn anymore. Bay Area winters are, of course, as brutal as cream puffs, but we nonetheless set up a huge gazebo enclosure in the back yard, where a tarp, pillows, heating pads and collection of chairs, tables and cat condos gave him a comfy throne for over a year. But then he started wheezing. At first it was a cute little cooing-dove purr, and we thought he was just becoming more vocal. But it developed into a whistling, ticking sound as he labored for breath. Never comfortable on trips to the vet—always scared and panting, frequently pooping in the carrier even when in the best of health—on his last trip he was so freaked out they had to put him on oxygen. Tweaks to his medication and a cortisone shot helped for a while, but soon he was back where he started, with the recommendation of the vet that we make him comfortable. And we did—or, mostly, my wife did. She constantly reworked the outer area to make it a luxurious throne. A night owl herself, she fed him at all hours as, despite his decreasing weight of six and a half pounds, he became our most ravenous cat. And she stayed with him to brush him or sit with him or make him happy. And me? I’m the one who dragged us out to the Bay Area to work for a search engine company, and I’m the one who has to work long hours keeping the lights on now that I’ve transitioned from search to robotics. I’m the one who chose to take on a huge writing project at which I’m barely started, and I’m the one who chose to take on helping found a small press. I seemingly can’t say no to projects, not because I want to do so many projects, but because that’s the only way I have found to make the projects that I do work on into successes—constantly seeking other avenues, other points of connections that make the work that I do more valuable. So now I find myself with an enormous stack of responsibilities that I can’t easily unwind. For a variety of reasons, this has become even worse in the last six months, right when Caesar began his decline. Weekend after weekend I planned to spend time sitting in the back yard with the cats, and weekend after weekend I found myself working late at work or putting out fires at the small press. And week after week, I saw Caesar continue to decline. I even knew this was likely to happen, and took a picture intending to blog about caring for elderly cats. But life intervened, and Caesar has now passed without me ever posting that post about his decline. I can’t look at those pictures without thinking about dereliction of duty. Finally, I had enough, and started to arrange time to spend more time with Caesar. But it was too late. He’d grown too frail to clean himself, but no longer enjoyed brushing, pulling away from me when I tried to clean out his fur. He’d grown too scattershot to properly drink from poured water, but no longer enjoyed suckling my knuckle, making a few halfhearted attempts at the gesture that had calmed him so much as a young cat before wobbling away. I’d sit in the Adirondack chair in the back yard, hoping he’d come up and sit in my lap, and for a while he did, scrabbling his way up on me, getting a scratch, then shakily hop down and walk away. I eventually tried picking him up to put him in my lap, but he just wanted down. By the end, he barely tolerated a scratch behind the ears, and would quickly give up or walk away. As Christmas approached, I worried that he wouldn’t be here when I got back from visiting my folks—but last night, we noticed vomit on his pillow. Today he wasn’t sitting in his throne, and I found him lying against the fence in the back yard, muzzle covered in vomit, drooling on his paws, unable to muster the energy to eat and unwilling to tolerate my touch. I called in at work, woke up my wife, and we started calling for home pet euthanasia services. After half a dozen calls, we had an appointment arranged, and in the mid afternoon, a kindly veterinarian came by. Caesar had slid even further, with a soft, plaintive mew, and the vet gave him a sedative to help him sleep, and soon he was breathing easy for the first time in weeks. Five minutes later, I was sitting on the porch, with Caesar in my lap. The vet shaved a small patch of fur on his leg to get to his vein, and injected the final shot. I put my hand on his chest as he breathed his last, and the vet listened until his tiny heart stopped. The vet left us an impressed paw print in clay and a tiny bundle of fur, and took our cat, wrapped up in a basket, looking more comfortable than he had in six months. Then Caesar was gone. I wasn’t there when my dad died. I knew he was going, I even quit work so that I could be there for him while he was dying in Greenville, South Carolina, but for some reason at the time I felt like I had to periodically go back to my home town, Atlanta, Georgia, for what, I don’t remember now, to keep up the condo, or for my karate classes, or whatever, and on one of my returns to Greenville Dad passed while I was finding a parking space in the Greenville Memorial parking lot. Mom stood straight, but was in tears, and I knew what had happened; Dad’s body lay there, his eyes open, half lidded, his head turned partially aside, not rightable, the human body’s unconscious processes of self-stabilization and homeostasis finally ceased. So Dad was gone. I wasn’t there when my grandmother died. She’d been in the nursing home for a while, and the doctors warned us that she’d had a sharp slide. We came out to see her. Mom, strangely, didn’t want to go into the room, seeming somehow semi-estranged from her, despite being about as good to her as she could have been. I went see Grandma; she was holding her hands tight, her eyes half-lidded, barely registering my presence. We waited a long time, then returned the next day, and waited again. Finally we went for a late lunch, and when we returned, it was over. And Grandma was gone. I wasn’t there when my Aunt Kitty died. She’d been in decent health, despite a painful hip problem, and was jogging at the gym one day when she had a heart attack and fell off the treadmill. I was already on my way to Greenville for other reasons, but when I arrived, she again was barely holding on, each of her organs struggling to keep up, offloading their problems onto another. I parsed the jargon the doctors were saying and re-uttered the words to the family in words they understood, and they seemed comforted. She lay there, writhing a little; once her eyes, half-lidded, seemed to recognize me. But the family told me to leave, and after a few days, I flew back to the Bay Area. She passed the next day, and I flew back for the funeral. But Aunt Kitty was gone. I wasn’t there when Gray Cat died. He was a feral who stayed in the yard, and we slowly started the process of trying to tame him. I was the only one who could feed him. I was the only one who could pet him, and I did it with gloves. But we had started to play together, and he started to warm—then got in through the cat door and attacked my wife. She had to fight him off with a broom, and we ultimately decided that he was dangerous enough that we had to put him to sleep. But it was my wife who took him to the pound. And Gray Cat was gone. I wasn’t there when Caesar’s brother Nero died; as I said, he was taken by coyotes. He was an active outdoor cat, and we could even take him on walks without a leash. But that expanded his range, and he loved hunting on the watershed hill near our home. One night went out late at night, shortly before we heard the coyotes howl. He never came back. We posted flyers and walked the neighborhood, and checked shelters, but none of that mattered; we knew what happened the very next morning. And Nero was gone. Nero's death came without warning. I knew Caesar’s end was coming. I was determined to not let him die alone and afraid the way Nero did. So I kept close watch on him. I thought through the scenarios he might encounter and decided what I was and was not willing to put him through. The ultimate criteria, I decided, was if he could not breathe, if he could not eat, or if he could not get up; today, two of those three happened. So we acted. I was there when Caesar died. We let him lie where he had chosen until the drugs put him into a peaceful sleep, and then I held him in my lap until he passed. And after he was gone, I asked my wife to go for a walk, and I unloaded to her about how I wanted to have been there more. “No,” she said. “We are a team, and I was there for him, several times, every day, while you worked. While you spent your love on the cats that still wanted affection, I focused instead on Ceasar and gave him all the attention he needed. We gave him everything we could.” I still don’t know what I feel about this. I must feel something: I’ve been prompted to write two thousand words on it. But the feeling is that of a void. An uncertainty of how I should react or how I should feel. The only thing I know is that I made sure I was there when Caesar died. — Epilogue: Caesar is gone. Now one of our other cats, Lenora, has erupted in tiny bumps and larger lesions, along with two big lumps in her abdomen. Is it cancer, and she’s soon to be gone? Is it simply cowpox, and she’ll be fine in a month or two? I don’t know. But I do know I am making a special effort to be with her, and with my wife, and my friends and family, while they are alive. -the Centaur

The Yearly Reboot

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So one of the things I like to do each year, as part of my traditional visit to family over the holidays, is to drop in on a Panera Bread, pull out my notebook, review my plans for the previous year, and make plans for the new one. As of the 7th of January, I still haven't done this yet. Shit happened last year. Good shit, such as really getting serious about teaching robots to learn; bad shit, such as serious illnesses in the pets in our family; and ugly shit which I'm not going to talk about until the final contracts are signed and everyone agrees everything is hunky and dory. And much of this went down just before the holidays, and once the holidays started, I cared a lot more about spending time with family and friends than sitting by myself in a Panera. (In all fairness, the holidays were easier when I lived in Atlanta and came up to see family many times a year, as opposed to only occasionally). But I can recommend trying to do a yearly review. One year I decided to list what I wanted to do, both in the immediate future, in the coming year, in the coming 5 years, and in my life; and the next year, almost by chance, I sat down in the same Panera to review it. That served me well for more than a decade, and I find that even trying to do it helps me feel more focused and refreshed. And so that's precisely what I tried to do yesterday. I didn't accomplish it - I still haven't managed to "clear the thickets" of my TODO lists to get to the actual yearly plan, and I miss being able to take a whole afternoon at Panera doing this - but I did the next best thing, sitting myself down to a nice "reboot" dinner and treating myself to a showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. As someone said (a reference I read recently, but have been unable to find) the very act of doing something daily centers the mind. Here's to that. -Anthony

Everything was on fire until earlier today

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Not literally; we were far south of the literal fires, which just barely missed the homes of our friends. But so many other things have been going wrong that it felt like things were on fire ... so no posts for a while, sorry. But tonight, I got to the last chapter of Dakota Frost #6, SPIRITUAL GOLD. I will likely finish this chapter Saturday. That makes today a good day. Time for some cake. -the Centaur Pictured: a cat break with Loki. Not how things look right now, but how I feel.

Facebook is not a Waste of Time

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Facebook is not a waste of time: it saved my cat. Not long after my good friend Jim Davies shared a story about his beloved pug's sudden illness, I came home to find our beautiful cat "Loki the Loquacious" turned lethargic, not interested in food, and yowling at touches to his abdomen. This struck me as seriously unusual, and I was motivated by Jim's experience to look up Loki's symptoms. The recommendation: take him to the vet right away. So we did. It turned out we were right not to wait: this was a life-threatening urinary blockage which could have killed him through cardiac arrest. According to the emergency room vet, this is a particular issue for male cats near the end of winter, when for some reason they drink less. This leads to increasingly concentrated urine, crystallization of debris in the bladder, and, thanks to the (ahem) tapered nature of the male cat anatomy, can lead to blockages that can kill a cat in under 72 hours.
Fortunately we caught it in time, and they were able to catheterize him, put him on an IV and antibiotics. Loki started out as a feral near-bully cat, but after years of love the vets pronounced him a sweetie. They thought he would be home after a couple of days, though it was closer to five. But he's home safe now, and that happened because me and my friends were on Facebook, sharing our stories. Jim, if you're reading this, as I said on Facebook: I'm sorry for your loss. But thank you for sharing it. You helped me save my cat's life. -the Centaur

Unexpected Complications

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So if I haven’t posted here in the past few days it’s because I’ve been FREAKING OUT about an unexpected problem with a project, where two separate contributors had computer failures and travel disruptions. What seemed like a nice, on-time, if tight project became a total freakout O.M.G.-we-may-miss-the-date over the course of a week and a half.

That slow slide off the cliff was halted today and it looks like we’re back on track, but it was touch and go for a while - I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and sent a round of emails trying to get things on track, which worked - but I found out a more experienced coworker had been worried about this last month, and had been trying to say so.

Ah well. Hard lessons. I think it will be fine … but I was motivated to take this picture for this blogpost as I sat here and worked on it, and after a bit, I realized why: it’s another example of unexpected complications. What you see is a giant pile of cat bedding, which didn’t work … because why sleep on something warm, fuzzy, and sheltered when hard shingles will do just fine.

And who could have anticipated that, but a cat. Sigh.

-the Centaur

Excuse Me, I Ordered the Large Cat

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Busy catching up on writing today, trying to get Chapter 1 of the rewrite of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE done, plus various small press tasks, plus writing documentation at work, plus getting new tires for my car … aaaa! So here’s a picture of a cat. Also, apropos, of a tire … but that made me think. I used to take a lot of notes - I still do, but I used to too - but a lot of the time a quick snapshot of something with your cell phone can do you one better.

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I took a few pictures of tires and of the label on the inside of my door without having to write down any numbers. I then went back to my desk, found some highly rated tires on a web site, found a local tire store online, found the models they had in stock, looked up the old tires I bought for the car to confirm the numbers made sense, and made an appointment. Bam. No paper involved.

It’s amazing to me what can be done with storing information in the cloud, as much as I am a skeptic about it. (And even my complaints about how hard it is to take notes on computers are getting addressed - a fellow author just got a Windows 10 book and claims he now prefers its tablet mode for editing because he can use it like real paper).

But it amazes me even more that when I showed up early for my tire appointment, they fit me in so quickly I had my car and was on my way to work at essentially the time I would have normally have gotten in. As a colleague said, "how many times does THAT happen?" My answer? “ONCE. Just today.” America’s Tire, Mountain View, California. Go check them out.

-the Centaur

Don’t Put Things off Too Long

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Recently I wanted to write a blogpost. A blogger I read put up an interesting article, and I wanted to respond. But I rapidly found that there were so many concepts that I take for granted that the article would be incomprehensible without them. I had four bad choices: go ahead and make the article incomprehensible, make it so long it's unreadable, write many blogposts explaining the ideas, which would make the final post no longer timely, or don't blog it at all.

I went for #4, for now, because I realized something else recently: don't put things off too long. That may seem contradictory, but in the case of the blogpost, I'd already put things off too long, and had lost the opportunity. So rather than scramble to recapture the opportunity, I decided to write about the lesson I'd learned about not putting things off.

I knew this lesson already because I had one friend whose father worked his whole life saving money, but then got too physically sick and mentally enfeebled to enjoy the bounty he'd prepared for his family. Then again, when I moved out of my condominium in Atlanta, another friend pointed out I'd made the classic rookie mistake: renovating the house on the move out to sell it … meaning the new owners got the benefit of the renovations, leaving me having lived there for years in a place I wasn't happy with.

The right time to fix up your place is when you move into it: identify the problems that you have and fix them. If you're going to spend a lot of money fixing up your place, you should enjoy it; don't get suckered into spending a lot of money on renovations in the hope it will raise the price of the house. Unless it's a big bathroom or kitchen remodel, it won't.

There are a lot of reasons me and my wife didn't fix up our place when we moved in, mostly having to do us expecting to move within a few years and that not happening because of the financial crash. We actually started the process of renovation, put up some crown molding and such, but then put it on hold … and the holding pattern continued for seven to eight years.

But, recently, we had the opportunity for me to move closer to work. We considered it, then decided not to. With the money we saved from not moving (down payment on new house, plus megabucks to ship all my junk) we considered renovating the bathroom. The cost for what we wanted was literally triple what we expected, so we decided to hold off on that too.

With the money saved for the move that we hadn't spent, we realized we could easily fix many of the small woes in the house. I won't go into all of them, but we've been systematically updating the house on a small scale - fixing up broken fixtures, replacing older equipment, planting plants, and so on. The most recent expenditure: a new umbrella for the back patio.

That seems like a small thing, but when we bought the house, it had a wooden trellis over the whole back patio, but it was destroyed before we moved in, in a freak rainstorm while the house was being tented for termites. A tree that shaded the patio had to come down because it was destroying the neighbor's fence. So for most of the time we've lived there, the patio has never had adequate shade, and has effectively been unusable, leading me to spend many a day on the front porch.

The front porch is nice, but you should be able to use your patio. When we renovated it, we decided to stay cheap: a free table, cheap but very comfortable made-in-the-USA metal chairs and, rather than plunking a lot on a new trellis, we decided to get a simple fold-away patio umbrella. I put it up, winched it out … and found that the back porch completely changed.

You can see the result up there, but it's hard to describe how it felt. The umbrella, while not seeming so large, actually covers the patio on its shorter length. The patio became inviting again. I had to work from home, so I dragged my laptop outside, sat under the umbrella, and coded while a sequence of cats hopped up into my lap, wanting attention.

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The cost of the whole project was under five hundred dollars, about a quarter of the cost of replacing the trellis.

We could have done this eight years ago.

Congratulations. We just lost eight years of enjoyment we could have had in our back yard because we were indecisive in the name of saving an amount of money which, while not trivial to most people, was in the larger scheme of mortgages and cars and computers and phones and even the trellis project itself, was a mere pittance.

So don't put things off too long, is what I'm saying. You may find yourself having missed out on years of enjoyment, as we did with our back porch, or you may find yourself unable to take advantage of an opportunity, as in the case of my blogpost. Yes, be frugal, be busy, be a good use of your time, but for goodness sake, if you have an idea, execute on it.

You'll thank yourself later.

-the Centaur

From my labors, I rested

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So, at long last … I have sent LIQUID FIRE to Bell Bridge books.

Phew.

This has been a long time in coming; the book that became LIQUID FIRE started with some florid philosophizing about the nature of fire and life by my protagonist Dakota Frost - 270 words written way back in 2008:

Liquid Fire

A Dakota Frost, Skindancer Novel

by
Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr.

Started: 2008-04-19
Rough Draft: 2012-09-26
First Draft: 2012-10-23
Completed Draft: 2013-10-19
Beta Draft: 2013-11-01
Gamma Draft: 2014-04-05

Along the way, the story became something very different, an exploration of Atlanta and San Francisco and Hawaii, of learning and science and magic and mysticism. My obsessive attention to realism led to endless explorations and quite a few set pieces.

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Now it's in the hands of Debra Dixon, who's already started to send me feedback. Feedback I'm going to do my best to shelve until May 1st, so I can focus the rest of April on SPECTRAL IRON, which is due early next year. Aaa!

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But for now, my labors, I rest. If only for a little while.

-the Centaur

P.S. This is is my fifth completed novel, and the third Dakota Frost. Only 18 more Dakota Frosts to go in the main arc!