mostlyihyperfixate

[mostlyihyperfixate]

so so so so so so so close to finishing this one shot

i thought of a title (or at least an idea for the title) on my way home from work yesterday, and today I almost finished the penultimate scene

if my cat continues to show improvement and i don't put any other holes in my fingers then maybe i can finish this thing in time for posting on the weekend!!!

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Big ol biddie lawyers and don't call me Shirley

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Listen, Tumblr, I don't turn my ad blocker on on this site because you're my favorite little hellsite, and I generally trust you to just suggest weird things for me to buy, not give me computer viruses.

HOWEVER!!!!!

If you keep making me look at this horrendous person with a fleshy, cowboy-hat-shaped growth on his head, I am not sure how long this arrangement will last.

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My old piece ^3^

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Another 800-something words in the bank on that Loki one shot. We're sitting at 8,270 right now. One and a half more scenes to go!

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long time no franziska... i missed my queen 💙💙💙

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Spin this wheel of ~300 AO3 tags three times.

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sutileza

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every time i write i think about that maya angelou quote where she talks about her editor asking her why she uses semicolons instead of colons and says she has often responded by threatening to never speak to him again

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🌙🌸 CHIBI SAILOR MOON | USAGI TSUKINO🌸🌙

[mostlyihyperfixate]

This is not a very well organized blog post.

Okay, quick update (when am I ever "quick"?) just in case anyone has been reading these and would be interested in an update.

Emmett is doing considerably better than he was. He did go in for surgery and have a feeding tube placed last Friday. It was sort of a bigger deal than I thought--it wasn't just placed through his nose, but sewn into his neck.

He was still really lethargic the following day, worse than before I took him to the vet again. But he had just had surgery, two straight days of being under anesthesia, and the vet put him on a different pain medicine that's easier on his empty stomach, but makes him a little sleepy. So I tried not to worry too much throughout Saturday.

And since then, he's definitely improved. He shows up for meals now, even if he doesn't eat a whole bunch. I mean, I do have to put a bunch of emergency care food into his stomach four to five times a day. Which also includes a lot of water, so I haven't seen him at the water bowl, but not only is his food mixed with water, but he gets his medicines crushed up in water, and his tube needs washed out before and after he's fed. So that's a lot of water.

He spent most of Saturday just sort of blobbing on the floor again. Yesterday, he upgraded to blobbing on the couch after his afternoon meal. Today, he waited until my supper time to start blobbing--and that's almost certainly because he got his pain medicine about hour before that.

The vet says he needs to have that until his feeding tube comes out. He's got a follow-up appointment towards the end of next week to take stock of when that might could happen. And he's eating well enough on his own that I was told to take him off the appetite stimulant today. He isn't eating as well, but he is still eating, so that's good.

He slept with me all last night, which is the best I've slept since this whole thing started. I could reach behind me and touch his side and just make sure he was still breathing. He left pretty early, too, probably 5:00. He meowed at me a lot (he's naturally a chatty boy) and let me pet him, and this afternoon before his feeding, I found him outside on the patio--it was over 80 degrees outside today. It's February. How disgusting. But I went inside to exercise, and when I came back, he was sitting in the grass.

Overall, he looks more like himself, and he's not nearly so hot! He's not hissing when I touch him. I really hope that this means he's on the mend!

I did bite the bullet today and sign him and his brothers up for pet insurance. It's not as unreasonable as I thought, and for all three of them annually, it's still less than I spent on a single vet appointment/procedure Emmett had last week (and he had five). It won't help me with this issue because he won't be covered for another couple of weeks, but it will save me money in the long run, I think.

Anyway, now that that has (mostly) passed, unless something new and scary happens, I can assure you that I will now return to reblogging and posting about Ace Attorney instead of my various adventures with my cat.

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Well, the vet called me a little after 8:00 this morning with Emmett's ultrasound results.

The lymph nodes near his small intestine are enlarged. His gallbladder is as well, but that's most likely due to the fact he hasn't eaten anything in almost a week. So the swollen lymph nodes are the biggest concern.

This could be caused by three things: 1) he has cancer; 2) his lymph nodes are fighting off whatever disease started all this; or 3) he's got some virus I can't remember the name of, but, basically, he fought off an illness (and he did have a cold last month), but his immune system didn't do it properly, so the virus has mutated and is now attacking all of his organs.

The last thing comes in "wet" or "dry" variety. The wet is pretty easy to diagnose. If Emmett had wet, he'd have fluid in his abdominal cavity, and that fluid is very distinctive. Since he doesn't have any fluid in his abdominal cavity, if he has this problem, he has the dry variety. The dry, unfortunately, is very difficult to diagnose. He'll have to undergo surgery simply to find something to biopsy. They can try to find these places via ultrasound and get the biopsy without surgery, but most of the time, the pathologists don't get enough from this procedure to do anything with it. So they have to go back and do the surgical biopsy anyway.

The good news is that Emmett has really perked up today. He's been running around all morning. He's not all stiff anymore. He hid under a rug for a bit again, and when I went to pack him up for today's vet appointment, he was actually sitting outside on the patio, perched on the arm of a chair. And he didn't eat, so that sucks, but I realized before I went to wrangle him that he didn't actually get his prescribed appetite stimulant tonight. He's got so much medicine he has to take that that one simply got missed.

Here's the thing (that a lot of people probably already knew, but I did not): cats develop food aversion when they're force fed. So it is possible that he's getting better, but since I gave him some food granules yesterday and some syringes the night before, he just won't eat at all.

So he's off at the vet's to get a feeding tube placed. This will be done this afternoon--and might make things easier, since I can give him his medicine and water through this, instead of via IV or syringes.

If it's food aversion, it could take anywhere between a few days to over a month for him to start eating on his own. The hope is that, since he's showing signs of improvement, he will continue getting physically better, then eventually start eating on his own again, and that will be that. But if he keeps being lethargic, stiff, etc., then he'll have to go in for the surgical biopsy.

I'm trying my best to remain hopeful. It doesn't seem likely it's cancer if my mom's cat has the same problem--but no one really said what's supposed to be done if he does have that virus that attacks his organs.

But there's nothing I can do for now. The vet tech said she'd call me when he was getting ready to be sedated again. So I guess I'll whip out my stenograph and do some speed practice in the interim. I've already exercised for the day, cleaned everything on my list for the week, and I've still got a big hole in my thumb (that at least isn't opening up and bleeding every time I look at it funny anymore, and the dead skin hardened enough for me to clip, so the wound isn't catching on everything I touch).

You are not in any way required to stay tuned, but I'm sure I'll have more to say as things progress.

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another update; at least you're not a captive audience.

So Emmett got to go back to the vet again today. It took him a long time to wake up this morning. Like, he didn't even lift his head. It was pretty scary. Got a bunch of fancy cat food stuff from the grocery store in the hopes I could tempt him with any of it. No go. I did manage to give him a few crumbles of chicken like I was giving him pills, but that was it.

I mean, he still seemed a little more active. Like, he did leave when he got sick of me feeding him. He wandered around a bit. He squirmed like crazy when he got nabbed to get a bolus. But he hasn't eaten anything of his own volition since Sunday.

And the vet we saw today just doesn't know. She did all of his bloodwork again; she took X-rays again. Everything is fine. This time, they did take some urine. But it, like his bloodwork, was "pretty boring." His heart is still fine. His lungs are still fine. His X-ray shows that his bladder isn't a concerning size, and it showed that he has, in fact, had a bowel movement since his last one.

I'm not sure if he still has a temperature or not. He didn't feel so warm to me, but I can't really trust that. This vet didn't say.

So I got to drive him to a different location for the same clinic to get an ultrasound. Literally the only thing this vet could find was that maybe the left side of colon looks a little weird. But she doesn't even know for sure if it does, and she says she doubts he has a foreign object in there because his stomach feels soft to the touch, and he doesn't hate being touched there anymore than usual, and there's no visual sign that he's got something.

I don't know what he could have swallowed. And I keep thinking, a tumor isn't a foreign object, is it?

I had to leave him at the vet, because I have an hour-ish commute to work, and we had set a temporary orders hearing for a divorce this afternoon. Since my boss has been cool enough to let me use this other time for taking care of my cat, I wasn't about to ask if someone else could handle the hearing today.

Major Seymour flashbacks.

Thankfully, the hearing didn't even happen. Everyone came to a short agreement. It took about 45 minutes all in all, and then I got some stuff for a job I took a couple weeks go scanned and printed, and then I headed home.

But they haven't called to give me the okay to pick up Emmett...

I know he was a work in. I know it takes about 30 to 45 minutes for the anesthesia to wear off. I know that actually this clinic isn't even reading the ultrasound, and I won't have an results from it until tomorrow at the earliest. I keep trying to remind myself that ultrasounds are not an invasive procedure, and Emmett is young, and apparently otherwise completely healthy. He should not pass on from this.

All the same, it's tough not to worry that I'm going to get the call that he's got cancer all over again.

He's also getting some appetite stimulant. If he doesn't start eating by tomorrow morning, I get to take him back for a feeding tube.

This is not the fun kind of deja vu.

[mostlyihyperfixate]

quick update just in case anyone read my nonsense

Emmett seems to be doing a little better today. I don't think he's necessarily out of the woods, but at least we avoided our third vet trip of the week.

He's been more active, moving from place to place to sleep, which is a little more usual for him. He spent some time in a new box. And actually, he's up here right now, not sitting next to me, but sitting nearby. For want of better term, his eyes look a lot more "alive" today than they did yesterday. I even saw him give himself a very short bath while I was working on dinner.

I wanted to give him another bolus, but the vet didn't send me the instructions on it yesterday like she said. I called to ask about it, and I asked again when someone from there called to check on Emmett this afternoon. But the vet's out of the office today, so I don't think I'll be getting those today.

He's still not eating or drinking on his own. But he did just very recently finally finish taking in yesterday's bolus, so I'm not as concerned about dehydration as I might have been otherwise. I've also seen him use the litter box a couple of times. And I have used a syringe to give him a small amount of watered down food just because he hasn't eaten since Sunday morning.

Percy, meanwhile, seems to be truly offended at the amount of attention I'm giving his little brother, and keeps following me around and demanding pets.

At least I don't feel like I'm going to be as worried when I go to the office for work tomorrow.

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Behold my powerpoint on the various forms of the narumitsu ship

Thank you for listening to my ted talk.

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Here's a lot of information you didn't ask for, but I'm upset, so I'm going to post it anyway! I'll probably decide it's a bad idea and delete this later.

God, my cat is so sick. I'm a wreck.

I lost my cat back in December 2020, right before Christmas. He just stopped eating. I kept taking him back to the vet, and they kept sending him home--and eventually it turned out he had cancer that was blocking his digestive track. He had a lot of surgeries. A lot of medicine. And I was told with chemotherapy and whatnot, I could probably have another year with him. But a week later--a week where he stayed at the vet, and I went to visit him--he passed on because when they took the biopsy of his tumor, they got fluid in his lungs, and he wasn't strong enough after everything to recover and breathe properly.

It was a pretty traumatizing experience. I had told the vet that if they didn't think he was going to make it, I didn't want to leave him over the weekend to pass on alone. But they assured me they thought he'd make until Monday...only to call me at 2:00 that morning to say that he was going to pass, and that, no, I couldn't go up to be with him because it wasn't clinic hours. They did end up transporting him to a pet emergency room that was open, so I could go say goodbye, but...

Man, it was hard to get over. I ask myself, "Why do you live here?" a la the Prophets in Deep Space 9 a lot, so I'd quit reliving the whole thing. It's really only in the past year or so that I've been able to think about Seymour with joy, or visit places (such as the vet's office) that remind me of him. He was only eight, and it was so sudden.

This is not to minimize anyone's trauma or pain; I realize that Seymour was a cat, and people lose loved ones every day. I understand that. I have, like, two IRL friends, and one of them lives in a different state, so I just really value my pets. Losing Seymour was a really big deal to me.

Anyway, I have been doing a lot better. I don't mean to make it sound like I was a weepy mess for four years after Seymour passed. I adopted Percy and Emmett, and I love them dearly! I just tried really hard to avoid the thought of Seymour at all, and it's taken me a while to trust that maybe I'll have Percy and Emmett for some time, and I don't have to be constantly on the lookout for something just coming out of nowhere and killing them

Well, Emmett got really, really sick over the weekend.

Friday evening, he followed me around a lot. I got a package of clothes, and I didn't want him hopping in it until I'd tried my clothes on and decided what I was going to return. The minute he was able to get in the box, he was so happy. I have pictures of him sitting in that box, peering over the top of it...really just being himself.

But Saturday, he just wasn't himself. He didn't get up for breakfast until hours after feeding time. He didn't want to help me strip my bed and put new sheets on it. When I had, he went to the top of my bed and just slept there all day. I know he's a cat, but he's usually not this lethargic. Then he didn't eat dinner, and he wouldn't get off my bed at all on Sunday. I offered him some special food I knew he liked, and he wouldn't touch it. And he was so warm.

I guess I can't say it happened out of nowhere. In retrospect, he'd been eating less for a bit, and I came home from work last week to find that someone had peed all over my shower curtain, and it smelled awful. But Emmett hasn't been doing that since I put him on fluoxetine, so I didn't really even think about it being him. I was just glad he was choosing to sleep with me every night, because I love him.

Thankfully, I didn't have to go into work yesterday, so I got him to see the vet as soon as I can. He had a pretty bad fever, but, like, that was it. They did a full blood test, and nothing was "medically concerning." He had some chemical that was high because of an infection, and he had low electrolytes because he wasn't eating and drinking. So after a couple of hours there, they gave him some injections and sent us on our way.

And he seemed to do better after that. He perked up a little bit. As soon as we got home, he drank some water. He started moving around more. He even crawled under a rug, one of his favorite past times. He followed me to my bedroom after dinner. But when I left since it was only, like, 5:00, he left, and he didn't come back.

When I got up this morning, he was sitting on my couch, and I could just tell he didn't feel better. He didn't eat anything at all. He looked worse. So before I left for work, I called the vet and did my best to get him an appointment. 3:00 in the afternoon wasn't ideal, but it was something. They'd said something about giving him an X-ray if he wasn't better.

And even more thankfully, they were able to work him in, like, an hour after I left, and my dad agreed to go grab my cat and take him to the vet for me. I got to work, took a quick guilty plea, confirmed that no one needed me for anything that required my physical presence the rest of the day, and drove home to be with my cat.

About 20 minutes into my drive, the vet calls and starts asking me about testing my cat for feline leukemia.

So I'm a crying, icky mess by the time I get to the vet's office. My dad refuses to leave because I'm so upset. So I get to sit there with him for thirty minutes while they sent Emmett for heartworms, feline leukemia, and some sort of autoimmune deficiency disease that's sort of like AIDS in humans.

The good news is, he doesn't have any of that. His X-ray came back clear. He doesn't have any blockages. His heart and lungs are "excellent." But his temperature is worse, and now he's definitely dehydrated. So the bad news is, the vet doesn't know what's actually wrong with my cat.

They gave him some IV fluid and another injection for nausea and vomiting, then they sent me home with some oral antibiotics and pain medicine and the rest of the IV bag.

But if he hasn't started eating or drinking by tomorrow afternoon, he's going to be hospitalized.

He's only three. I'm not ready to say goodbye yet.

I know there's nothing else that I can do for him right now. He's so mad at me for taking him to the vet, so he doesn't even want to be around me right now. And he's already spent, like, three hours at the vet today, so obviously he's exhausted. But I'm so worried.

The only good thing, I guess, is that my mom has a cat that had similar (though not as extreme symptoms), and her vet diagnosed the cat with an UTI and sent her home with almost the same medicines as mine. About the one thing my vet didn't do was check his urine (not that he had much anyway, considering he's not drinking much), so maybe he's also got a UTI and these will help?

Just wish I'd figured out something was wrong with him sooner.

No use sitting around, though. I guess I'll go run a 10k. Healthier for me than just crying and continuing to write incredibly long Tumblr posts that no one cares about, right?