Another Week (with Lucy)
Jun. 12th, 2023 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aTHE TRIP HOME. I left off in the airport at Oahu. That just left us a 45 minute flight back to Kauai and then a 30 minute trip car ride home.
On the airport flight, Lucy tried to make an escape from her carrier. Quite successfully. The top flap can be zippered open and closed, which makes it quite easy to get a cat in and out, and the front attaches with velcro. Well, halfway through the trip home I looked down and Lucy had managed to push open the velcro and was halfway out of her carrier.
I pulled the cat carrier up and Kimberly and I managed to wrestle her back in the carrier as we listened to the pilot say we were landing in 11 minutes. We noticed she was wet, unfortunately, which meant she'd had a second accident in the carrier. Well, we learned the carrier is indeed leak-resistant, as it's supposed to be for use on the plane. But that explained why our poor kitty had made an escape attempt. (Something similar happened on the very long flight from SFO to LIH on January 1, 2020.)
While Kimberly and I were wrestling with Lucy, we noticed a flight attendant go by and she locked her eyes straight forward, determined that whatever we were doing, it was beyond her pay grade.
Anyway, we got Lucy back into the carrier and she spent the next 10 minutes straining against the velcro attempting to force it open again.
AIRPORT HIJINKS. When I got home, I noticed that my tube of sunscreen in my backpack had made it back. I hadn't expected it to because it was over TSA's ridiculous and totally unhelpful limit for liquids (which is why I always end up buying new sunscreen while I'm in Oahu).
Now maybe Hawaiian TSA just doesn't worry too much about sunscreen, but Kimberly and I also remembered how entranced all the TSA workers at Honolulu were when I carried Lucy through the metal detector and we joked that it you have a cute cat, TSA doesn't pay a lot of attention.
A BUSY WEEK. Oh, the rest of the week was busy. Wednesday was a Blockchain Commons day, and we had an important meeting.
But then Thursday I had to deal with all my work that had gotten backed up, to a certain extent over the previous month, but especially over the last several days. I had two different projects each for two of my blockchain/decentralized-identity clients, and then an article for an RPG magazine that I was already late on.
Now usually, I try to spend my three non-Blockchain Commons workdays on my personal projects and allocate the last hour to an hour and a half to my other clients if needed. (Unfortunately, I've been doing that almost every day for a month or more, which is one of many reasons that I'm feeling jammed on my own work.) But I knew I just had to sit down and try and work through the backlog.
I got all of the client work done on Thursday and much of my article and finished it up on Friday, and so that was a relief, because it all had been hanging over me ever before our trip to Oahu.
A BAD WEEKEND. On Friday we took Lucy in to our local vet for what's become her weekly visit. Which went fine.
But that afternoon she started yowling unhappily, even moreso when we fed her in the evening.
Then Saturday night was awful. We offered her some food, she ate a little and FLED. And then when I brought her back up she was growling at me. (I tried to tune out the fact that she was growling at us on the evening this all got started, which is getting on to a month ago.)
We started tube feeding her and she got more agitated. We eventually stopped around halfway through.
Our supposition was that she was getting sicker (which seemed obvious), but she was seeming better each morning and worse each night, so we supposed that the culprit might be the new antibiotic, which we'd started giving her in the evening (following on from VERC in Honolulu) and had shifted back to the afternoon.
After some real effort, Kimberly got in touch with VERC and they agreed and prescribed her a second anti-nausea drug, for use twice a day as required.
So far? Probably so good. She didn't have the big complaints Sunday night or tonight.
But we're also well aware she's still not eating much. We had that legendary week before the VERC trip where she was eating her full caloric intake every day on her own (with some tube feeding supplementing that and making her pills easier). And we've yet to see anything like that.
So, we wait. We were told that the antibiotics could help in a week or two or it could take the six weeks.
It's just even more nerve-racking having seen the decline this weekend and feeling like we might not even see if she's doing better because of the antibiotic side effects.
But meanwhile our local doctor should have all of Lucy's VERC records too, so we've extended the question of whether she agrees with the diagnosis (though they'd also done a few ultrasounds on her on their own without seeing anything). But hearing our local vet say, yes, that looks right and the antibiotics should help would provide some relief.
On the airport flight, Lucy tried to make an escape from her carrier. Quite successfully. The top flap can be zippered open and closed, which makes it quite easy to get a cat in and out, and the front attaches with velcro. Well, halfway through the trip home I looked down and Lucy had managed to push open the velcro and was halfway out of her carrier.
I pulled the cat carrier up and Kimberly and I managed to wrestle her back in the carrier as we listened to the pilot say we were landing in 11 minutes. We noticed she was wet, unfortunately, which meant she'd had a second accident in the carrier. Well, we learned the carrier is indeed leak-resistant, as it's supposed to be for use on the plane. But that explained why our poor kitty had made an escape attempt. (Something similar happened on the very long flight from SFO to LIH on January 1, 2020.)
While Kimberly and I were wrestling with Lucy, we noticed a flight attendant go by and she locked her eyes straight forward, determined that whatever we were doing, it was beyond her pay grade.
Anyway, we got Lucy back into the carrier and she spent the next 10 minutes straining against the velcro attempting to force it open again.
AIRPORT HIJINKS. When I got home, I noticed that my tube of sunscreen in my backpack had made it back. I hadn't expected it to because it was over TSA's ridiculous and totally unhelpful limit for liquids (which is why I always end up buying new sunscreen while I'm in Oahu).
Now maybe Hawaiian TSA just doesn't worry too much about sunscreen, but Kimberly and I also remembered how entranced all the TSA workers at Honolulu were when I carried Lucy through the metal detector and we joked that it you have a cute cat, TSA doesn't pay a lot of attention.
A BUSY WEEK. Oh, the rest of the week was busy. Wednesday was a Blockchain Commons day, and we had an important meeting.
But then Thursday I had to deal with all my work that had gotten backed up, to a certain extent over the previous month, but especially over the last several days. I had two different projects each for two of my blockchain/decentralized-identity clients, and then an article for an RPG magazine that I was already late on.
Now usually, I try to spend my three non-Blockchain Commons workdays on my personal projects and allocate the last hour to an hour and a half to my other clients if needed. (Unfortunately, I've been doing that almost every day for a month or more, which is one of many reasons that I'm feeling jammed on my own work.) But I knew I just had to sit down and try and work through the backlog.
I got all of the client work done on Thursday and much of my article and finished it up on Friday, and so that was a relief, because it all had been hanging over me ever before our trip to Oahu.
A BAD WEEKEND. On Friday we took Lucy in to our local vet for what's become her weekly visit. Which went fine.
But that afternoon she started yowling unhappily, even moreso when we fed her in the evening.
Then Saturday night was awful. We offered her some food, she ate a little and FLED. And then when I brought her back up she was growling at me. (I tried to tune out the fact that she was growling at us on the evening this all got started, which is getting on to a month ago.)
We started tube feeding her and she got more agitated. We eventually stopped around halfway through.
Our supposition was that she was getting sicker (which seemed obvious), but she was seeming better each morning and worse each night, so we supposed that the culprit might be the new antibiotic, which we'd started giving her in the evening (following on from VERC in Honolulu) and had shifted back to the afternoon.
After some real effort, Kimberly got in touch with VERC and they agreed and prescribed her a second anti-nausea drug, for use twice a day as required.
So far? Probably so good. She didn't have the big complaints Sunday night or tonight.
But we're also well aware she's still not eating much. We had that legendary week before the VERC trip where she was eating her full caloric intake every day on her own (with some tube feeding supplementing that and making her pills easier). And we've yet to see anything like that.
So, we wait. We were told that the antibiotics could help in a week or two or it could take the six weeks.
It's just even more nerve-racking having seen the decline this weekend and feeling like we might not even see if she's doing better because of the antibiotic side effects.
But meanwhile our local doctor should have all of Lucy's VERC records too, so we've extended the question of whether she agrees with the diagnosis (though they'd also done a few ultrasounds on her on their own without seeing anything). But hearing our local vet say, yes, that looks right and the antibiotics should help would provide some relief.