Blog–ruptcy!

Oh yeah, this thing. Here's the ridiculous thing. I've been meaning to write a whole mess of posts. And in fact it had reached a logjam of stuff. I was paralyzed on writing any given post because I knew there were so many to write. So then I decided I was going to declare "blog bankruptcy" and just write one post touching briefly on all of the topics. The thing is that I decided that in early December and I've had a task sitting in Omnifocus about it for over two months. In that time frame even more shit has transpired that needed to be in the post. In short, it wasn't going to happen. So here we are. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dump a list of interesting things, no more than a couple of sentences on each. Once it's all here maybe it will free me up to write more on particular topics. Feel free to jab me if any of these catch your eye and you want to hear more.

1. We got a new TV! We replaced the old set with a projector and an 84" retractable screen. It's pretty sweet!
2. While doing all of the projector install and wiring I put my foot through the hall ceiling, so we had a big hole for several weeks. This was less sweet.
3. Back in October Schrödinger got really sick and we had to take her to the Cat Hospital. Turns out she's having renal (kidney) failure and was super-dehydrated. They had to keep her there on an IV for five days, one of which we couldn't visit her at all. That super-sucked and now I have to administer fluids subcutaneously to her daily. (Translation: I have to stick a needle under her skin and give 100 mL of lactated ringer's fluid.) She's doing fine now and she's got a special diet that helps her along.
4. Not to be outdone Heisenberg had some sort of hypoglycemic shock in January. I came in and found him passed out on the floor with his face in his food plate. He couldn't stand and when I checked his blood sugar it was drastically low. He only had to stand overnight in the hospital but we're still adjusting his insulin trying to find the right balance. He seems OK for now, so we'll see what happens.
5. Since my last post talked about iTunes Music Match I should probably mention that I turned it on since then on my iPhone and it works well. I find that I can't stream music from the internet down to my phone and then wirelessly to the Airport Express but that's a pretty edge case. It is pretty cool to be able to search my entire music library from my phone. Macworld has a useful article describing how to upgrade crappier audio files after using Music Match. It worked for me and upgraded 4,788 tracks so that's awesome. I did notice one example later where my "explicit" CD rip had been replaced with a "clean" radio edit so keep an eye out for that.
6. I got Skyrim for Christmas. Probably my vote for best game of 2011. So good!
7. I also got Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS. It's a lot of fun, but the last few worlds get ridiculously difficult. At one point I was up to well over 100 lives but I'm on the last 2-3 worlds now and I've gotten down to a bit over 25.
8. Playing the 3DS again really drives home the odd conflict in Nintendo's hardware these days. I like the 3DS and the 3D effect does make some sections of Super Mario easier, but I've also died many times because I move my head or arm and lose the sweet spot mid-action sequence. It's weird that over with the Wii they've made this big push towards getting non-games, this "blue ocean" strategy and then their handheld is so weirdly finicky as to require serious training in how to use it.

So there you go! Hopefully this will clear the decks and I'll resume posting. I have some pictures of the projector install and ceiling repair that I intend to post at the very least.

State of the (Boy) Cat Address, 2011

So about that darn cat. He's diabetic again. We've known that for about six weeks now but it took a month to establish that he was just not going to respond to glipizide this time. At least now I've learned that "Hey I'm going to start peeing in weird places" means "I've got diabetes, check my glucose levels", plus I had the glucose meter on hand. All that means I'm about a week into giving him insulin injections. Hard to say what's that's doing for certain. I haven't done a full glucose curve for him (we're supposed to wait two weeks for his blood chemistry to stabilize), but I have been peeking roughly daily. Truth is halfway between his breakfast and his dinner the numbers still seem bad, which probably means I'll need to up his dosage. But then there's the anecdotal side of it - the pee volume is down (locations are still wrong, damnit cat!), and he's definitely more active since the injections started. I hate to read too much into his behavior when it might be just that I'm watching him more carefully, but this really was a matter of the day I gave him the first injection he was considerably more underfoot and playful that day. So maybe the insulin is giving him good numbers for a big chunk of the day, and just at the nadir between injections the numbers are bad again. I'm no expert …

For reasons I don't quite understand, the doctors insist that there's no interaction between any of these diabetes treatments and the Metacam (for his walking). Which I would believe – it's not that I don't trust them – but the thing is that the reason I thought there was an interaction was that they told me there was back in 2009 when all of this diabetes & walking stuff started. As far as I can tell they didn't want to start him on Metacam while he was having diabetes because kidney function is weird in diabetics. But now that we know Metacam is OK with his chemistry it's OK to add the glipizide or the insulin on top of the Metacam - even though they weren't willing to add Metacam on top of glipizide before. Either that or something new is known in 2011 that we didn't know in 2009. I'm not sure which.

At any rate, that's the deal now. He still gets his Metacam syrup every three days and he gets a shot of insulin with every meal. I was dreading that but the truth is that he doesn't notice the needle. He appears to think it's normal for me to pet him after each meal and so he's more than happy to come over and sit with me and get the shot.

Of course, the first time I won't be around at the feeding I'll have to convince Karin that the needle isn't "gross". We'll see how that goes …

Carpe Diem, the Cat Version

One of the stranger artifacts of working from home is that Heisenberg has decided that I should throw his little ratty ball-toy down the hall at least four or five times every day. He has a special little cry that amounts to "Hey, come play with me" that he often makes while holding the ball in his mouth to get my attention. What's funny is that he makes the same call sometimes when he just wants me to watch him play with the ball and doesn't actually want me to do anything. Sometimes I can just talk to him about what he's doing and sometimes I need to come throw the ball myself. I haven't been able to figure out the difference so far.

My first reaction is sometimes to be annoyed and to say "Hey I'm working here". It takes a conscious effort to remind myself that he won't be here ten years from now and I won't care about what esoteric Python feature I was reading about, but that I will remember the two minutes I took aside to play with one of my cats. Which is weird because I'm used to thinking that Heisenberg is a stupid little idiot but sometimes he reminds me that I can learn from him. Speaking of which I hear him calling now. I'd better go throw that scruffy little ball of junk down the hall for him while I have that privilege.

About that Cat Blogging

Has it been two months since my last blog about Heisenberg's health? It has! (And there were only eight posts in the last two months. Meh. I've been busy.)

But I've been delinquent in posting about the goober and that's especially a shame because we had good news. The funny thing is I posted that last post on August 17th. Well, that 21st was his monthly "glucose curve" where I checked his glucose level every two hours for twelve hours. Now remember, I said something from 80 - 170 mg/dL was "normal" for cats and he was considered "managed" at numbers around 250. Well that Friday his numbers were between 67 and 88. Yes that's right his numbers are now low. See cats can go into spontaneous remission from diabetes and just start producing insulin again. Nobody really knows why.

So yeah, he hasn't taken glipizide for about two months now. I still spot check him occasionally and I haven't seen anything higher than 87 mg/dL in that time.

He still had the neuropathy walk and I eventually asked the vet about it (and about the possible vertebrae fusion). What they originally said is that any treatment for that would interfere with the glipizide and we couldn't do that. So now he's on a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory called Metacam. Metacam is a scary thing to Google for felines: it's not approved for cat usage in the US, and it can cause renal failure. So I watched him really carefully as we started him on it. It definitely makes a big difference in his gait. He's not walking like he did last year but he's faster and more agile on the Metacam than not.

Just to keep the roller coaster going last week he started peeing inappropriately again, and I immediately thought "Well crap, that could be renal issues with the Metacam" so we took him into the vet Saturday so they could get a urine sample and do some tests. Word is that he's doing just fine, all of his levels are what we want to see and he can stay on the Metacam. So he's just peeing on the floor to spite me. (sigh) I did rearrange his access to the litter box to see if that made him happier, we'll see over time.

Anyway, the main takeaway is that he no longer has diabetes which is good. He's on a medicine which has been bad for some cats and you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence about cats who couldn't take Metacam on the internet. But that's not science, and my anecdote is that he seems to love taking the Metacam - he'll even come over and sit in my lap while I'm obviously holding the syringe (it's a syrup that you squirt into his mouth). He's got stable levels in his blood and he's been taking it long enough that it was going to cause problem it would have by now. We still have to keep a close eye - if he got sick from something else that could break the equilibrium and then we could have trouble. But for now he's a solid little guy and he may not have to go back to the vet for another four months. Which is a good thing.

Followup on His Royal Highness

I should follow up on my first post about Heisenberg. And I should post more than once a month, but that's a different topic.

The good news is the little bugger is doing fine. The glipizide has made his condition "managed", which is excellent news. Depending on what source you use you hear that "normal" cat glucose levels range from 80 - 170 mg/dL. Our veterinarian told us we wanted to see numbers between 100 - 300 mg/dL for Heisenberg. When he was in for his checkup back in June he had a reading of 411. Now, that may not be accurate because he gets really riled up about going to the vet (they have to sedate him because he gets all hissy and bitey) and stress can elevate the glucose levels but it's obviously above normal. After a few weeks on the glipizide I started taking readings and I haven't seen anything above 267 and he's pretty much dialed in around 250 as an average. He's stopped drinking quarts of water and he's pretty much stopped peeing everywhere (there's an occasional backslide, but it's less than once a week now as opposed to five-six times a DAY this spring), and he seems more alert.

The bad news is that he's also developed a symptom known as neuropathy where he has weakness in his back legs and has some trouble walking. It is possible this will heal over time now that we have the diabetes controlled so we're just waiting to see. While we were diagnosing that we established that he also has a couple of discs in his vertebrae that are starting to fuse together - which would cause much the same problems as neuropathy and the normal treatment is steroid and those would conflict with the glipizide. (sigh) So the upshot of all that is that he's probably never really going to walk (or jump) as well as he did as a li'l guy. But still, it doesn't really seem to bother him and we're assured that he's not in any pain because of it so we just keep on trucking. We got a ramp for the laundry room step so he no longer has to jump up and through the cat door. (It needed to be a sturdy ramp because Karin and I use that door all the time, so we got a wheelchair ramp.) I still need to build him a ramp to his cat tray but he can still jump up on a bed from the floor, so for right now he can make it into the tray easily. He needed the ramp for the cat door because of the combination of jumping up the step and through the cat door is a little tricky.

I've always assumed we'd need a ramp there eventually for Schrödinger, so it wasn't that big of a deal to put one there and for now he seems OK with all of the other steps and jumps he has to do. So once I get this other ramp built we'll just step back and see how he does.