Day to Day

I almost lost my little old lady Addy a couple weeks ago.  She started vomiting on a Monday and wouldn't eat.  Tuesday afternoon I took her to the vet, which turns out probably to have been a mistake.  I thought that like last time she just needed subcutaneous fluids and a shot to break the vomiting cycle.  But her kidney tests were actually normal!  Better numbers than I've seen in a long time.  Her amylase was sky high, which is a marker for the pancreas not functioning well.  It turns out, pretty much any major organ failure she goes into will have pretty much the same symptoms, vomiting, refusal to eat, etc.  They gave her sub-cutaneous fluids anyway, and an anti-nausea shot and an antibiotic shot.  

I took her home but Tuesday evening she was worse, and Wednesday she was obviously hurting so much that I almost took her back and asked them to put her to sleep.  There is no 'right' or 'wrong' decisions when you get to that stage.  I just held and gently stroked her for long periods on Wednesday (I was out sick too) and hoped for the best.  That was all she wanted - to be where I was. 

So she didn't eat from Monday through Friday, although she continued to drink water.  I tried tempting her to eat with everything I knew, but no go.  Saturday morning about 2:00 am, we were both laying there awake and I was contemplating taking her to the vet for the final time.  Just drinking water, she was losing strength and could barely totter around the house.  I was carrying her around.  As we lay there, she got up and headed for the cat box.  I got up and put down fresh wet food and tried again - carried her to where it was.  And she ate it!  Not a lot, but she voluntarily ate for the first time since the previous Monday morning.  So I started putting small amounts of dry food on the bed with her and fresh wet food down regularly.  Over the course of the last week, she's steadily been increasing the amount of food she's eating, both wet and dry, and she's steadily gained strength back

I don't know why but once again she's come back to fairly stable.  She gets around the house as well as she has been this last year, and doesn't seem to be in any kind of discomfort except for her usual arthritis.  And she's 21 years old this month.  I know she won't live forever, so I'm incredibly grateful to have some additional time with her.  If she didn't keep beating the odds, it might be easier to think that she won't keep on doing it.

The quince is in full bloom in my back yard, about a month before it bloomed last year.  And the honeybees are happily going to town on it.  If you look closely at the picture above, you can see a bee in the middle of the flower in the center.  Nothing else is blooming yet.  I had my peach trees cut way back so they may not bloom for awhile.  Yes, I broke down and paid someone to do it.  It wasn't that expensive and it took him an hour to do what would have taken me most of a day.  I did finish trimming back all my roses and cleaning the vine out of the quince myself though. 

My african violet at work is still not looking good, although the center is still holding.  I now have 6 leaves from it planted in soil though, so hopefully at least one of them will grow a new plant.  Hopefully more than one, so I can give one to Monica too.  I've also planted two other violets for her, a frilly purple one and a regular purple one.  I still need to plant her a cutting from my maroon violet.

On other "growing things" fronts, various flowers continue to bloom in my aerogarden that has flowers in it.   I like it because I love blooming things.  I'm not even sure what these flowers are that I have blooming.  I just like flowers, so I planted several different kinds.  the bad news about that is that not all of them grow at the same rate.  That means I am cutting back the fast-grower a lot to give the other access to the lights.  Oh well.   I'm still getting flowers.

The other aerogarden, which I'm using to try to sprout some stubborn tree seeds, is growing a couple of little pines but not much else.  It's more in the nature of an experiment to see what I can get to grow in an aerogarden.  As you can imagine form all the things I've been planting lately, my kitchen counters look more like a greenhouse than a kitchen.  Good thing I'm not much into cooking.  I currently have more plants in this house than I've had all together since  . . . actually since ever.  Most plants ever.  Some of them will go outside when the weather warms up for the year, but then some of the plants I have outside will come in when it gets hot, so I guess it balances out.  

That's all for today.