It’s been pretty rough here lately, hence me not being around much. I need to post something fun to cheer me up, and what better than my kitten/no longer kitten Lumi?
Christmas Cat!
He climbed in here behind my back, it’s a sack for firewood.
He has a skull on his shoulders!
Still loves his ‘brother’ Lokii.
And loves his ‘daddy’, too.
I’m scared of large groups of ants to this day because of something that happened when I was about 10 or 11.
My older sister and I got into a fight when we were home alone (I belive it was about whether Boy George was a man or a woman) and she slapped the HELL out of me. I ran out of the house, around the corner to the next block, and sat on a big lump of dug-up concrete that wasn’t quite on the side of the road but also not quite in someone’s yard.
I sat there sobbing my little-kid heart out, face in hands, until I felt something bite my right side. I looked down and I was covered from the waist down in gigantic red wood ants.
Aka carpenter ants. Credit embedded in the photo – that is what I looked down on! Those jaws.
I do remember running. I don’t remember screaming.
My sister heard me from a block away (I remember her saying she never heard screaming like it) – from inside our brick, air conditioned house – as I ran for home. She had me strip naked in our back yard and used the garden hose to get the ants off of me. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, but I think our stupid fight was quickly forgotten and I am still grateful that she forgot our silly fight and helped me so quickly and efficiently. Even when I still had her perfect red hand print on my face!
It’s been a few decades since this event, and if I am ever surprised by an ant, or worse a colony of ants, I calmly freak right the hell out. Or at least I think I am calm when falling over backwards to get away…
What scares you, so long after the immediate threat is gone? We likely all have some serious flashback memories – I will never ask for those. I don’t mean real trauma, but small things like this that have never left you.
I probably don’t need to say again that I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I think I first read one of his books (either Cujo or Firestarter) at age 8, and I’ve never regretted a moment spent in the company of his characters.
I’ve read everything he’s published, I’m nearly 100% sure of that. Maybe a short story or three have gotten past me. Definitely have read every novel, novella, collection of short stories, and his nonfiction works.
Easy to say, then, that the way to my heart is through Sai King!
Hubby got me these as a thank you for taking care of him when he was so poorly.
I hadn’t asked for Christine, but she is awesome!
Then this month, I had a birthday. As you hope to do every year! This one came with my first vinyl ‘toys’ – Funko Pop figures.
Pennywise! Yay! And a small part of my King collection in the background. A very small part!
Roland Deschain and Walter Padick aka the Gunslinger and the Man in Black. My favourite series of books, ever, hands down.
This is King’s year – a remake of IT and The Dark Tower are or will be in theatres near you. The series The Mist has been on for a bit, and Mr Mercedes started last week. I must warn you, Mr Mercedes is NOT for kids or anyone who is sensitive; and we’ve only seen the first episode. It’s a wow, for sure, but horrible and chilling, also. They put on screen much worse things than my imagination cooked up when reading the books. Yikes. Ark – avoid!
Anyone else a Stephen King Constant Reader?
I might have the Wise part. Maybe. The other two have been in massive decline for the last decade or so.
I’ve been at my current workplace for just over 5 years. And it is a good place to work. Before that (when I first started this blog because I had free time), I was unemployed for nearly two years. We were just starting to get out of the financial hole from all that delay this last last summer… then Spot died. While the vet bills were very reasonable, we had already spent our ‘extra’ money on my bass guitar, flights to America and tickets to see Iron Maiden. And of course, then we got Lumi. He’s now on illness benefit and it doesn’t cover the bills, so back into the hole we go. At least we don’t ow tens of thousands to the hospital.
The flights to the US never happened, as himself is too unwell to travel further than the stairs to the bedroom. Iron Maiden had to be done with himself in a wheelchair. He could stand and walk, but not for hours.
Best thing about a wheelchair at a concert? No queueing. Right in the door. Worst thing? Other concert goers who thought he was “brave” or “awesome” or “cute” when he got into the music and whipped his long hair around (like you should do, if you are a man with long-ass hair at a Maiden concert). One fucker actually patted him on the head like he was a dog. That twat is lucky I didn’t break his damn fingers.
We’ve learned a lot about how the world is not wheelchair accessible. I’m a strong woman, physically, but I got sore pushing him around on walkways that tilt to one side or the other. You wouldn’t even notice the cant on foot. Gravel? Forget it. A two inch curb? Not happening without him getting out of the chair first. Oh, that last one was learned at our local hospital. Of all places to be perfectly accessible to a chair, you would think a hospital would be top of the list, wouldn’t you? Nope.
He has iGA necropothy, an immune disease that attacked his kidneys in October 2015 and left him with 30% kidney function. He will need a transplant one day, its incurable. The treatment to keep his function from continuing to decline was a very heavy doesage of steroids – which has lead to the rare (of course) side effect of pinching off the the blood supply to his left femoral head (the ball of the hip). So, the bone started to die. Literally. At first we thought his pain was gout. The iGA has done so much damage to his kidneys, which means they don’t filter correctly, and a buildup of ureic acid is gout. However, the pain went on too long in one single place. He was misdiagnosed twice by his GP with muscle or sciatic nerve issues. Once he was screaming and writhing in pain he was given morphine and sent for X-rays.
Which showed sweet fuck all, of course. Then an MRI after more waiting. Finally a diagnosis. I won’t go into how long it took to get his surgery, but the pain started March 15th and he had the surgery May 18th. So two months on addictive painkillers and nerve blockers, which of course is another worry for us. He is voluntarily weaning himself off of the painkillers this week.
The surgery was core decompression. They drilled a bunch of holes into his femoral head in the hope that blood would start flowing to the bone again. No bone graft, no cartilage added, but between 7-20 holes were drilled. We don’t know how many. He was sent home the next day, about 26 hours after the surgery. We spent more time waiting in the hospital hoping to be seen over those two months than he actually spent in recovery.
He was handed a pair of crutches. Neither of us has ever had to use crutches, and don’t have a clue how to use them properly. He wasn’t given much education on using them, either. YouTube was more help. Thanks to the Aussie lady who helped us figure out stairs!
He’s put on a ton of weight due to the steroids, which he is still on, and of course that makes moving around on crutches even harder. He can’t put any weight at all on his left leg for six weeks (down to four now). His right leg and knee are sore, along with his arms, just from the amount of moving around the house he can do.
I could talk about the issues he has just peeing, or having a shit. I’ll leave it at this – it is incredibly complicated, and I’m so very grateful that I have access to the medical equipment to help him.
Showering is even more fun. If he didn’t have long hair, it would be a shorter process. I don’t care: I love his hair and I’ll take care of it for him when he cannot. It took an hour and a half tonight to get him bathed and dressed again. The hardest part is the compression stockings he has to wear to prevent blood clots. Let me tell ya, those bastards are tight! I stuck my arm in one to turn it rightside out and holy crap, it was even tight on my skinny wrist. Trying to get them on his legs is a job and a half. I feel a bit shit that I can’t do the bath more than once a week as it wears us both out.
We had a scare last week, too. His crutch slipped and he fell on the stairs, landing on the bad leg for a moment. He had also fallen getting off the couch the day before. His left foot, the bad leg foot, was sore to touch. So I rang his GP and asked what we should be worried about regarding this new pain … it turned into ‘a thing.’ His uncle came and drove him to the GP, who sent him to A&E because he was worried that the metatarsals were fractured, and that there might be a blood clot in the left leg as the pulse was slow in that leg. I was already at work and spent most of the day in a panic, but it turned out the GP had panicked instead. He had soft tissue damage to the foot, and no clot.
I’m tired. The worst thing is that I have to give an injection of blood thinners into his belly every day. He is a bit needle-phobic so no chance he could do it himself. Sticking a half inch of pointy sharp metal into someone you love is incredibly hard. I nearly threw up the first two times I did it. I’m better now, two weeks on, but his stomach is a mess of bruises now. It hurts to see what I’ve done to him. I know it is for the good but fucking hell, it sucks that I’m okay with it now. It’s just another thing like emptying a urinal or replacing a bandage or getting him a glass of water so he can take his pills.
Neither of us is happy with this version of life right now. He’s only 44. The world feels upside down and inside out, and not quite real.
I found out last night that one of my oldest friends is dead. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and we are not sure why. Might have been her heart. Might be something else.
She is gone when she was finally getting much needed improvements in her life. The last picture she sent me is of her and her husband smiling and happily goofy. He found her dead on their couch Monday.
My friend, who I have kept in contact with over all these years, is gone. I was maybe 11 or 12 when we first met, she was about a year and a half older. I don’t remember it, but she said I stood up for her in the face of bullies on the school bus. Maybe I don’t remember because I was bullied so hard myself, and it might have been that I found another one like me and simply sat next to her so we could be weirdo outcasts together. As I recall, she looked way tougher than me back then, and I was hoping to find a friend to have my back.
Whatever happened that day on the bus, it left us friends for life. I moved away, she moved away, I moved closer, she moved away, and then I moved really really far away. It didn’t matter, we still had video chats and made each other laugh til we snorted.
I miss her. I was wanting to ask her advice on how to make wire work jewellery, since she had been making and posting pictures of her work which was really amazing. I thought we’d have more time. She was only 46, just days away from 47.
I don’t even know where I’m going with this. I’m writing it out as I can’t speak half as clear as I can write. I could write for days about my friend and our shared lives. I can’t do that now.
Instead I’m going to be a bit selfish and wallow in my grief. I’ve also finally broken my veneer that is ‘hard ass’ and let the pressure and uncertainty of my husband’s continuing illness and the sheer fuckarow of the Irish health service. I do NOT want to talk about his issues until the fix what they can, but the messing around we have gotten means he has been in constant pain for over two months, and the opiates he is on barely work, and we still have another week to wait, IF they don’t cancel his surgery again. We can’t even begin to think about how hard it will be to break off of two months of heavy addictive painkillers. We need the source of pain to be fixed, then we can deal with that.
So. I’ve kind of cracked. Again. I can deal with one major issue and look like I’m laughing it off. But add another and I fall apart. I’m still not over losing Spot, and why should I be? Death is a big bad one for me since my mother died; I have triggers for major depression when people or fur people die, that means I have to watch myself. I wish I was stronger mentally but sometimes the load gets too heavy.
I didn’t write this for replies, but because I had to to get it out of my head a little. Email me if you want to talk. I doubt I’ll be up to a big discussion here.
By accident, I realised that I have passed 600 followers today!
I don’t do this for fame, or massive amounts of followers, so this number is rather a surprise to me. I barely pay attention to stats these days – there are only about 20 of you who interact here consistently, and you are the ones I write for. So very happy to have you all.
Thank you very much to my 600th follower, TheLocomotingVet. Give her some love – most of us would appreciate having an actual veterinarian around online to share good advice.
Happy Christmas from Lumi, in Irish.
Bit blurry but hey, he isn’t yet seven months old and is like a little furry rocket. Lumi-zoomie!
And he looks more like a clown than a Christmas kitten, anyway.
Happy holidays to all of you, whatever form they take for you. Love from Spiders, iDJ, Lumi, Lokii and Neko.
Please help. My friend, met through blogging many years ago and now someone I would call a real friend, like so many of you.
Despite never having met in person, I love this woman. With all the hardships she has had over the last year with car troubles and housing issues – her cat suddenly becoming sick with no clear diagnosis is her top priority. Even a few dollars will help.
Methos looking out for his new human. Guardian Kitty.
And now – same precious kitty and same beloved girl. They have been best friends for her whole life. Please help, even 5 or 10 will add up. She misses her friend while he is in the veterinarian hospital, trying to find out what is wrong.
Please help my friend take care of her good kitty, and keep her daughter’s best friend around as long as possible.
Three years ago, my best friend Socks visited Maine.
Who do I love that lives in Maine? Could it be my life-long hero Stephen King?
Well. Socks went to his house.
And took a beautiful photo of it.
And took an autumn leaf from the grounds outside the friggin’ awesome fence the King’s have around their property!
And framed them both up, and sent them to me.
One bookshelf out of four that are crammed full of King books and comics. Um, and wishbones. I save them. Seems like an appropriate place to store them! Of course, Socks’ framed photo and leaf had to live here, too.
Look at the gates! How awesome are they?
One of Stephen King’s leaves. How damn cool is that? Maybe one day I’ll meet him and totally creep HIM out by saying I have some of his property? Heh. I am a Constant Reader, but I don’t think I’d qualify as Number One Fan! That is pure cockadoodie.
Thank you again to Socks for this, I treasure it so much. You are the best friend ever.
I needed new work boots! As you can see. Exactly the same model, but so nice and shiny clean it seems a shame to beat them to hell, too. I managed to wear them from 9:30 to 4:15 today before I got sore. They just need to loosen up a bit. Condsidering that I have walked an average of 8km (5miles) a day at work this week, that isn’t a bad break-in time before I realised I might be heading toward blister-toes.
I’m married to a shoe-guy. He is also the shopper of the family. He is also really, really good at spotting a good, rare shoe at a great price. So now I have two beautiful sets of Doc Martens. I love that he knows me so well that he gets me amazing boots or kicks (sneakers) that I will actually wear! The black ones are called Coralie, quilted leather. The brown ones are…who knows. Now, I just need to be the kinda gal who changes her shoes three times a day so I can wear them all…
heretherebespiders 