SaraBelle, The Other Shoe Drops.

I got the word today from the Vet. SaraBelle has Cancer. She goes on chemo, but the doc made it fairly clear that this merely extends her life for another 6-12 months. Remission is fairly rare.

This has not been a good day.

Fishtank!

My present to myself this X-mas is a new fishtank! Yay! This is probably the largest tank I have ever had (baring the ones I could never get working). It is a 29 gallon tank that is now sitting on top of my bureau awaiting the addition of fish.



This was a pain in the butt to fill up, being somewhere around 29 gallons, and the water taps are all downstairs. At first I was using a 1 quart pitcher before I finally said 'screw this' and went out and got a gallon jug of water. It still took a lot of trips to fill up.

Now I just let the water clean up, and all will be good to go.

back from the Vet.

SaraBelle's Assessment follows:

"...During surgery I was able to locate the large mass which appears to be a lymph node. Due to the size and location of the mass it was not removed. A portion of the mass was submitted for histopathology. I also biopsied her intestine since this was thickened. Since her spleen was also grossly enlarged a piece of this was taken as well. Her recovery was routine. A duragesic patch was applied to provide pain relief for the next 3-5 days. Please remove this patch on 11/28 and flush it down the toilet. The results will be available next week; typically within 3-5 business days. You will be contacted as soon as these results are available so we can better determine the next best step for SaraBelle."

Normally, they'd keep her overnight, but since tomorrow is Thanksgiving they let me take her home. They told me she'd be loopy, and that is a serious understatement. She walks like a drunken sailor, lurching sideways when she wants to go forward, then flipping over. Its not pretty, after hoping she would rest in my bedroom (where it is warmer) I decided that perhaps her wanting to take the stairs made this a poor choice. She seems to have finally decided to lay down for a bit, although the trip to the litter box was a bit of an adventure.

They shaved more fur off her:



So now we play the waiting game.

Mystery Roll of Film 3: Electric Boogaloo

More Joy From Film



This is the deck on the side of the house. The table is one I bought at target and have kept to this day. The lovely plastic green chairs were a temporary measure from Wal-Mart, and were eventually replaced by solid wood chairs. All part of this deck were a housewarming gift from my parents.



Leeeet the sun shiiiine. If you notice the shovel, you can look slightly to the left
of it and see what looks to be a stick in the ground. This was actually my attempt to grow an avocado plant. It failed. It failed mostly because any foliage or twigs it tried to grow would be eaten by deer. One morning I woke up to find a deer six feet from my window happily munching on one of my plants. Also there was a local stray cat giving it the eye with a sort of 'I can take him' look on his face. I had to pound on the window to make him go away. I then went to the local nursery to get some deer repellent. Ugh, do you have any idea what deer repellent is? Let's just say that you really don't want to spray the stuff into the wind.



As I mentioned earlier, those snapdragons got a lot bigger. I Usually have good luck with Snapdragons for some reason. This area of the garden eventually got taken over by a giant tarragon plant.



Not much excitement here. The big green plant close to the camera would seem to be the Tithonia plant (Mexican Sunflower) that eventually grew to be 6 feet tall. It stood nice and proud until the first hard rain of the winter, whereupon it collapsed into a heap of vines. Back from that, and up against the wall you can see some more green stuff. That was my attempt to grow a grapevine. It grew, but never produced a single grape. Next to the grapevine is a Limequat plant, it too grew and never produced any fruit. I just don't have much luck growing Citrus plants, except for the raspberry container plant I grew on my deck this summer. Even that stopped after about a dozen or so berries.

Mystery Roll of Film 2

We continue



This a shot of a few plants I had on the side of the house. Not very exciting, I admit.



This is the front of the whole Triplex. My car, and the cars of the Majors (my neighbors) are in their usual spots. The front and roof of the house is actually covered with Redwood shingles. Soot from the highway (literally a stones throw from the house) has turned many of those shingles black. The whole property had the feel of being a commercial building converted to residential. The garages were nice and useless, BTW. You could get your car into them, but then you couldn't open the doors.



The exciting side of the house. I already had a shot of this scanned, why did I take another? Nothing really changed except for my deck table, and there's a better shot of that on the roll.



This is a picture of a cat I was taking care of called Cinder. Cinder was my then girlfriend's cat. Her landlord forbade her from having the cat anymore, so I agreed to take her (Cinder) in until she got a new place. The relationship did not end well, and for a while I thought I would permanently have a fourth cat. After a few months, she emailed me and got her cat back.

I don't remember much about Cinder. She was small, sort of friendly, and was constantly being chased around by SaraBelle and Brother. Oh and she peed on me when I had to put her in her cage so my ex-girlfriend could take her away. I'm sure the ex thought that was just dandy.

Mystery Roll of Film

I was digging through some old stuff a few days ago when I found my old film camera. It is nothing special, just your standard auto-focus camera. The thing is, it is had a roll of film in it and I had no idea what pictures were on it. I also had no idea when I took the pictures. I got a digital camera after about a year of living in California and didn't use the film camera much after that. There were a few pics left on the roll, so I took shots of anything available, namely: The cats. I took to the film in for developing when I went downtown toady and found out that the pics were mostly of my old apartment in Aptos. I figured I would share them since there's not much else to talk about until SaraBelle's surgery on Wednesday. I'll put up about 4 a day if blogger will let me.


This pic is looking over the fence to my neighbor's yard. One of their cats, by name of Misha (that is not Brother) is walking along the fence. The lower left of the picture shows that I had at least done some mulching by the time this photo was taken.

This is the garden in its early stages. Keep in mind that before this all that there was in this yard was a bunch of grass and weeds. I had to tear up the garden pretty much with my hands and a hoe. I laid down redwood chips as mulch, put in some flat slates and walking stones, and laid a soaker hose under the chips for watering. This pic shows the late.beginning stages of the garden. The plants have pretty well taken, but most have not reached the huge status they would later achieve.




This show looks towards the fence, and shows some of the crumbling garden boxes that were next to the stairs. Some of the soaker hose is showing through the mulch ( never could get it to completely stay under. The white plants near the fence are Nicotiana. They grew huge the first year, and then never really bloomed again. Down the fence from the Nicotiana are some California Poppies. Europeans think they are weeds, and while they are intrusive, they are also very pretty.


The snapdragons in the center of this shot would become much larger later on. This will be seen in a picture later on the roll. That lovely thing on the left is a bag of sand which I used to plant the walking stones. You might notice various rocks around the garden. I sued them as weights to keep the soaker hose down. They never quite kept the hose under the mulch like I wanted, but they did keep it from traveling too much.

More soon.

Under the Knife

After discussing SaraBelle's situation with someone online, (someone who happens to be a veterinary pathologist) I have decided that another Aspiration is a waste of time and money. So I have scheduled her for exploratory surgery. She goes under the knife the day before Thanksgiving.

Disregard Previous Posts...

I got to talk to the vet today about SaraBelle's Aspiration. The bad news is that the results were 'inconclusive'. The worse news is that the vet is not convinced that it isn't cancer (!). Both the Aspiration and the X-ray gave no indication that it was a tumor, so the vet is going by what she felt in SaraBelle's stomach. If this wasn't perhaps the best vet in the Philadelphia area (Dr. Eigner) I might be less nervous about her declaration.

SaraBelle is now scheduled for another Aspiration on Wednesday.




WAAAAAAAH!

Picture Time!

I took a few pics of SaraBelle with the digital camera. I don't know if it is the camera, her old eye condition, or whatever, but SaraBelle just doesn't look like herslef in these photos. She looks almost mean and scruffy. Her appearance is more like a tough alley cat as opposed to her sweet natured self. She also really wasn't big on staying put for the camera, stupid digital camera delays (WHY you camera designing fucknuts? WHY THE DELAY?) meant that anytime she actually looked up, would then look down by the time the camera actually took a picture. There's still a lot to be said for film cameras folks.

Anyways, here are the requested pics. This one shows her shaved bod.



Here's a not atypical SaraBelle pose.



This one, while not showing her face, gives a better idea of her nature.

Its not cancer!

Good news! SaraBelle had her Ultrasound yesterday. The good news is that whatever that lump is in her abdomen, its not a tumor. Tha bad news is that no one is yet sure what it is. The mass was aspirated and sent off to the lab. Results come next week.

Sarabelle looks very silly with her fur shaved all around her belly and up her sides.

SaraBelle Ramblings

So Sarabelle is spending the night at the vet to get an ultrasound of her tumor tomorrow. I don't really know if it is going to reveal anything more than we already know, but I am sticking by the vet's advice.

Looking back I can see how this has been affecting the little girl.

Her normal behavior is to be very friendly, and to plop on the ground on her back, belly int he air to any person in view. It was adorable. She hasn't done that at all of late, presumably because the tumor might make such a position uncomfortable. Of late she was just curled up on some piece of clothing.

SaraBelle was also fond of letting her voice run away with her. She'd start meowing, and then get louder and louder (usually this was done at night) until she reached to top of her voice. She'd only get quiet if you acknowledged her existance with a loud "SaraBelle!". I barely heard a few meows out of her in the past few months.

As Jade pointed out, however, she's been through worse in some ways. Vets did not expect her to survive early kitten-hood. I never had her as a kitten, she was 2-3 years old when I took her in when Jade's family had to move and could not take her with them. When they raised her, it was obvious she was coolest cat in the whole world. When Jade's step-sister once crumpled up a paper bag and tossed away, the defining moment for me and SaraBelle was made when she happilly strutted back in the room with the paper-bag ball firmly in her jaws. The bag was about three times as big as her head. A true SaraBelle moment.

SaraBelle, for a while at least, played fetch. She had a striped bal that she loved to chase after. She would sometimes bring it back. Once or twice when I was upset she would bring me the ball as if to try and offer its magic to make me feel better.

When I was in California, my neighbors had a large fuzzy cat named Roscoe. He was quite the cool semi-feral cat. SpittingRage once commented on a picture I took of him, saying he looked like "SaraBelle's surly biker boyfriend". It was a perfect description. SaraBelle charmed the neighbors as well, the whole family came by to say farewell to her when the cat transporters picker up my fuzzballs.

When they arrived at my parents house, where I was staying upon my return to CA, Brother and Lyra both hid under a dresser and did not come out all day. SaraBelle explored and found Dad reading on the couch. That was a perfectly warm place to be.

I can't say much more now.