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July 12, 2009
Sunday So Far
Here's what I've done so far today:
1. Woke up and got out of bed at 5:30 a.m., which is about 90 minutes earlier than I usually get up. However, it's also three hours later than I got up yesterday, so I was happy. Furthermore, even though I tossed and turned last night, even though I was bedeviled by strange dreams and woke up often, it was a chemical-free night. That's right: no sleep-inducers, not herbal, not prescription, not OTC--not even liquid! I try to vary what I take during a really bad stretch of insomnia so I don't become too dependent on any one thing, and a really bad stretch of insomnia is what I've dealt with for the past few weeks. But I hope that after last night, it has broken--I hope, anyway. I HATE being awake in the middle of the night and exhausted during the day.
2. Read this really awesome piece in the NY Times magazine about our interactions with whales. It was moving and interesting and profound, and after reading it, I thought, "Well! No matter what happens during the rest of the day, at least I've read this, and that will salvage this entire day, and overall, I will count today as a good day." Ha!
3. Went for a nice long walk while the humidity wasn't grossly intense and the temperature uncomfortably high and the sky overcast and gloomy. Which was another reason I figured today would be a good day.
4. Tried to feed my cat, who had most of her teeth removed on Tuesday.
That's right: my poor sweet kitty Dinah has only eight teeth left in her head. Mercifully four of those are her canines, top and bottom, so she still looks normal--she can still close her mouth and her tongue doesn't just loll out of her face in ways she can't control. I felt like such a horrible person when the vet told me he'd had to remove most of her teeth--if I'd just had her teeth cleaned more often, I thought, she'd still have more of them. But he said no, that cats often just have weird teeth to begin with. Also the fact that my kitty was a stray and clearly malnourished early in life affects her teeth--just like human beings, cats have to have plenty of calcium and Vitamin D to form strong teeth and bones. Anyway, the bad teeth are gone, and she's healing--I no longer have to dose her with pain medication. But she doesn't like wet food, she can't eat regular dry food--she tries, but it falls out of her mouth because she has no molars. I've let her try to dry food in the hopes of persuading her to eat dry-food-soaked-in-water-so-it-gets-soggy-as-Cap'n-Crunch-left-too-long-in-milk, which is what the vet told me to feed her, but go figure, she doesn't like it. (Soggy cat food, not soggy Cap'n Crunch. Though if I thought she'd eat CC, I'd try it.) I don't know what I'm going to do. Hopefully she'll get hungry enough to eat SOMETHING before she starves to death....
5. Talked to my closest cousin M. By "closest" I mean "closest to me in age [she's three months older than I am] and the only cousin I talk to regularly [meaning every six months or so]." The conversation opened like this:
M: How are you? What's new?
H: Oh, nothing's new with me. Same-old-same-old. How about you?
M: Well, I had a mastectomy on Tuesday. I have breast cancer. I start six months of chemotherapy as soon as I've recovered from the surgery.
She's only 45. WTF? And she has been diligent about mammograms and so forth, because her mother also lost a breast at 45. It was during the self breast exam she did religiously that my cousin found this tumor in late May. The good news is that the form of cancer she has isn't nearly as resistant to treatment as the doctors originally thought. Also, if she continues to follow her mother's pattern, she'll be fine--her mother has had no more problems since her mastectomy 25 years ago.
And that was one of the few things that could make my Sunday not as good as I thought it would be.
But read the article about the whales anyway, because it's really cool and hopeful. And if you have advice about how to feed a cat who has no molars whatsoever, let me know.
Posted by holly at July 12, 2009 3:31 PM
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