Watching and waiting

Today is day eight after My's diagnosis.

Camping trip was successful. She hiked 2.5 miles with me around the lake. She wagged her tail and loved all the attention that was lavished on her. She loved being wrapped in her warm, borrowed blanket and slept for a couple hours in the tent before we went to bed each night. Thank goodness for the rigid door of our tent.

We went to the holistic vet on Monday evening. It was in a lovely part of south Nampa, very picturesque. An excellent place for a vet's office, I think. The floors in the waiting room were bamboo with Chinese symbols as a border. Dr. Ault was matter of fact and brusque. She did a physical exam and then some kinesthetic work. She prescribed several more supplements to add to the drugs she's taking. She's lost 7 pounds in the last 7 days, we can presume is fluid loss from the diuretic.

I still am filled with anxiety. I want to do the right thing by my beloved Miss My...but I have to be truthful, I am $1000 in so far in the last two months and I don't know how much more is healthy for either of us. The expenditure of money makes me anxious, and the anxiety over being anxious over the expenditure is real as well. I'm watching her every move...wondering if she's breathing too hard or is too hot in this oppressive heat.

Then there is Sadie. She's had a hard time walking in the house...She did great camping. She seemed able to get around quite well on the dirt and asphalt when camping. She swam a ton, did well in the life jacket (in the water only...She froze up and fell on her side like she was dead when we out it on her on land. Kind of sadly hilarious.) I'm hoping she just needs to get used to being back in the house and navigating between the yoga mats we have all over.

I feel like when I concentrate on one if them I am forgetting the other one. Again, more anxiety. I want to show then equal love. But their needs are so different. And Sadie hasn't even been to vet. Dear God, what would happen if I took her in? Jeebus! Again, the balance between what I want to provide for them and their age is so hard to maintain.

I love them so much...I hope that I may make the correct decisions for them both and maintain our love, our lives, and our hearts without regrets.

My Beloved Mylie

I'm very sad to report that our visit to the vet today was full of bad news. My has been diagnosed with dialated cardiomyopathy. The vet started by noting that he could barely feel a pulse in her femoral arteries on her back legs. X-rays confirmed that her heart is severely enlarged, taking up nearly all of the space in her chest cavity. It is compressing her lungs, which are full of fluid. She turned blue when they had her on her side to complete the x-ray, so they put her on oxygen for a bit. She's been prescribed three drugs, Lasix to help dissipate the fluid in her lungs, one to reduce the enlargement of her heart, and another to open her blood vessels so that her weak heart can get more oxygenated blood to her body. Without the drugs, her prognosis was only days before she starts to suffocate. Even with them, she's only going to be with us for one to two months. Her recent issues were certainly caused by hypoxia (not enough oxygen to her brain). As I sit here with the few tears I have left rolling down my face, I am trying to comfort myself knowing that we've given her the best life possible, but it's not really working. I'm not sure if it's better to know she's going to die soon, and watching her every move like a hawk...living in a constant state of fight-or-flight, being hyper-vigilant; or just to have lost her suddenly. I thought that I was so smart, thinking that her undiagnosed UTI was to blame for her recent vestibular incidents (seizures)...and in going to the vet to confirm my own "diagnosis," discovering that my little white dog is terminally ill, and soon, is so shocking. I guess it's good to be told that it is genetic and degenerative and could never have been predicted; not something that started or got worse by her mom's sins of omission or blindness. She appears to be her usual self...which makes the possibility of her dropping dead at any moment all the more distressing to me. We've decided to maintain our plans to go on our annual camping trip, despite the vet's back-handed recommendation that we don't. We want to keep her life as much the same as we possibly can, as nothing will change her prognosis. We hope to give her one last time in the outdoors, exploring, sunning herself, eating the kids' uneaten hot dogs...before she leaves us for the great beyond. But, I can't help being mad as hell. She's the only baby I'll ever have and right or wrong, she is my baby girl. I know she can feel my anguish and my tears right now, as she has always been so sensitive to my emotions...I should stop. This emotional tidal wave is not good for my heart, nor for her huge (literally and figuratively), precious heart. Please bear with me...this is and will be very hard for us, but it is Nature's true and sometimes cruel Law that all things come to an end. It is an immutable truth that none of us can change or undo. I apologize in advance if I am unable to give or even speak without breaking down for a while...I can't help it. Life is fragile, and all the more aching when lost. Especially when it is my sweet Mailie, whose only need was to be loved, who never asked for anything but love, and who now cannot, by even the fiercest love, be saved.

This heat...

To be in a snow and ice-encrusted igloo, free from the heat of the gorged Sun, the sweat of billions of cars (Oh!  How they try in vain to force Winter through their insignificant plastic vents!), the waves of hot, blistering smoke that roll across the shimmering landscape. My dream: To huddle on windswept tundra, shivering in the cold, arching my back in a trembling stretch. To be out from under the heat that makes me shudder, sucking the air from my lungs, bleeding me to death by osmosis. Ah, to be frosty under plastic, a Dreamsicle maybe...so cold - air sticking to each fine, misty drop of crystalline moisture. To escape the stuffy, thick, heavy air and dive naked underneath smooth, light, obscenely expensive liqueur over ice. Feeling slow and deathly pale. To move from the achingly hot of today into the painfully cold, blue, suffocation of Winter.

Seriously. Is this nightmare real?

One giant bumblebee!

This little warrior was a beast! He appeared almost too heavy to fly!

Fire bug

I admit it. I am a fire bug. Love the flames in my little homemade fire pit. Makes the yellow and orange monster's dance all the sweeter.

Right?

Morning

Sometimes, in the morning, when I have shaken off our warmest sleepiness and showered myself into morning, I tiptoe back into our room and watch you sleep. Your back is usually towards me, your head buried in hoards of pillows, your shoulder peeking out from under the blanket of bluish stars. I can make out the shallow, shadowy valley pushed up between your shoulder blades, just barely vanishing under the sheet. Your hair, the color of milk chocolate, is tousled; messed up on top and duck-tailed at your neck. I will often open the curtain so the almost-risen sun filters in and makes the fine hair on your bicep glow. I like to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment, and watch your shoulder and back rise and fall gently with each breath, the scoop of your neck expanding and contracting, your pale skin shivering occasionally with fields of goose bumps. I think about tracing the white welts of scars on your arms, but don’t want to wake you – yet.

Finally, the inevitable. I kiss you lightly on your poky cheek and trace the edge of your ear with my finger. “Wake up, baby.” You open your stunning ice blue eyes and smile sleepily, making me feel so guilty for waking you up.

Notes from today

I am waiting for something to happen. For the roof to collapse maybe…for something to implode in one momentous sucking noise – for something science fiction cool to happen in my own dying back yard. I mean, wouldn’t it be neat to see some fat hairy lady sprout a small fig tree out her nose while festering in the “eternity” line at the bank? Or watch someone mutate into a frog (a big, human-sized fog in white silk panties) while eating over-processed slop in some obscenely crowded, greenish and hysterical luncheon joint? I want to be in a huge room glowering with artificial lights that buzz and rubber chairs with leather straps. Oozing bottles of slimy eyeballs would comfort me from their dusty, cob-webbed shelves – or casting spells maybe? I would even enjoy hot, bubbly and steamy test tubes perched above ancient Bunsen burners, percolating smelly new diseases and beings with translucent skins. I am wishing for hospital-tile floors covered in caustic spills leaking into cold corners. To lean into the air and breathe dank, murky, and thick moisture, sucking the burn into my lungs and getting fuzzy from it. I’m tired of nature and niceties! I’m sick of birds and babies. I’m voting for permed hair and liposuction, computer-generated fantasies and metal flooring – partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and unventilated oil refineries…let’s just turn the whole thing to plastic, refrigerated falseness. Sometimes I wish they would dip me in wax.

Kids' Night

Kids' Night 2014 is in the books.

This year we had 8 kids, ranging in age from 10 to 4.

Roasted marshmallows in the spankin' new fire pit for s'mores. Now I need more wood!

Watched movies outside on the awesome outdoor a/v system my radical techie brother set up for us...6'x6' screen, huge speakers up on towers...We rocked the neighborhood!



The kids singing every word to the songs from "Frozen."  Why are we watching this movie if you already know every single word to every single song?



You can't tell how big it is, but that's some giant Monster's University!



Phew!  Best Kids' Night ever!  Pizza, popsicles, fire, movies, s'mores, dancing, popcorn, so many kids and blankets you can't see the floor, dog cookies, pop tarts, juice boxes, blueberry bagels, movie chairs and the telephone game.

Sam said this morning as he crawled into my lap, "Aunt Amy, I am so happy to be at your house right now."  Sigh.

Eyes

My eyes are tired sick and clogged with a heaviness of to today's  transactions. Between the semi-imagined nightmares of those who today I reached, and the rushing, dusty, rusty, molting of today's menu of allergies, my delicate pained, veiled eyelids are fashioned of crumbly concrete. They ache with overuse and over-zealousnes. I yawn and they squint, barely squeezing out a dew drops of moisture...not enough to take the sharp edge off the haggard skin-on-eyeball connection. Time, past time, to close them for hours; one more moment open is a moment lost. Go to bed world! Turn off the electronica!  Forgo the rave, the hour, the deadline!  Sink in, breathe deep, wipe your eyes of today with a cool cloth and dream of days without these stone, smoky, cracked eyeballs.

Medicinal cookies for my Old Lady Sadie

I wanted to make some cookies for The Sade that could offer some potential health benefits for her in these, her last months,  weeks, days...sigh.

I made a double batch of my go-to Peanut Butter Puppy Poppers (recipe here).

To this I added:

Blanched stinging nettle - helpful for liver cleansing and removing metabolic waste
Oat straw - source of calcium and a known nervine
Lavender - 'cuz it smells good
Red clover - phytoestrogen
Honey - I didn't have the superfood bee pollen, but I did have honey
Six bags of Echinacea herbal tea - boosts immune function
Valerian - nervine, promotes natural sleep
Small handful of fresh dandelion leaves - liver issues and kidney disease
Two yellow dandelion flowers (I didn't have too many dandelions.  Why?  Check this.)

Here's how it looked in the food processor.

Scooped them out into balls and baked them for 20 minutes.  Letting them air dry for a couple days so they don't mold in a container.

They seem to calm her a bit...other than that, I doubt I will ever know if they help her in any way.  Here's hoping.

Toilet Talk

I just got sucked into some Vanity Fair article when I was using the bathroom (is it too early to admit I read in the bathroom?)…felt like I was there for about twenty minutes, but when I return, the clock tells me it has only been three. The Vanity Fair article was about drug addicted musicians in the 70’s (the ones that are still alive to talk about it, anyway). It said that Steven Tyler snorted baby laxatives once thinking it was coke and ended up almost “farting himself off stage” during a performance. I laughed out loud, echoing all over the tiles of our dingy (although very clean) bathroom. It is depressing to me that even something very clean can look dingy. Maybe if it had some sort of natural light, it would be better. When they made the men’s room the ladies’ room last year, they installed a little wooden bench, that looks like the kind of slatted wood benches that you would see in a sauna. It is a nice little bench. Thing about it is, it sits right next to the stall. So, the purpose remains a mystery to me. I don’t even like to be in the same room when a co-worker is doing their business, much less sitting right next to them on a little bench. It is almost like a two-seater outhouse only one person is just joining the other to talk politics.

Old writing

My backyard is one big, brown sea of mud. The muck has nearly taken over my life. If you listen closely, you can hear it quietly planning to suck things in, to take over the world. I have lost most of my grass already. The mud is in every square inch of the house, staining the carpet in perfect paw and shoe prints. It has signed almost all of my towels, the seats of my truck, and my white tennis shoes. Its presence is in the bathroom, clogging the drains and collecting in the corners and grout. Several of Sadie’s toys are missing, and I am waiting to come home sometime soon and find one furry leg sticking out of the breathing mud – a final last reminder of winter.

Birds!

I hung a new feeder in the front yard that sat un-visited for weeks.  It is filled with delicious (so the container from Zamzows said) feed and I almost thought I was being shunned by the neighborhood birdies, or that the noise from State Street had banished us to only being able to attract the marauding, though cute and fuzzy squirrels...only to see their fat, overly fed squished bodies in the road.  Too much drama for front yard feeding.

Anyway.

It appears the birds have found the feeder.