lee_future

I have a really good vet.

My animals are actually spread across two vets at the same pracrice, and both are great. As far as I can tell, they charge only a token markup on Siri's meds, and they're happy with me doing home testing to avoid both a trip in and the cost of his diabetes bloodwork twice a year (he goes in for normal senior cat bloodwork once a year). They go out of their way to help the community with things like vax trips, which is a four-t-five hour round trip for them and not a ton of money. They're fully accessible through text and are happy to give advice on things like torn nails free. They actively love my cats.

And when I took Solly in yesterday, after explaining the reason she's been limping, she took a look at my face and said, "she's on pain control now and I know this is a lot to take onboard, so if you like I can call you next week and we can go over this again when you've had some time to think about it"

Solly herself behaved excellently in the car and at the vet's, though when I left her alone to get xrays she was pretty scared. But as soon as we got home she took off like a shot in the -15 snowy dark and I couldn't find her. I assume she's inside the fence and you;d think I could follow her tracks, but no. And it was a long day, and I was kind of woozy from the one-two-three shot of finding my truck battery stone dead in the morning and running around in sandals in the snow trying to start it, the drive to and from the vet which is after all five hours round trip, and the heavy emotion of the vet's visit. The last thing we all need is me dropping in the coldening night, unable to get up. So I went inside with the idea that I'll find her in the morning.

She'll need to stay inside now except for controlled walks.

With five senior animals in the house -- Thea, Avallu, Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri -- I was not expecting to need to make life or death decisions about Solly anytime soon. But here we are.

Compounding everything, Solly won't be able to work. The other two dogs are in semi-retirement, and with the birds I really do need someone who can work in the summer. In the winter they get mostly shut up and it's easier for the pups to patrol. Solly was a superb worker. There's a tornjak pup, like Avallu, available in BC. I do not want a new dog. Getting Solly a partner had been interesting to me but if she isn't going to survive more than a year or two and she is going to transition to almost fully inside I want to mourn. But. The work needs to be done. Or do I transition to the idea that in three to five years I just... don't have outside animals anymore? The dogs pass, I get rid of everyone except a couple cats, I hand mow a couple of acres and have a garden?

That seems terrible. The reasonable terrible thing, like getting a desk job somewhere that thinks good social management is having ladies' nights or politely smiling through someone's kill-the-immigrants screed over dinner once a week or living in a house with nothing to do that's not either housecleaning or in a computer. Smart.

It's 3am. I cried some. Whiskey always comes when I cry, like I'd called him, and he snuggled a but but then I cried a little too much for him. I slept, woke up, pulled out the laptop. I am too old to cry, I can't see well now but I guerss I still have enough adrenaline to remember how to type, which has been going lately in normal circumstances. I expect I'll barely be able to hobble around tomorrow so I'm hoping my pup has forgiven me by then and I can get her inside. I need to rearrange downstairs so she actually fits there but that'll be a couple days.

The road gods were kind to me. Very little ice on the roads, unlike yesterday, and over half of the way the road lines or a reasonable facsimile were visible. We all made it home safe, or as safe as Solly gets to be.

It'smoments like these I realize just how much love I'm surrounded with. There is a lot to lose in my life.

My poor little girl. She's been hiding her pain really well.

I still really haven't recovered from... all the stuff. Teaching classes, pushing to do one more thing and then one more thing as the fall stretched on long without much snow on the ground, PMDD meds wobble and then medical stuff, and a steady dribble of disability correspondence.

The hope was that, from last full moon to next, I could take a month off and just kind of recover and regroup.

Well, what happened is that I did an impromptu cleaning bee with some folks at the clay studio. We've had a ton of people through there, so it was nice to do some of the project stuff together (sand and kiln wash shelves, turn over some reclaim, organize some things) and load the big kiln full of bisque; the one guy who comes in only on his two-week shifts had a crate full of scuplture, the homeschool group had a lot of stuff, and two of the studio people had taken a wheel class in the next town over so they had more stuff too. It was a fun and varied kiln load. I got someone else to do the next-day check and I left relatively early so it wasn't too bad for me, and my mental health really needed a volume of communication with folks that wasn't authoritarian/disability logistics related.

My vet offered a sale on pet dental work, and so I booked Thea in for next week since she has some tooth stuff she's been waiting on. It isn't uncomfortable but it needs to happen at some point, so a sale seems like the right point. It will mean taking her into town (2 hour drive) in the pre-dawn dark (which is admittedly anything before 8:30am these days) in unknowable road conditions, and sleeping in the truck while her surgery is done.

It was inevitable that a -20 cold snap would be forecast for next week. We've been bobbling around freezing or just slightly below, again, still. It's normal in Fort for cold snaps to alternate with warmer snaps, not really fully above freezing or just a little above, where the snow compacts and there's a reprieve from the brutality of real cold. Our last snap was in the -15Cs and was brief; the next is supposed to be in the -20Cs and not so brief. There's supposed to finally be a lot of snow; we have some but not much right now.

The last couple days were warmish so I went out and sledgehammered some things off the ground (things freeze to the ground and ice gets harder the colder it is, so sometimes on the warm days they can be moved. In this case there was a concrete block that had blown down right where I wanted to snowblow, and some pallets lying on the ground. The yard is clearer now, which is good.

Then last night a big wind came up, gusts up to 80kph, and unsurprisingly the pigpen's metal roof started to peel off. I went out with the power drill and climbed up there. The wind was enough to pull some of the screws through the metal and fold it in half backwards, so I folded it back and screwed some wooden strips overtop, so the screws went through wood, then the metal, then into the structure. While I was doing that the roof was bucking and lifting and very slippery since it was angled and topped with snow. I did not slide off (the drop would only have been 4 feet from the back, so I wasn't so worried) but I did get some bruises. It was holding an hour later but the wind continued all night; I have not yet gone out to check. Suspecting the wind might be ab issue, I'd used hurricane ties on the rafters when I made it, so I'm actually quite pleased with myself. Been a couple years since I made a pigpen fix in the middle of Winter Weather. Of course, it doesn't leave me much energy for today.

It's looking clear and sunny through the window. It's inviting me to come out and totter around a bit in the sun, and of course everyone needs to be fed.

But you can see how I haven't had much rest. I've had the mental fortitude to not do too much pottery at least, crawling into bed around 4pm instead of taking an hour of wheel time at night.

Descent into meds:

Oh! Good news from the gut meds I was given by my doctor: things feel weird in there still but these really help. Things seem to pretty much go in the right direction, with minimal pain comparatively, and at more or less the right speed. I don't worry everything is going to fall out of my stomach if I lean over, and I suspect I'm breathing in a lot less gut contents at night. AND I'm feeling a little less lightheaded, or lightheaded less frequently, which I'm chalking up to keeping liquid in my body better. Interestingly one of them (Accel hyoscine or something?) was prescribed to me for gallbladder stuff but I think has additional IBS use? I'm taking it at half the prescribed amount, since that seems to work best.

Anyhow, there we are.

In the whole PMDD and disability paperwork mess (I got rejected because the gov says their notes suggest that with treatment I should be able to return to work! Nice of them to I guess know what I have without telling me?) I forgot that I'd asked my doctor for stomach meds. One is a proton pump inhibitor, which I'd had before (and felt truly not-nauseous on, which was impressive) and one is a smooth-muscle relaxer. The latter I think she gave me because it's used for galbladder attacks but from what I can tell my gallbladder is normal (they did an ultrasound which I can finally access online) but! it super reduces a lot of my gut pain and other weird stuff in there. Things still *feel* weird but they're just much more livable... if I reduce the dose substantially from what she gave me.

So that's all very interesting and maybe means something. It's funny, having been with Angus for those years, now I feel like I have a weird malevolent thing living in my guts too.

Got my covid/flu/vit B shots all in the same day. Spending a couple days sleeping to recover, and my watch that measures things says I'm using as much energy as if I were ultra stressing and/or standing on one foot bouncing gently the whole time.

STILL dealing with ghosts of PMDD, which flare up with any outside world contact. I really would just like to crawl into a hole for long enough to forget the outside world exists, especially with no garden to distract me. People are impossible. And have my gyne appointment today. Oh well.

Seems like in Canada we can get private hormonal-competent gyne care for $300/appointment plus med costs if we don't want to wait in line for six months to a year. Unsurprisingly, people on fb groups for this stuff rely heavily on chatGPT for medical advice. What a fucking mess.