I’m going to gently and respectfully suggest that you listen to what the vet is saying (and trying not to say). End-stage congestive heart failure is a form of torture for humans, who are able to communicate their needs. For an animal, it’s just torture, and they don’t understand what’s happening.
So if your vet says the treatment has bought her some quality time, that’s great! But if it’s at the stage where she will be barely surviving while gasping desperately for breath for at most another week or two, then you’ll have to make the hard choice.
Yeah. That’s key. There were common field mushrooms up the road a while back. I’m sure they were just that but guess what? Some lethal mushrooms look pretty similar and comparing Gill patterns and bruising is how you tell.
I’m waiting for a load of shaggy ink caps down the road to pop up any day now and I’m going to make risotto. They have no poisonous ones they look anything like. I don’t pick anything that you need to think hard about to work out is it safe.
Oh I so empathise. Our little girl arrived up at the top of the stairs and made a tiny howl Saturday morning a few weeks ago. She was panting rapidly. We rushed to the vet down the road straight away where they said she had pneumonia and put her in an oxygen tent on a cocktail of drugs. As it was Saturday and she didn’t recover we had to bring her to the university hospital. She eventually responded to treatment but it was close. Our poor girl is probably a bit more constrained than before and she looks to us a bit more but generally she’s recovered.
She had nearly no lung capacity on the scans. It was horrible to look at. She was always a wee little thing and seeing her struggle like that and drag herself up to us to help was heartbreaking. If she wasn’t so wee she might have been further away and died trying to get back.
I was going to post a picture of her as a kitten hugging a unicorn cuddly toy of my daughter’s while she was sleeping here but I was too distraught to really look for it.
It’s made us think about a few things like when we can’t look after our pets and what it must be like to be seeking healthcare in America (we don’t of course have pet insurance and it was by a very, very long distance the largest medical bill we have ever paid. I mean we don’t have human health insurance so this was a real shock to us.)
Which is all digression but illness sucks. Hope your kittteh recovers. Our boy (Bubbles, a beautiful sweet black cat) died one Saturday morning of heart failure and the family was really triggered my Minnie’s turn.
I’m so sorry to hear about Myrtle’s condition. We went through something similar with our kitty Ruckus a few years ago. We’re keeping Myrtle (and you) in our thoughts.
Of course. Our choices this morning were basically: let them try to stabilize her; try to bring her home now and have her die on the way, or have her euthanized without even trying.
The vet was very open, so we made the best choice we could at the time with the information we had. To try. We’re expecting an update shortly.
Incidentally, the vet was more humane and communicative than any doctor I have been to for human ailments.
Wow… it gets worse on La Palma…Red hotboulders the size of houses being washed through the Las Manchas area by a white hot river of lava (edit: carrying lots of arsenic and sulfur dioxide). This is in the wake of Thursday’s “lava tsunami”…
Update: Myrtle came home today, alive!
She will be on medication, and we know we’ll be lucky to get even another year with her, but she’s home, comfortable (if a little loopy from the drugs) and has already chattered at some of the birds at the feeder.
Thanks for all the warm thoughts. I think she got them.
I know some people from Nijmegen, although they aren’t football fans. I’m glad nobody was hurt, but this is like one of the nightmare scenarios that I read about when training to work at Carlisle United.
It’s a lot harder to lock down a college newspaper, especially one with digital publishing. Even if the college pulls funding you can still get your content to the populace. And free speech issues with students who are not minors are seen as much less clear cut than they are in high schools. Great to see that the students showed just what crap the admins were up to-some of that is illegal.
It depends on who “owns” the paper. At some universities the paper is an independent organization, funded through a foundation account that does not answer to the university itself. The building, the printing operation, salaries, etc etc are independent. At other universities this isn’t the case, and the university may have various ways of exerting control. Bates is a private college, so the rules there are different.
Hopefully the end of that video is where they got in the car and followed all the other people getting the hell away from there post haste. That cloud looked to be heading their way, and I for one would not want to find out what it’s like inside it.
"Warning: Scalding hot, lethal pyroclastic flow is closer than it appears"
The inside of that is not something you want to experience. Get away (like vulcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft didn’t, once).
Speaking of Mother Nature “rolling coal”… La Palma’s volcano now has 4 openings: the lowest is a Hawai’ian style effusive vent still belching waves of high temperature, low gas lava, two vents pulse both lava rocks and ash, and a fourth particularly ashy one is now covering the surrounding island in nasty black cinders. Nearly 2,000 homes and businesses have been destroyed.
Amazon UK are misadvertising food ingredients, and now I get to spend the night worrying about whether I have managed to avoid making myself ill for the next week.
I would take it to trading standards, but the Tories have cut their funding so much that they don’t really function anymore. I don’t have the strength or finances to sue anyone either, so the arseholes will get away with it.
