Nate (June 27, 2000-March 18, 2010)

When I last posted in October, my kittyboy Nate was doing very well, despite stage 4 kidney failure and a host of other ailments. Unfortunately, Dead Cat Walking is no longer walking (at least not here).

While he was boarding at the vet’s in mid-March he had routine bloodwork to see how he was doing, and his kidney values came back alarmingly high. Worse, a subsequent x-ray revealed fluid in his lungs and an enlarged heart.

I’d spent almost a full year expecting the end to come at any time, but the diagnosis still came as a surprise. Nate had been doing very well, and hadn’t shown any outward signs that he was so ill. Even while boarding he ate well, enjoyed attention, and showed no sign that there was anything wrong with him. As my vet said, “He just doesn’t seem to know he’s a sick cat.”

But there was nothing to be done for him. Reducing his dosage of sub-q fluids to ease the strain on his heart and lungs would send his kidney values even higher, and giving him IV fluids in an attempt to bring his kidney values down would only add to the fluid in his lungs and hasten heart failure.  Either way, he was out of luck. We didn’t know how much longer he might live, but it was not going to be long.

Housekeeping.

I haven’t posted to this thing in ages.

I started using Twitter several months ago, and am hooked. It’s quick and easy and lends itself to whatever passing fancies and fleeting observations I might have; it is, essentially, microblogging for the attention-impaired. And that suits me just fine, most of the time

But while splashing around in the shallows on Twitter is fun, I do occasionally wish I could develop an idea further,  go into greater detail, or start a real discussion–and that’s just not what Twitter is for.

I’m going to try (once again) to get this blog off the ground. I’ve avoided doing so for a long time, in part because most of the entries already here seemed old and stale and no longer relevant. Some were even kind of dumb. So I’ve set most old posts to “private,” at least for now. Maybe once I’ve got enough fresh content up I’ll unlock it again, but for now an (almost) clean start seems like a good idea.