:: Casa De Morrill ::

So the good news is that we are back to being a two kitty household. Kudzu had her scan and she was determined to be a good candidate for having the radiation therapy and we went ahead and scheduled it for last Monday. The procedure is just an injection, but they keep the patient in a special area after the injection, Kudzu was officially radioactive and needed time to come down to a safe level before she could come home. I picked her up this past Friday and she explained to me all the way home how happy she was to be in the car. It makes me wonder why I ever thought driving in a car with a cat was a good idea. Luckily this time it was only 45 minutes, not 3 days like when I drove with Weaver out to Phoenix.

But regardless she is getting back to her normal self once she had some time to sniff around. Her one big rule right now has to deal with sleeping with us. Since she still has some of the radioactive material in her system she is not allowed to sit/sleep on us for an extended period of time. Honestly we don’t need a new post entitled “My Cat Gave me Cancer” anytime soon.

In Other news Kat has spent the last 2 weeks up in Denver for business, and so I took the opportunity to fly up to Denver for the weekend. She finally got to show me around the city she has been going to for the past 5 years. The last time I went there was during college for a snowboarding trip, and even then it was from a bus window.

We went up to Arapahoe Basin since they were still open for late season skiing/snowboarding. I finally convinced Kat that she should try snowboarding, especially since she has had problems with her ACL in the past. I also decided that I was not going to teach her myself, we tried that once, for 20 minutes and decided that marriage was more important than snowboarding.

We got her first-timber lessons and rental stuff and I gladly sent her off to class. I also decided that lessons would be a good option for me. Especially since I am self taught for snowboarding and it was only about 20 bucks more for the lessons. It ended up being great for me, I was the only one in my class (blue/black slopes) so I essentially got a private lesson. The lessons were great and I really improved my technique. I had two big spills for the day, the first one with me landing right on my tailbone, how do I know? Well I think I cracked/bruised/broke it since as of today, it still hurts. No mom, I did not go to the doctor since it’s not like they can put my butt in a cast.

I also had an incident with a bamboo pole, luckily I did not have a good hat I could take with me anymore. It was quite windy that morning so I decided to pony up an extra 5 bucks to rent a helmet and in this case it did more than keep me warm. I caught the tail of my board on another bamboo pole in a really skinny area my instructor was leading me through. It launched me into the next pole headfirst and if I did not have that helmet I am pretty sure I would have gotten a ride behind a snowmobile. Luckily no ill effects besides a dented helmet and bruised ego.

The rest of the trip was great, the weather was wonderful and it was nice seeing Kat, and for once it was me who was going back and forth to the airport.

I’ve been waiting on posting about this until Sean and I really had something to report. A couple weeks ago, we noticed that Kudzu had a chunk of fur missing along her back. That worried us, so we scheduled a visit with her vet and Sean took her in one morning. The vet did some blood work on Kudzu and checked out a few other vitals. The diagnosis was feline hyperthyroidism. The illness is pretty much the same thing as what happens in humans. In fact, the treatment options are pretty much the same as well. The options that we were given were 1) shove a pill down Kudzu’s throat twice a day, 2) have Kudzu’s thyroid gland surgically removed or 3) have Kudzu undergo radiation treatment that targets the “sick” cells and kills them while leaving the “healthy” cells.

After doing a lot of research on the illness, it wasn’t a very hard decision for Sean and me to make. The first two options have a lot of risk involved and aren’t really cures. The third option, on the other hand, is a cure with low risk and very low potential for recurrence. We’re really lucky being in Phoenix, because we had two choices of locations to take Kudzu for treatment. Our vet specifically recommended one location, Arizona Veterinary Specialists. Today, we took Kudzu in for her initial scan and so that we could talk to the oncologist who would be caring for her. I have to admit that I immediately loved the technician and the oncologist. They were incredibly friendly and very informative. I honestly left Kudzu for her first stay with a lighter heart.

So, tonight, we are a single cat family. Kudzu has to stay overnight after her first scan because of the chemicals they have to use to scan her thyroid. After tonight, she’ll go back on a Monday and stay for the whole week. She’ll get injected with Iodine-131 on Monday and spend the rest of the week in isolation while the radioactive material leaves her system. After that, we’ll have to take her back to our vet at 1 month and 3 months for blood work to make sure her thyroid has responded to the treatment as expected. All of the doctors are very optimistic right now. No one seems to believe that Kudzu is 16 years old. So, please keep us and her in your thoughts over the coming weeks. I’ll keep everyone posted on how things go.

I’ve had my office chair for a while. It’s one of those standard executive-style chairs (whatever that really means). It’s a pretty comfy chair, but it’s cloth and Weaver loves to sleep in my chair when I’m not sitting in it. The result of an uber-fuzzy cat sleeping in my office chair means that I get fuzz butt really easily. I can’t check my e-mail in the morning if I’m wearing dress slacks.

My chair has started to show it’s age a little bit and I’m tired of having to constantly use a cat brush on my chair (a lint brush doesn’t even start picking up Weaver’s fur). We’ve been looking at various different new chairs for me, but haven’t wanted to spend the money on it. This weekend we found my office chair. So far it’s actually proven pretty comfy and I’d like to just see Weaver attempt to sit on this chair.

I’ve been up in Denver for the past couple of weeks. I flew back up on Sunday for my third week but finished my work early and caught a flight home last night. I walked into the office this morning and had about 10 people ask me, “What are you doing here?” Seriously, people. Do I annoy my coworkers so much that they have to ask that annoying question?

The first person to ask me was my task lead. I decided to be snarky. “I’m not actually Kat. Kat finally got that clone machine working, so she’s still up in Denver. I’m Kat Prime. I’m here to get all the rest of the work done that she can’t deal with while she’s on travel.” He wasn’t amused. I was, though, so it was worth it.

Second response to the question, “You’re finished already?!” “No, actually the whole testing thing was going so badly that I just decided to ditch it and come home. It was a waste of my time.”

My responses got worse and worse as the morning drew on. I’m glad to be home, but I’m ready for the day that I come home and my coworkers don’t express shock at my return.

As most of you know, since I started my job as a test lead at my company, I’ve had a pager attached to my hip almost constantly. My pager has a clip on it and that gets clipped to my jeans/pants pocket. The clip on my pager, though, is not very good, so I’m constantly dropping it. In the about 3 1/2 years that I’ve had a pager, I’ve gone through three up to this point. Yesterday, I killed my fourth pager. As I stated in my previous post, Denver got snow on Sunday night. Monday morning, I went to clean the snow off my car and the pager apparently fell off my pocket. I didn’t realize this until I got into the office and went to look at what time it is (my pager’s also become my timekeeping device since I can’t have a cell phone in my office).

That afternoon, I went back to the hotel and made sure I hadn’t just accidentally left the pager in my room. Nope. Went down to the front desk and asked if anyone had turned in a black pager (because I’m sure tons of people carry around different colored pagers now a days). Sure enough, the attendant handed over my pager. At first glance, it looked fine. I figured that I would just have to let it dry out overnight and I would be good. Nope. I looked at the screen and realized that the screen had cracked in two places and the display was completely ruined. Great.

I got to explain this to both my manager and the administrative assistant who deals with all of our pagers. Both of them got a good laugh out of this. So, from now until I get a replacement (which could be up to two weeks), my customer has my cell phone number to reach me when I’m not in the lab at their place anyway.