First, about the cat

Been a while, hasn't it?

First I got behind, and then I got behinder because I kept thinking about all I needed to do to get caught up. And in the meantime, life kept happening.

Anyone who's been reading elisem's entries knows that she and Juan adopted a cat. I was the one who had the beginning of the story, having scraped him off the road where he'd nearly gone splat.

Here's the earlier bits -- and remember, if you get to any scary parts, that it all has a happy ending.

Part 1: There's a cat in my den

So there I was at 7:20 Thursday morning, driving down Minnehaha Avenue to get to Lake Nokomis to go jogging with Pat Wrede, and there was this car sitting in the opposite lane, not moving. And there was this cat sitting in the middle of the road, not moving, with a woman from the car standing over it. She hadn't hit the cat (she said), but she was right behind the guy who did and who drove on.

She pretty clearly wanted to do the right thing, but didn't know what it was. She was calling Animal Control while I took a look at the cat. It was an orange tabby shorthair, panting a bit, but not immediately dying. There was some blood from the mouth, but it looked more like a mouth injury than the results of internal bleeding. It had a collar on, but was very thin, and there was no ID.

I don't think she got an answer from Animal Control, and I asked her to call Kitty Klinic (my local vet). They didn't open until eight. I said I'd take care of the cat and told the woman if she gave me her name and number I'd let her know what happened. She said she'd just pray for it, and gave me $40 toward expenses. I had a box flat in the trunk and put the cat in.

I headed over to meet Pat, and let her know that plans had changed. I called the U of M vet clinic and they said that taking the cat over to Kitty Klinic was probably a good thing, since I could get there sooner and they could get the cat stabilized. Pat headed over with me. It turned out that while they opened at 8, there wasn't a vet there until 8:30. The assistant called Dr. Mac to see if he could get there any sooner. In the meantime, the cat started perking up a bit, which mostly meant he wanted to get out of the box. We shushed it and kept it put until the assistant took it and put it in an incubator to warm it and give some oxygen.

Dr. Mac arrived and said the cat needed more treatment, and I should take him to the U of M vet clinic -- so I probably should have done that in the first place.

At the U of M clinic, the surgeon looked at the cat and wanted to know what sort of care I was willing to provide (i.e., pay for) -- euthanasia, supportive, or full care. I told him I was willing to pay, at which point he went back to do more of an assessment. I filled out forms in the meantime -- and gave the name Sophocles, since he seems to be male, and looks rather like a short-haired version of Pamela's Aristophanes T. Furball, and "stray" didn't seem to be a very promising name.

After a half-hour wait in the ICU waiting area, the surgeon came back and said that Sophocles appeared to be comparatively stable. There was a fair amount of mouth and gum damage (that's where the bleeding came from) and there might be brain damage, but there didn't appear to be any spinal damage or broken bones. They gave an estimate for the day's care at $600 to $800, and I authorized it. Pat, bless her, offered to help with the costs.

By Thursday evening, it was clear that while Sophocles was pretty banged up (pneumothorax, some blood in the abdomen, mouth damage, and possibly a cracked rib), he didn't have major internal injuries. He was still in intensive care, but was holding his own.

On Friday, the vet dropped the news that Sophocles was doing better, but turned out to have a broken leg -- the right back leg, an ankle equivalent bone. The options were amputation, surgical pinning, or surgical fusing. The last one seemed to be both the least intrusive and the least expensive. I asked about just splinting it and letting it heal naturally, but the vet didn't seem to think that was a viable option. On Friday evening, Pat and I went to visit. He was pretty zonked out and had a big bulky bandage on one leg and an IV on the other, but was friendly.

On Saturday, the vet said that any of the operations would be prohibitively expensive (around $2500), and that his supervisor had said that splinting and letting heal should work as long as he was observed and the bandages were changed regularly.

On Sunday, he came home with me. The final bill was just over $1800, though $500 was paid for by a companion animal fund from the clinic. (Normally it's income-based and I wouldn't qualify, but the vet managed to get that waived since it wasn't originally my cat.)

He's now living in the den, which the other cats are not terribly happy about. Gandalf likes to hang out with me when I watch TV, and he can't. Pyewacket just doesn't like closed doors. But even if I thought they'd get along (and there have been some hisses back and forth), I don't know about Sophocles' vaccination status, though he is negative for fel-leuk and FIV. And he has claws and my current two don't.

Sophocles has mostly been lying on one spot on the couch, except for excursions to the food and the litter box. He'll eat Fancy Feast if I haul him down to to the food (he turned up his nose at the vet-provided stuff that was supposed to nice and healthy), but he isn't drinking anything that I can see. He's using the litter box well, and I don't see any blood in the urine.

He's still painfully thin, and I don't know if the antibiotics are doing the job; he feels warm to me.

I hope he's going to make it.

[slightly later]

The vet from U of M just called to follow up. He's a bit worried about the lack of drinking, too. I said that I knew how to administer subcutaneous fluids if he wanted that done, and he said that was a good idea, and will write me a prescription. He also suggested adding some tuna water to the water to make it more appealing.

The saga will continue, no doubt. He's a very sweet cat -- he pushes his head against my hand when I pet him, and purrs for me. His head shape is about halfway between apple-headed and vampire rat cat, which makes it more pointy than I'm used to. One could imagine him to be foxlike, with the pointy orange head and the white area on his chest.

I'm looking for a home for him, if I can't find his original owners. He's clearly been socialized, so I hope he has people.

Part 2: Cat saga continues

If anyone remembers our last thrilling installment, Sophocles is the cat that was rescued from the middle of the road just over a week ago, after being hit by a car.

At the time of my post, he was feverish, listless, and exceedingly thin, but not apparently in immediate danger.

He's been at my place almost a week now, and is slowly improving. He's taking much more interest in his surroundings, even though most of his time is spent sitting on "his spot" on the couch. He leaves to use the litter box, and sometimes eat and drink, but mostly he's content to just lounge.

After he turned his nose up at the healthy cat food and had a couple of days of Fancy Feast in him, I tried mixing the healthy stuff in with the Fancy Feast (flaked tuna, which I _knew_ he liked), and got this "you're trying to poison me, right?" reproachful stare. It sat there for several hours untouched. I finally gave up and gave him half a can of the Good Stuff and let my other cats eat it. They only get dry food normally, so it was a big treat to them. They're really enjoying licking out the cans, too.

I am such a cat wimp. Sophocles seems to have trouble with the leg when he stands there eating, so if he doesn't eat what I consider a sufficient amount, I'll take the plate to him and put it under his nose while he sits on the couch. I feel like a Jewish mother -- "Eat, eat -- how will you get healthy?"

Yesterday he went for his first bandage change. The circulation in the leg is apparently fine, despite all my worries (mostly because I couldn't get at the toes to check them). I mentioned that he'd been straining after he urinated, and the vet ran a urinary panel. I got the results today, and while the BUN is elevated, everything else is within normal limits, so seems to confirm what we knew -- that he has some kidney damage, and it's healing. There's also blood and protein in the urine, but that's no surprise.

He's much more alert than he was at first, though I've got him on a low dose of pain medication. He loves being petted, and he's a major head-bumper. He has a little purr -- more felt than heard. I'm trying to figure out what I can do to amuse him (other than petting and talking) that would give him a bit more activity than he currently has.

Wednesday Lydy came over to visit, and I took the opportunity offered by having two humans present to introduce the other cats. There were a few hisses from Gandalf and growls from Sophocles (Pyewacket mostly stayed away), but no actual violence. I think as long as I'm present it's safe to keep the door open. Gandalf hasn't deigned to take up his usual spot on the couch (draped over my arm) as long as That Cat is there.

I'm hoping I've found a home for him; I'll know soon. No word from his original owners, but given how skinny he was, he may have been abandoned or lost.

I'll know in seven weeks or so how the leg healed, but it looks like there's going to be a happy ending here.

Part 3: Off to a new home

This is good news, not bad.

Sophocles (name possibly subject to change) will be going to live with Elise Matthesen and Jon Ladwig tomorrow night, if all goes well.

In the meantime, he's recovering by leaps and pounces, metaphorically if not quite that physically. He's much more energetic, and has taken to stomping around the den, especially when he thinks it's time to feed the cat. When he's not doing that, he's happy to lie on top of me and bash his head into my chin while I pet him.

He's a junk food junkie, alas. Not only couldn't I get him to eat the healthy a/d (IIRC) cat food I got from the vet, he also wouldn't touch the Science Diet kitten food. Not even when I poured the glop from the Fancy Feast Marinated Salmon (yuck!) over it. He gave me several patented "Why are you trying to poison the cat?" glares, and couldn't be persuaded to do more than sniff at it. Eventually I gave up and tossed the stuff, and gave him the remaining contents of the Fancy Feast can, minus the glop that had gone on the healthy stuff. He chowed that down in record time.

I wish he would deign to drink water when I could see him, but since his urine output and chemistry seems to be adequate, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

I'm going to miss him when he's gone.

Winnipeg Folk Festival

Damn, damn, damn.

I just wrote a long comment about the Winnipeg Folk Festival, with musings about the second year versus the first year, and lyric descriptions of the extraordinary Aurora Borealis we saw the second night that covered the entire sky, and ruminations on food at WFF. But I forgot to copy my message before I hit the update button, and it disappeared into the ether. Got to get that LJ client working.

So this is the short version, in which I mention that some of my favorite performers were SoNiA, Mary Gauthier, Tom Paxton (always and forever), Stringband, Le Vent du Nord, April Verch, Leon Redbone, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nathan Rogers (yes, that Rogers), Billy Bragg, and Bob Geldof.

House maundering

Okay, this should be the last of the grand catch-up messages, and it's going to be a long one. Let me know if you think I should have put it behind a cut tag; I've never done that before.

I've been muttering about doing things to this house pretty much since I moved in in (IIRC) January 1996. I wanted to redo the downstairs bathroom, I wanted to put a bathroom in upstairs where the bedroom is (the bedroom and office are in a finished attic; there's a certain amount of unfinished area that could be grabbed for the bathroom and maybe a walk-in closet), and I wanted to make the allegedly finished basement into something that I would be happy to have people use for overflow partying.

I started this process a few years ago by getting estimates from contractors to redo the downstairs bathroom. One was at $13,000, and the other was $11,000. I was prepared to spend the money, but I wasn't terribly happy with either of the contractors. For that amount of money I want a bit more hand-holding than "Tell us what you want and we'll do it." I was even willing to pay an interior designer, but that fell through.

So the bathroom sat. The big flurry of activity was a summer ago when I got the hand-me-down bathroom fixtures from my parents' house and brought them up here. I eventually got the toilet installed, mostly because the previous toilet had gone from leaking a bit to leaking quite a bit. Into the bowl, mind you, but still noisy and wasteful. Only problem was, the toilet was missing the tank cover, so in a way it was a backwards step. But there I stalled.

The next bit has to be Pat's fault, I think. She was looking to have some construction done on her house, and when the bid came in much higher than she hoped, she started thinking about buying a new house that met her needs better to start with. Since we go running (okay, jogging) together three times a week, I heard about all the house exploits in great and extensive detail. I had houses on the brain. That must be it.

I'd been unhappy with the basement for a long time. It leaked. Leaked copiously, in fact. Which meant that before I could do anything about the cosmetic issues in the basement, I had to fix the leaking. I'd stalled there for several years, even after a call to MPR that gave me some guidance about installing a sump so that I could have a sump pump. But Pat (see how it all comes back to her?) had just had some waterproofing work done on her basement, and she was very happy with the guys she used, especially since they offered a lifetime guarantee -- lifetime of the house, not the owner. So I had my basement waterproofed in July. That involved taking jackhammers, removing a swath of concrete a foot deep and wide around the inside perimeter of the house, installing drain pipe (the sump), adding new concrete over the drain pipe, and hooking the whole thing up to the sump pump. It cost right around $4,000, and I won't actually know how well it works until it rains, which it hasn't done except in little spatters since it was installed. I may have single-handedly caused the drought, in fact.

So, okay, that was the first major expense. And having done that, I was in the mood for major houseness. It was time to consider the bathroom, upstairs bathroom (currently nonexistent), and basement. I was in the market for yet another contractor, since I hadn't been terribly pleased with the ones I'd talked to earlier. So I talked to friends for a recommendation. Pat and Lois had both used the same contractor for their building work (kitchen for Lois, kitchen and garage for Pat) and were quite happy with them. So I called the company and asked for an estimate.

One of the guys from the company showed up and said that the downstairs bathroom would be $7500 (less than the earlier bids, yay!), the upstairs bathroom with be $15,000 to create out of nothing, and the basement would be $10,000 for dry wall, ceiling, lighting, and generally making it look like a real finished basement. But not including the floor, which would be another $1,000 or so, minimum.

Each item sounded not entirely unreasonable on its own, but when I added them up, that was more than $30,000 -- just under half of what I paid for this house eight years ago. So, remembering Pat's example (see how this is all her fault?), I considered that perhaps instead of putting all that money into this house, maybe I should consider whether another house would meet my needs better, for that additional $30,000.

So I called Bob Williams, aka Realtor Bob, aka Realtor to the Stars.

(to be continued)