I'm having a very lazy weekend--home alone with nothing to do except some much-needed cleaning. So naturally, I'm suddenly very interested in blogging.
Life has shifted into a different gear of late, I can't really say things are better or worse. Work is going fine, and I still feel I'm in a place I could happily stay for a while--though I have concluded I don't love being an administrative assistant and probably never will.
I am angling for another promotion that would be a solid step closer to the professional level. We had a couple of openings when one person left the department and another was promoted. The first opening was filled by a guy whose previous position was eliminated. I was quite relieved to learn that for him this was considered a lateral move and he did not get a raise, because I work circles around the guy on a daily basis. The other position is still open, and there seems to be some mysterious delay in filling it.
My supervisor's words were "I am facing a lot of complex staffing issues, so I can't make any promises, but I am definitely keeping you in mind." Not very encouraging, but I'm holding out hope.
We're undergoing several huge changes right now: our manager retired, and my former supervisor was promoted to replace him; our Denver office is being consolidated with Tulsa, so we have a few people relocating and several more needing to be replaced; we are in the middle of moving the entire department to a different floor; and our department is in early stages of spinning off into its own company. Any of these changes alone would be a big transition, and they're all happening at once. I must say everyone as a whole is handling the stress surprisingly well.
I must also say that I absolutely hate moving!
On to a sadder topic, I lost my old girl Sunshine about a month ago. She was wasting away, and the days she seemed to enjoy life were getting fewer and farther between. So the vet came to our house and put her to sleep peacefully while I held her in my arms. I try not to remember those last moments too often, but when I do remember, I'm stunned that I was able to do it.
I was strong for her, and when it was over I felt relief for her. But for me, there was just a big hole left behind. Sometimes it felt like there was a physical hole right in the middle of my chest. I'm getting past the shock now, but I still think of her every single day, and I never go to bed at night without noticing she's not next to me.
There is a lot of comfort in the fact that I'm able to focus more attention on my three boys now. I really felt like I was neglecting them over the last several months, but now they sleep with me every night and I don't have to divide my attention between different cats in different rooms. It's an adjustment, going from sharing a bed with a quiet, elderly female cat to sharing it with three big, rambunctious tabbies. But I'm so grateful to have them!
Back to Sunshine, I am proud to say that she put up a hell of a fight against that nasty cancer. And she still had some fight left in her at the end. The vet had to give her a sedative before the sedative so they could put in an IV, and I held her, wrapped in a towel, while the first sedative took effect. My feisty girl growled quietly until she couldn't growl anymore, making me laugh through my tears.
I am still searching for just the right tribute to her...nothing seems quite fitting. I certainly don't have it in me yet to put into writing everything she means to me. But for now I keep a picture of her by my bed, right next to where she used to sleep.
And I will always carry a little bit of Sunshine--especially her stormy side--in my heart.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
This and That
Yeah, I know--it's been forever since I blogged. Don't think I haven't missed it. But when things are going well, it seems that urge to write has a lot less fire behind it.
Things have been going well in a lot of ways, and as of December I have a new job with the same company where I started working as a file room temp last summer. I'm now an Administrative Assistant, which is something I never saw myself doing; I've always felt it has an element of baby-sitting grown-ups to it. And it does, but only in small quantities.
I'm on a different team in the same department, so I already knew the people I would be working with before I moved. They're a very hard-working group, and generally just damn nice, likable people. I hear some of them are a bit gossipy, but as long as no one tries to drag me into that, I don't care. My boss is great...she's nothing close to being a micro-manager, and in fact she's really good about trusting people with their responsibilities. But at the same time, she knows what's going on!
Getting hired on permanently couldn't have come at a better time, because I got paid for all the days off we had over the holidays. And when life happens, I have paid time off immediately available to me. It's so weird!
Life has been happening, for sure. Last November Sunshine started acting strange, like she was hurt. Fearing another abscessed anal gland and an ensuing week of pure hell, I got her right to the vet. But this time she had a bite wound--A BITE WOUND!--on her butt that had gotten infected. I don't know who did it, but George is the most likely suspect. Poor Sunshine has been in complete and blissful seclusion ever since, and I think sometimes she forgets she's not an only cat. She's definitely much happier with the boys out of her life.
She bounced back pretty quickly from the bite, but that was only the beginning of the story. While she was sedated to have the bite looked at, one of the vet techs noticed a red lump on her belly that looked very suspicious. We decided that after she recovered from her bite and felt better, she needed to have it looked at more closely. First they did a cytology, probably sometime in December. They ended up not sending it off to the lab because they couldn't tell much from it and they felt I should instead spend the money on a full biopsy.
By the time I'd gathered the money to have the lump removed, things had apparently gotten much worse--or the first vet hadn't been sufficiently alarmed in the first place. The new vet did some chest x-rays and found the growth had spread to Sunshine's lungs, which explained the terrible cough she'd suddenly developed. The vet was almost certain it was mammary cancer, which in cats can be extremely aggressive and almost impossible to cure--especially at the stage she had reached.
We went ahead with the surgery just after the new year, and the vet removed as much abnormal tissue as she could find. The biopsy didn't tell us much, but it did confirm our fears: cancer. The vet (who has been absolutely wonderful through everything) advised me there was no way to tell when the cancer would come back, but it almost certainly would. It could be a matter of days, weeks or months, she said.
Of course I was devastated, but in the time since this began, I've coped by keeping my focus on doing everything I can to make Sunshine as comfortable and happy as possible. She's taking water pills to keep fluid out of her lungs, and that helps her coughing. She's lost a lot of weight, and the meds seem to make her feel pretty sick at times. She has completely stopped eating a couple of times--the last episode lasted five days. But as soon as I stopped giving her all the meds (by then she was also taking an appetite stimulant and something for nausea) she suddenly became ravenous again.
Back on the water pills now, she seems to be losing her appetite again. I'm going to have to talk to the vet about whether it's really worth it to keep giving her this stuff. The good news is that in all of this I've finally found a way to medicate my little banshee.
This pill shooter is THA BOMB. It's a godsend. The ones I found at Petco and PetSmart were too big for tiny cat pills, but my vet recommended this one, which she was selling much cheaper than any others I've found. This thing has saved my relationship with Sunshine.
We are enjoying each other's company every minute we can, and on the days she's feeling well she is very happy and affectionate. There are days when I'm so depressed I can barely move, and they seem to coincide with the days she seems sickest. She is my best friend, and I can't imagine my life without her. But I'm so thankful we have this time together. There's no telling how long it will last, but I'm going to make the best of it.
I haven't been to Oklahoma City with Ryan since the New Year, and that truly sucks. But he's been very supportive and completely understands why I can't leave my cat to go out of town these days. Unfortunately, with a snowpocalypse preceded by two terrible colds, he hasn't been able to get here either for several weeks. I'm definitely looking forward to next weekend, when By God nothing better stop my man from getting to me! It will have been a month since we've seen each other, and that's the longest we've ever been apart since we met.
I'm looking forward to returning to work tomorrow...I haven't been in almost a week because of a very unusual blizzard and our mayor's complete lack of competence to handle the situation. Dude declared a state of emergency before the first snowflake even fell, and yet a week later people are still snowed in and the roads are a mess. I just know people who live up North are laughing at us...
Things have been going well in a lot of ways, and as of December I have a new job with the same company where I started working as a file room temp last summer. I'm now an Administrative Assistant, which is something I never saw myself doing; I've always felt it has an element of baby-sitting grown-ups to it. And it does, but only in small quantities.
I'm on a different team in the same department, so I already knew the people I would be working with before I moved. They're a very hard-working group, and generally just damn nice, likable people. I hear some of them are a bit gossipy, but as long as no one tries to drag me into that, I don't care. My boss is great...she's nothing close to being a micro-manager, and in fact she's really good about trusting people with their responsibilities. But at the same time, she knows what's going on!
Getting hired on permanently couldn't have come at a better time, because I got paid for all the days off we had over the holidays. And when life happens, I have paid time off immediately available to me. It's so weird!
Life has been happening, for sure. Last November Sunshine started acting strange, like she was hurt. Fearing another abscessed anal gland and an ensuing week of pure hell, I got her right to the vet. But this time she had a bite wound--A BITE WOUND!--on her butt that had gotten infected. I don't know who did it, but George is the most likely suspect. Poor Sunshine has been in complete and blissful seclusion ever since, and I think sometimes she forgets she's not an only cat. She's definitely much happier with the boys out of her life.
She bounced back pretty quickly from the bite, but that was only the beginning of the story. While she was sedated to have the bite looked at, one of the vet techs noticed a red lump on her belly that looked very suspicious. We decided that after she recovered from her bite and felt better, she needed to have it looked at more closely. First they did a cytology, probably sometime in December. They ended up not sending it off to the lab because they couldn't tell much from it and they felt I should instead spend the money on a full biopsy.
By the time I'd gathered the money to have the lump removed, things had apparently gotten much worse--or the first vet hadn't been sufficiently alarmed in the first place. The new vet did some chest x-rays and found the growth had spread to Sunshine's lungs, which explained the terrible cough she'd suddenly developed. The vet was almost certain it was mammary cancer, which in cats can be extremely aggressive and almost impossible to cure--especially at the stage she had reached.
We went ahead with the surgery just after the new year, and the vet removed as much abnormal tissue as she could find. The biopsy didn't tell us much, but it did confirm our fears: cancer. The vet (who has been absolutely wonderful through everything) advised me there was no way to tell when the cancer would come back, but it almost certainly would. It could be a matter of days, weeks or months, she said.
Of course I was devastated, but in the time since this began, I've coped by keeping my focus on doing everything I can to make Sunshine as comfortable and happy as possible. She's taking water pills to keep fluid out of her lungs, and that helps her coughing. She's lost a lot of weight, and the meds seem to make her feel pretty sick at times. She has completely stopped eating a couple of times--the last episode lasted five days. But as soon as I stopped giving her all the meds (by then she was also taking an appetite stimulant and something for nausea) she suddenly became ravenous again.
Back on the water pills now, she seems to be losing her appetite again. I'm going to have to talk to the vet about whether it's really worth it to keep giving her this stuff. The good news is that in all of this I've finally found a way to medicate my little banshee.
This pill shooter is THA BOMB. It's a godsend. The ones I found at Petco and PetSmart were too big for tiny cat pills, but my vet recommended this one, which she was selling much cheaper than any others I've found. This thing has saved my relationship with Sunshine.
We are enjoying each other's company every minute we can, and on the days she's feeling well she is very happy and affectionate. There are days when I'm so depressed I can barely move, and they seem to coincide with the days she seems sickest. She is my best friend, and I can't imagine my life without her. But I'm so thankful we have this time together. There's no telling how long it will last, but I'm going to make the best of it.
I haven't been to Oklahoma City with Ryan since the New Year, and that truly sucks. But he's been very supportive and completely understands why I can't leave my cat to go out of town these days. Unfortunately, with a snowpocalypse preceded by two terrible colds, he hasn't been able to get here either for several weeks. I'm definitely looking forward to next weekend, when By God nothing better stop my man from getting to me! It will have been a month since we've seen each other, and that's the longest we've ever been apart since we met.
I'm looking forward to returning to work tomorrow...I haven't been in almost a week because of a very unusual blizzard and our mayor's complete lack of competence to handle the situation. Dude declared a state of emergency before the first snowflake even fell, and yet a week later people are still snowed in and the roads are a mess. I just know people who live up North are laughing at us...
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