Regina Noctis

If anyone happens across the sandman, please knock him over the head and send him here. He seems to have skipped me yet again. This insomnia jag has been going on for nearly a week now, and I’ve had enough.

Back to free account status I go.

(No, this is not fishing for someone to pay my account for me. I’ll pay it myself, probably when I get the usual birthday money from the grandmother unit in October. Any of ya know me, you know I don’t deal well with receiving gifts.)

Working hard in Digital Illustration, which is a part of the reason for lack of posts. The other reason is that my computer now resides in my mom’s room, and will continue to do so until my room stops being an oven. When I can survive being in there without air conditioning, more regular ranting will recommence. A lot has been going on, but I’m just not comfortable posting about it where I can be watched. Completely unreasonable, really, because I know no one is trying to read over my shoulder. But that’s just one of my quirks, I guess.

The good news is that Extra is now cured of the infection that killed Spot, and that neither of the other two cats have caught it. Whiskers, Morris, and Extra have all made recent trips to the vet, but none of it related to the infection, and all felines are doing fine. More than fine in Extra’s case. I’ve got the scratches up and down both arms to prove it from tonight’s “MUST PLAY NOW!” attack. Which, I suppose, is better than a couple days ago, when she decided that the game of the morning was going to be hit-and-run-driver. After the second time she came charging in, ran into the back of my leg (she leaped so she’d hit about knee level, and nearly succeeded in knocking me over) I followed her around the house demanding that she give me her registration and insurance information. She apparently had none. Damn uninsured drivers.

Monday, the MonkeyFilter folks in the LA area had a meetup. Every time these meetups happen in LA and the Bay Area, I get more bent out of shape that I’m not there. Annoyed with life, not the Monkeys. The meetup on Monday was themed for Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I’ve been grumbling to myself that I wasn’t able to be there in the full pirate regalia I put together for a BayCon costume one year.

One of these days, I will get there. Oh yes. And there’d better be karaoke. Or else I’ll sing opera at everyone until they’re sorry. Or else start singing Beatles songs in the style of Elmer Fudd.

Not that I expect to contribute much as an attendee at one of these things. I tend to sit there and just observe most of the time at parties of whatever stripe. People usually feel uncomfortable in my silence, and try to draw me in, and it usually gets awkward. I think folks feel like I’m not enjoying myself because I tend to quietly watch and listen most of the time. But really, I enjoy just taking it all in. I’m just more social in small groups – maybe three at the maximum. And, of course, I don’t drink anymore thanks to the blood sugar problems related to PCOS, so the liquid lubrication to sociability isn’t much of an option for me anymore. I often feel like a wet blanket at gatherings anymore, since people are usually so busy trying to make sure I’m enjoying myself, followed by increasingly awkward silences, that they seem to have less fun themselves than they might have otherwise. So yeah, I don’t know that my presence would be too nice for the Monkeys at these meetups, but there are so many folks that I would love to meet at these things…

We figured out which cat was sick. It’s the kitten, Extra. We hauled her off to the vet, and she is being regularly medicated. We also got a sample to give to the vet for testing.

Unlike with Spot, Extra has continued to have diarrhea. She is responding to the medicine, but slowly. This is quite different from what went on with Spot, since he’d respond to medication pretty much immediately, appear to be on the mend for several days, and then get worse than he’d been before.

The vet said that Spot probably had something else wrong that wasn’t allowing his body to fight off and recover from the multiple infections. He suspects that Spot had leukemia in addition to the infections that we were trying to eradicate with the various bouts of medication. The loss of fat and muscle tissue and the bloating, apparently, were signs that this was likely. The vet said that by the last few weeks, Spot looked like a leukemia cat.

We are still being careful, and keeping an eye on the kitten’s leavings to see if there’s a relapse, as happened repeatedly with Spot. Whatever this is, it’s obviously contagious (though not highly so, or I’m sure all of them would have had it before Spot died, since this went on for two months or more.) And if an immune system that was depressed by leukemia is a part of why this eventually carried Spot off, then we’d have a big problem if Whiskers caught it. Whiskers is on doses of steroids every three weeks to a month, since he has such bad asthma. Steroids repress the immune system. Additionally, he’s almost definitely FIV positive (though we never had the final test to absolutely confirm this, there have been enough FIV-related anomolies in the batteries of tests that he has had that the vet is fairly sure that the cat has feline AIDS.) We’ve taken to patrolling the two litterboxes regularly, and scooping out anything solid in sight, to limit the risk of the infection spreading.

So far, Extra has not descended into the lethargic misery that Spot did. She’s still running from end to end of the house, knocking things onto the floor, and coming in to wake me up hours before I’m ready to be awake every morning. She plays with everything she can get her paws on, and is a constant ball of furry activity. I’m taking this is a hopeful sign that the infection is slowly being controlled by the medication, and that she will get over this.

Though if it slowed her down just enough that she doesn’t come into the bedroom at o’godawful in the morning and either start yowling at the top of her lungs nonstop just for the exercise, or else launch attacks on my legs, I wouldn’t really object much. The alarm clock claw to the leg at six in the morning is not my favorite way to wake up.

I suppose now would be a good time to take my decongestant and try to get some sleep. If I time it right, the decongestant not only takes care of my cold symptoms so I can get a little sleep, it also knocks me out so thoroughly that I can sometimes manage to sleep through the morning yowling.

Me: I hab a code.
Her: What do you have to code?
Me: Doh, doh! A code! By dose is stobbed ub!
Her: Well, if it’s code you need for school, you’d better not doze instead.
Me: Did you ged be eddy code bedicide?
Her: I’m not going to help you cheat. Figure out the code for yourself. Besides I wouldn’t know Bedicide Code if it bit me.
Me: Why do I tog to you?
Her: Because otherwise you’d only be able to talk to the cats.

It seems like I only ever come here anymore when something upsetting has happened. So I figured it was well past time that I write about something that went right for a change.

Back when I went in to pick up my new glasses (June, was it? All the days kind of blend together here. They’re all alike.) my optometrist tested the pressure in my eyes. I’d told him about the mysterious appearance and disappearance of high pressure in my right eye ten years ago, so he’s been very conscientious about checking the pressure again, even if I’m only picking up a new prescription. He told me that the pressure was testing high in both eyes, and had me come back two weeks later to check it again. It was still high on the followup, so he referred me to an opthamologist here in town.

The opthamologist was pretty thoroughly booked, and the earliest appointment I could get was at the end of August. For two months, I had this hanging over my head. My phobia about losing my eyesight was kicking up the whole time, and I was worried about damage being done by the high pressure during my two-month wait. Ten years ago, the pressure was high enough that I’d lost a little of the peripheral vision in my right eye. The center of focus had shifted in response to the pressure, and the change in range of vision meant that I lost the rightmost edge of my peripheral vision.

My appointment with the opthamologist was on Tuesday afternoon. It was scheduled for 3, but I wound up sitting in the waiting room until a bit after four before they finally called me back. I then had to run what I came to think of as the opthamologic obstacle course. I followed the doctor’s assistant through three rooms, each with its own set of tests, before I was finally taken to the room where the opthamologist would see me. The assistant, actually, was a bit of an annoyance. She was fine until the final test she was running, but during it she got pissed off at me for something over which I have no control. I was supposed to stare at the tip of her nose while she covered first one of my eyes and then the other. With stereoscopic vision, there will always be a slight shift of the eyes when this happens, since there is, after all, some space between the eyes. For me, the shifting is slightly more pronounced because of the small change I experienced in the center of focus of my right eye. I was staring at the tip of her nose, as instructed. Since my eyes shifted more than she was accustomed to, she decided that I was tracking her moving hand as it went from one eye to the other, alternately blocking the vision. She first instructed me again to look at her nose, and I told her I was, and then we went through it again. When the same shifting of my eyes happened, she got pissed off at me for not listening to the instructions, and when I tried to tell her that I was obeying the instructions, she accused me of lying and then stormed off in a huff.

I sat and seethed until the opthamologist and his other assistant came in. I couldn’t stay angry once Dr. Bradley came in. He was one of those sweet little old men, quiet and polite, with a charming smile and a back bent with age. This assistant was also much nicer, so I let it go.

I repeated the story about the high pressure ten years ago, the sudden reappearance of it recently, the shift in vision, etc. He was glad to know I hadn’t just let it slide for ten years, but made sure that the pressure was monitored whenever I went to the optometrist, and that there’d been no reoccurrence until now. He checked what he called the “architecture of the inner eye” at both the standard level optometrists look at when they’re shining light in your eyes, and at a deeper level that required a rather intense light beamed through a magnifying lens. That was extremely difficult for me, light sensitive that I am.

When he was done, Dr. Bradley explained that I wasn’t actually suffering from pressure that could definitely be called high. My pressure tested at 19, which is slightly above normal. Some people with pressure at 19 suffer damage to the eyes and develop the damage that is glaucoma. But others seem to have eyes that are less delicate on the inside and handle the pressure with no problem. In his examination, Dr. Bradley had found no damage whatsoever. My high pressure is not actually unhealthy for me.

Just to be sure, since I did have that shift in vision ten years ago, I’m going back in a month for a recheck on the pressure and for a range of vision test, just to make sure I haven’t lost any more peripheral vision.

For the first time in two months, I don’t have my phobia kicking and screaming in the back of my head, and worried thoughts about losing my eyesight swimming through my mind when I try to sleep at night.

And then tonight, in my intermediate digital arts course, we did the first draft critiques of our first project. The instructor and various students all had lots of things to say about the work up on the board in most cases. Suggestions, mostly, for how things could be improved. I was one of only two people who didn’t hear one negative thing about the work in progress. The only thing that the instructor said to me was to keep doing exactly what I’m doing.

So there. It’s not all gloom and doom. Something I need to remind myself of periodically, since I have a tendency to gripe about the bad and ignore the good lately.