HEEE'S ALLIIIVVVE

Atticus that is. He's in the spare bedroom so we can monitor his urine output *just like at work! Only no I+O sheets!* We're all still gleeful and mildly baffled he's still with us, I still cannot say enough good things about our vet.

The kicker? 

The whole five day ordeal only cost us 400 bucks. 

I KNOW RIGHT. 

If I ever get hit by a bus I want them to take me there instead! At least I know that way someone will sit through the night with me and I won't be charged limbs.

I've also been looking up new things to forage, and this weekend I'm going to try my hand at cattails to make bread with. I wrote an article for P-Mag  this week about it and it's kind of amazing. There's an article on eattheweeds.com that I read much of the info for my article from that's superb, and I plan on using to wade into some wet areas around town this weekend. It's win win! Erick can play disc golf and I can nerd out over edible plants! 

The Amazing Atticus

So this week I noticed Atticus puking a little and straining to use the bathroom, and thinking it was nothing more than some constipation I dropped him off at the vet first thing in the morning.

Holy shit was I wrong.

It turns out he's had a blocked urethra and his bladder was completely full of bloody urine, to the point where his kidneys were shutting down. The cause? His run of the mill dry cat food. Our vet told us like, 80% of the cat foods on the market will cause things like this and play a direct role in why so many cats face kidney problems.

When I left work early to see him he was literally on death's doorstep, I had come to say goodbye because he was that far gone. He was on oxygen and totally unresponsive when I arrived, but after sitting for two hours just talking and petting him he started to come out of it a bit and respond. The amazing vet staff then cathed him and put him on IV fluids to flush the toxins that had been building in his teeny body. These people are like, serious. One woman stayed 5 hours overtime TOTALLY UNPAID to be there for him. They took shifts coming in at night to make sure he was okay.  I have never seen a group of people bust their ass so hard and care so much for an animal. Seriously. If I could plaster their logo on the side of my truck and tattoo it on my face I would.

They told me they thought he kept fighting because I was there, and that if I hadn't of come when I did he very well could have given up. He was fighting for us, to come home to us.

They had done all they could do for the night, so we put him in a kennel and said goodbye, not knowing if he'd even be alive in the morning.

He was. 

 I stopped at the vet after work to find him awake and upright. When I got there they'd told me he'd eaten just a little bit and offered to let me try feeding him. When he saw me he started purring and I spoon fed him wet food until the aid told me he actually needed to stop eating. He was still on IV fluids and a catheter, but they said he's doing better. At the absolute earliest

 he may come home sunday, but that's only if he can pee on his own when the catheter comes out. They said if I hadn't of shown up the other night at the vet he probably wouldn't have made it, and the aid thinks he held on through the night because I was there. She asked me to come back in the evenings to feed him. They told me when they got there in the morning they were expecting to find him dead and the woman who came in said she actually had to text a photo of him to the other aid so she'd believe her.

So while all this was going on I was sharing it with my friends on facebook, and something amazing started happening: 

People started flooding us with get well soon cards for him. 

People who didn't even have animals started doing it:

There were so many it was absolutely amazing:

*Update* They just keep coming! 

Her mom told me she called from a sleepover
to make sure we saw this. MY HEART, SHE MELTS. 

These are people I know in person. These are people who live across the country that I've never met in real life. The absolute outpouring of love and support has been overwhelming. There are times in life where bad things happen, things even worse than this; but having people circle the wagons and show nothing but pure kindness and love, it's too much. MY EYES ARE SWEATING SO MUCH. And you know what? It's helping. He's eating and alert and his blood work is back to normal. He's off his IV fluids and while he's not out of the woods yet, death collected one less cat this week. 

FUCK YEAH. 

Articles and foraging

In my unforgivable absence from this blog, I began writing weekly articles for Persephone Magazine. Some have had to do with my mini adventures into back yard foraging, and while I was poking around on the interwebs for cross references for a goosefoot article that comes out on Monday, I stumbled onto this amazing video:

Totally worth watching. And now I'm going to try and see what I can rustle up from the yard. I'm thinking raviolis stuffed with goosefoot and cheese. Anyone else have good foraged recipes? 

Wrists and bitching

So the last lingering fuckery from my car wreck got treated today. I have some unresolved issues in my wrists from being rear ended and steering my station wagon away from my doom, mainly the fact that I have some tendinitis like issues or tendon tears or something, (to be honest I was more focused on the fact that large needles were about to be inside me) and the only way to resolve it is steroid shots directly into my wrist joints.

Holy mother of lentils. So today because of my wrist problems I got steroid injections into my wrist joints. I had the first one done at noon and had to come back at four for the other because I was readjusting my mortgage (PRIORITIES Y'ALL).
I have incredibly dry skin on my hands from washing them constantly for work, and the doctor scrubbed my hands with alcohol pads to sanitize them before injecting me before she realized this would cause pain similar to that of a thousand white hot suns. A MILLION TINY PAPER CUTS FILLED WITH ACID..

She took an incredibly long needle and injected steroids into my joints * re positioning the needle several times still injected into me to properly distribute the lighter fluid into my joints, while having her assistant pull my elbow back while she was pulling my wrist to help make room while injecting, the first time she just had me pull back myself and mother of tits, I cried like a child* It's been a long, long time since I cried during a medical procedure, but holy balls. It was like my hand was simultaneously catching fire from the inside and being dipped in acid.

OH SWEET BABY JESUS WHY, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN MY HANDS. 

I cried more today than when I broke my ankle, got my tattoos, and was hit by a car (I cried a bit for one or two of those things but I straight up wept like a child while my hands seared and exploded all at once). My dad works at the same practice and said when she came out from treating me she was tearing up because she felt so badly about me hurting. For the next week I'm on Anti-inflammatory meds like Advil and Tylenol and I have to wear wrist splints when I'm not using my wrists.
Can I just say again how much I fucking hate the cunt who hit me with her car?

 LOOK WHAT YOUR CARELESS FUCKERY HATH WROUGHT. 

Updates

So it's been a shamefully long time since I've posted here, and I feel pretty shitty about it. BUT a lot of new things have been happening!

I got a second job working overnights at a local nursing home. MONEY, I FINALLY HAS SOME.

Erick has been busting his ass on the house because his mom is coming to visit, and we'd like to put our best boot/flip flop forward when she comes to see it for the first time.

The chickens are living on the farm we adopted Kylie from and for the time being I've abandoned my dream of being a mother hen *le sigh*

I've started writing weekly columns for Persephone Magazine online about herbs and gardening!

While our garden harvest was very modest, we have big plans for next year that I'll be posting about in the near future.

Oh, and did I mention THAT WE GOT ENGAGED? Yup. That's right. Erick's making an honest woman out of me! He proposed last Sunday at Nachusa. I'd been unwittingly documenting my own proposal when he got down on one knee in a small clearing and asked me to marry him. NOW IT'S TIME FOR ALL THE PHOTOS.