You won't keep the law with a broken word

First, because inquiring minds want to know - a cat update. Yesterday I took her to the vet for a checkup and blood work, and to see about getting something to soothe her in the evening; because ain't nobody happy (least of all the kitty) when on a bad night, she's up every 45 minutes crying and confused.



The lab work won't be back for another couple of days, but it turns out that she's down fully half a pound since Thanksgiving, and she's showing signs of thyroid problems. Maybe. Frankly, that's what we're hoping for - because thyroid issues are fairly easy to manage, even in the long term. If her thyroid isn't the problem, then there's really no telling. It could be anything.

None of this is a great surprise. She's an elderly cat, after all, but obviously we want to keep her happy and healthy for as long as possible.

So for starters, we have a special collar for her that's chock full of pheromones to help keep her chill. I was dubious about this, as we've tried the Feliway plug-ins before to zero response - but the vet said that in her experience, the collars were more effective.

In fact, the kitty didn't make a peep on the way home from the office, so that was a miracle in itself; and today I haven't heard a single note of her usual caterwauling-around-the-house. The collar is definitely doing something - but it's not enough to keep her quiet at night, not by itself.

Last night she got me up twice, and on three other occasions the husband and I were simply too despairing to respond to her howls, so we let her cry it out ... and after a few minutes, she stopped. This phenomenon hasn't occurred in over a year,* so hooray for that - but it still meant five full rounds of being jolted awake by a screaming cat between midnight and 7:00 a.m. So...yeah. An improvement, but an insufficient one.

Tonight we add our new weapon in the cat-sleep arsenal: kitty Valium. We'll start her on a quarter dose,** and see how it goes.

(That's my arm she's hugging and my hand she's using for a pillow, in the photo above. She was lying on the heated blanket and snoring her head off - demonstrating her capacity for forgiveness, since I was the big fat jerk who toted her off to the doc to get poked with needles.)

* * *

Here's today's progress on my southern noir about a woman whose memories and identity erode, only to reveal hints of another person entirely: a detective who vanished on the day she was born in 1959; now with BONUS moonshiners and revenuers, small-town governments with big-time crooks in office, cops both corrupt and courageous, and one hell of a paranormal twist:
Project: Shouting Distance
Deadline: March 1, 2015
New words written: 2100
Present total word count: 3515



Things Accomplished in Fiction: Met a nurse for coffee; took up smoking; second-guessed a lot of things.

Things Accomplished in Real Life: Neighborhood jaunt with dog; laundry; cleaned house yesterday; also went to the post office yesterday; went to Walgreens yesterday; also took the cat to the vet yesterday - thus the delay in word metrics.

Other: I am way behind on my metrics goals. Ugh. In my defense, I am also so far behind on sleep that I might not catch up until spring ... and that's IF the kitty Valium works.

Number of fiction words so far this year: 11,814

Greysongram.




* The vet asked if we had tried ignoring her, to make sure she wasn't just trying to get a reaction from us - and woo boy howdy, did we try that. We tried it for months. Unchecked by human intervention, the kitty would yowl for upwards of an hour or more before exhausting herself ... only to start again as soon as she'd recovered, a few minutes later.
** She's sometimes a bit sensitive to meds. We'll start low, and work our way up as needed.