Since last I wrote about Baldur a few things have happened. A week after that post we went to Toronto for Pesach and I boarded him at the vet's so they could monitor him. (This is a new service.) While he was there they did another X-ray and reported that the fluid he'd been retaining was nearly gone, so they had me reduce the dosage of the Furosemide (diuretic) and told me to bring him back in a month.

Last week was that visit, and he had a lot of fluid in his abdomen. (Not in his lungs -- just running around in there, um, somewhere.) The vet tried to get a sample with a needle but reached the "feisty" threshold before succeeding, so didn't. She recommended another ultrasound to see if there's been a change in his heart. That was today. She also had me raise the drug dosage (splitting the difference) a few days ago; they recommend checking bloodwork 3-4 days after doing that so we timed it for the ultrasound day. (This drug can rapidly cause kidney damage; that's what they're looking for.)

The ultrasound confirmed that he has congestive heart failure; at the previous ultrasound they used words like "possible" but not this time. His heart hasn't changed much since the last one, which is good; I guess they got a closer look this time. There is also still a fair bit of fluid, though it's down some, so I am to increase the dosage again (back to that original level) and bring him in for a quick blood test Monday morning. We will probably also increase the dosage on the Enalapril (the heart medicine), but my vet understands the value of isolating variables during testing so we'll do that after confirming that the other drug's dose is fine.

She also strongly recommended that I board him with them when I go to Israel this summer. I said my cat-sitter is excellent and diligent, thinking she was worried about him not getting all his meds or something, but she pointed out that if he's there I can authorize them to use their best judgement about any on-the-fly treatments. Good point. Being in a cage, even a nice large one, for a week and a half won't be much fun, but on the other hand he spends most of his time sleeping so maybe he doesn't care?

My vet is unsure about prognosis. We're pretty sure that he won't be going out to celebrate reaching drinking age in two years, but beyond that... At this point we need to get his heart problems under control, which risks kidney problems, which -- if they show up -- we'll need to do something to compensate for, and the dance goes on. I don't know what end-stage heart failure looks like, but I do know what kidney failure looks like and that's not fun, so let's hope he continues to tolerate the heart meds. (Today his BUN was 40, last week 37, normal is up to 36. Erik and Embla stayed around 60 for a year or two before going downhill. So I'm cautiously optimistic about the kidneys.)

His pulse, on the other hand, was 100 both this week and last. Normal for him is 160-200. That's kind of freaky.

On the bright side, a friend gave me some home-grown catnip today for him and I can report that he found his first sample quite satisfactory. :-)

Baldur is still lethargic -- a lot of lying around, barely moving, not eating -- but last night he came upstairs and jumped up on the bed. So, mixed signals there.

The blood tests came back today. The CBC is all normal -- no anemia (yay! the fluid isn't internal bleeding!), no elevated white-cell counts (infection). His BUN (kidney number) is slightly up (45, vs. 38 a few months ago); for comparison, Embla and Erik were both into three digits at the end. Kriatinine (the other kidney number) is normal. T4, the hyperthyroid number, is high at 5.4 (his highest reading so far), despite the fact that he's getting 15mg of Methimazole a day (this is abnormally high). That's transdermal, though, because something in the pill makes him throw up, and transdermal doesn't have perfect absorption. But still...

The drugs he's on are Enalapril (the heart medicine) and Furosemide (the diuretic).

I talked with both vets tonight -- the one who saw him yesterday and my regular one. My vet is going to find out whether imaging his heart would tell us anything we could use. Other than that, we keep doing what we're doing and give the drugs time to work.

Thanks for all the replies to yesterday's post.

Baldur has become more vocal of late. It's not just since Erik died; it's been building for a while longer. But it has gotten worse, maybe because of that or maybe coincidentally. The vet can find nothing wrong with him (other than that he's almost 19 years old); she suspects senility. Near as I can tell his vision and hearing are still ok -- at least, he chases the laser dot and hears a can of food being opened from a floor away. But he'll stand in the middle of the hall, yowling piteously and failing to respond to being called. If I go get him he stops for a while, usually. It's weird.

Alas, he has been doing a fair bit of this in the middle of the night of late, which is wearing. Tonight I shut him in the basement -- with plenty of warm soft stuff to sleep on, food, water, litter, and a light, of course, but still... He cried for a while but seems to have settled down. We'll see if it lasts.

I don't want to have to do this every night. I want my cat to be able to curl up on my feet (or, of late, my arm) while I sleep. This feels like I'm failing both of us.

Sigh.

What party affiliation do cats old enough to vote claim? Independent, of course. (But since neither can produce proof of citizenship, and anyway they are not allowed out of the house on their own, we don't need to worry about feline domination coming through that particular path.)

Baldur has spent most of his life being gravity-challenged. He'll stand (or sit) on the floor in front of the couch and contemplate jumping up to join you but conclude it's too much work. In the last month or so he has, pretty consistently, jumped up on the desk to be with me when I'm using the computer. (He goes by way of my lap; he can't do floor to desk directly.) I am at a loss to explain this sudden change in outlook. Yes he's lost weight (and that's actually a concern), but I had always assumed this was governed by attitude, not mass.

Erik, meanwhile, can be relied upon to crawl under the bed-covers at night, at least until spring. He has never considered gravity to be an impediment to this.

Purim was this past weekend. We continued the tradition started last year of having "Esther's banquet" after the evening megillah reading and Purimspiel -- adults-only, food, alcohol, study/discussion. This year we had about 50 people, I think, up from last year, which is good to see. Last year I had brought some homebrew along. I hadn't planned to repeat that this year because there hadn't been a lot of takers -- but then one of the rabbis, in announcing the event to the morning minyan, said "and Monica's going to bring her homebrew, right?", so I shrugged and did. I brought 12-year-old horilka (made with spiced brandy) and some mead, and both were very popular. (They polished off most of a liter of horilka! Last year they drank maybe a cup.) I haven't actually been making stuff for the last decade or so; I guess I should queue up some more horilka in the fall when cider is in season again. (The ingredients in horilka are unprocessed cider, honey, brandy or vodka, spices, and time. Thanks, hlinspjalda!)

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.