The Holidays, Part VI: Crisis Mode

 (Days of work remaining before holiday time off: 12)

This will be a long one all, and is sort of traumatic, so buckle in. 

First of all, before we get into the really...traumatic stuff...

We did go to the parents' today and I was able to get about twenty random tapes. About half of them are unmarked, so they could either be home videos or stuff taped off television (or blank tapes), etc. We don't know. The other half are a few commercial movies I wanted to save, and a good chunk of family videos of one sort or another. Included in that is a tape with just Dad's name on it, a tape of Daisy's oldest sister's 6th grade graduation, a tape containing that same sister's modeling audition (from the 80s, so I'm sure that'll be interesting), a tape with Daisy's other sister's name on it and nothing else, and some other various tapes of various ages that I don't know what I'll find on them. Many of these tapes are over 30 years old and I don't know how deteriorated they are. Some could be great, some could be terrible/unplayable -- degraded past the point of no return. So really, time is of the essence to get this stuff transferred. 

Doing so may kill the tapes or kill the VCR, or both. It's a risk I'm willing to take just to try, honestly. It's worth it to try. This "archiving data" stuff is the shit I live for, honestly. I love unearthing things and examining them.

So, I came home and began running them through the VCR. I normally take my nap in the evening on Saturdays because, well, I have to reset my sleep schedule so that I can work on Sunday again. The longest tape, to my knowledge, was the second 9/11 tape I had made myself -- it was a full six hours. I put it on, made sure the tracking was as good as possible, ate dinner with Daisy, and then came back upstairs. It had about 3.5 hours to go, so I set an alarm on Alexa for three hours later and passed out in my chair.

An hour later, Daisy threw open the door of my room and called my name to wake me up. 

In her arms was Hank, who -- unlike most times -- was not trying to get away.

"Something's wrong with Hank," she said. "He's breathing funny."

"Bring him over here," I said. 

She did, and laid him on my chest. He did not struggle. He did not try to get away. He laid on my chest, looked at me with his big orange eyes, and was struggling to breathe -- little gasps, like a chest rattle in someone with bronchitis. He was purring a little, but he looked scared. And that, in turn, made me scared.

"I'm taking him to the emergency vet," Daisy said. "Keep him there, hold him while I get dressed."

I did. I put my hand on him and talked to him sweetly. He didn't try to move, he didn't try to get up. He looked at me, and then looked for Daisy when she left the room to get dressed to leave, but he seemed calm. His breathing was very labored, like he was trying to breathe through a snorkel. And he seemed...limper than usual. 

Five minutes later, Daisy was in the car with him in the cat carrier, on the way to the vet.

I was still half-asleep -- it is very hard for me to wake up completely if I've just fallen into a deep sleep -- and I was sort of out of it. But my worry about my smallest son forced my brain to awaken quickly, and for the next four hours Daisy texted me continual updates about our child.

When she got there, Hank was whisked away into the back rooms for observation. They put him in a high-oxygen room so he could breathe better, and said they wanted to do an x-ray, bloodwork, and the full gamut of exams. Daisy agreed to this, of course.

His x-ray showed that he had some fluid on his lungs (probable fluid, anyway) and what appeared to be an enlarged heart, which is a possible sign of heart disease in cats.

"He's seven months old," I said. "How could he have heart disease?"

Apparently it can present from six months forward, and 1-2% of kittens can have it.

This began a waiting period of hours while Daisy was shuffled around to multiple rooms -- waiting room, exam room, etc.  During this time we both ran through a number of worst-case scenarios in our heads -- Daisy has a shamrock in the front window, and apparently that can be toxic to cats, and he's been getting up in that window to tear shit up -- did he eat part of it? Did he have feline AIDS? That can present as respiratory illnesses and he's right at the age where it could start up, if so. What if he did have heart disease or congestive heart failure? How can that be treated? How long would his life expectancy be? The internet says anything between weeks and years.

In the vet's office, Daisy was spiraling. 

"If he dies, I'm not getting another cat," she told me.

At home, I was spiraling, and my heart rate was going up out of stress/worry. He's so young. What the hell could be wrong with him? Why would he have an enlarged heart? Did I do something wrong? Did I give him treats or food he's allergic to? What could have affected him?

I went downstairs to get a couple of bottles of water, and Pete looked at me very concerned. I gave him and the girls some pets and lots and told them everything was okay. Pete followed me back upstairs and stared at me, as if he was saying she took the orange child, dad. Why is the orange child gone?

The vets got back with Daisy and told her that he did not appear to have pneumonia or asthma, and while his heart was enlarged, it did not seem to be in distress. The bloodwork would have to tell us anything else, including whether heart disease and feline HIV (I can only assume) could be ruled out and taken off the table. 

I waited. I finished digitizing the 9/11 tape and moved on to a couple of other known family videos one after another. They were mostly short and I could get through each of them quickly. There was no way I was going to be able to take my nap -- it just wasn't happening now. 

Finally, Daisy got back to me. The bloodwork looked good with no real cause for concern. He did not have heart disease, but they did discern that by ruling everything else out, he did have some sort of respiratory infection, or similar infection, and they wanted to give him steroids and an antibiotic to see if that would knock it out.

They also wanted to know if Daisy wanted them to keep him overnight for observation, and finally brought her into the room to see him. They left her there with him in her arms for half an hour, during which Daisy said he held onto her tightly and was shedding like crazy due to the stress. He was still breathing in a labored fashion. She asked me if I thought he should stay the night for observation.

"Waaaaaaay more expensive," I told her. "[Daisy], if they're giving him steroids and antibiotics, he's likely just going to sleep through the night at home anyway. If he doesn't have any heart issues they can find, I'm guessing he'll be fine once the drugs kick in. If he's not, we can always bring him back."

This was a remarkably calm statement for me in a time of crisis, and I commend myself for it. I don't know how I did it.

"TBD," Daisy said. "If his breathing is still bad and It's under $200, I'm going to consider it."

"Understandable," I replied. 

"He's clinging to me," she said a few minutes later. "He doesn't want to stay. Plus, it's $2,000."

"Yeah, fuuuuuuuck that," I said. 

They took him back into the back room to administer the meds at this point -- which I was frankly shocked they hadn't done before -- and gave Daisy pills and a dropper bottle full of medicine we have to give him every twelve hours. Daisy paid the bill (I won't say what it was here, but it was substantial) and brought him home.

By the time he got home, he was once more breathing normally. He still looked tired and stressed, and as soon as we administered the first dose of the liquid antibiotics to him (he wasn't a fan of that), he explored the house and looked at everything like it was the first time he'd seen it. He ate food, he drank water, he used the pan, and I even took him upstairs to give him "the pattern" of me touching him while he ate some of his special dry food in the cat tree. He chased Pete around a bit, briefly played fetch with one of his toys, and for all intents and purposes seemed normal again. Per the x-ray, he is also now weighing in at 11.24 pounds -- bigger than the 10 pounds his normal vet expected him to weigh at his next appointment in July. 

Daisy pulled any "poisonous" plants out of the front window as a precaution and tried her best to seal off the area so he wouldn't try to get back up there anymore. The remaining plants are harmless to cats. The vets said that likely wasn't the issue anyhow, as that would present itself with a lot of vomiting, generally. 

We're going to have to watch his heart -- meaning, we'll need to get it checked every year at his normal vet appointments, which would be an extra step compared to just a normal check-up, but at least to us, his heart is a cause for concern.

Daisy was finally able to go to sleep around 3am, and my guess is that the orange lad followed her to bed as per the usual. 

I am still very concerned. If he starts wheezing again in the night and it doesn't wake up Daisy, we wouldn't know for hours. What if he has an episode when we're not around and just keels over? I'm terrified of waking up -- maybe not tomorrow, next week, or within the next year -- but eventually, and just finding him dead. I don't know what to do. He was fine until this evening, though he had admittedly been a sleepyhead most of the weekend -- we now know that was perhaps because he was feeling sick. It's very easy for me to become obsessive and start spiraling. He's such a sweet little boy and I'm so terrified of something being seriously wrong with him that I'm unable to prevent, fix, or really even treat.

Looks like December is starting off to be a banner month already.