Who’s the Scary Cat Now!

The month of May might be known for bringing flowers but at my house it also brings the dog’s yearly vet appointment to get caught up on his shots/vaccines and to get the ‘diet talk’ about him needing to loss a pound or two. Doctors are all the same, aren’t they. In Levi’s case the vet talk usually goes something like this: “One pound will lead to two pounds and pretty soon it will start effecting his all over health.” Ya, doc, I know it. But have you ever lived with a stubborn schnauzer who wants his treat when he wants it? Walking him more sounds easy, doesn’t it, except Levi won’t go out in the rain and I won’t go out in snowy or icy weather. I used let him run in the back yard on a long clothesline but my back lot line neighbor acquired three pit bulls two years ago and only one is chained up---presumably the one that has already killed a cat and attacked another neighbor’s dog. But Levi didn’t get the ‘diet talk’ this year because he actually lost his two pounds and now I’m mad at the little bugger for not sharing his weight loss secret with me.

This routine appointment drained $452.43 out of my check book for all his shots/vaccines including two required for licensing, a canine flu shot, CBC blood work, fecal check, ear infection treatment, three months’ worth of flea, tick and heart worm meds and apoquel pills for itchiness when he needs it for a plugged saliva gland. On the good side, this was the first time in three years his teeth didn’t need cleaning but they aren’t going to let that money get away. They want to re-check his teeth in October and I will let them because he can’t afford to lose any more teeth to gum disease. And I'm taking bets on whether or not his CBC blood work will turn something up they'll want to treat. He's a senior citizen now and those years turns us all into cha-ching machines for the medical communities.

The month of May also brings my yearly eye doctor appointment. My eyes are tired and bother me from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed but the doctor keeps telling me eyes are healthy and my sight hasn’t changed enough to bother getting a new prescription in three years. And my cataracts aren’t big enough---yet---for him to want to remove them. “Artificial tears,” he says, “use them up to 20 times a day.” I asked if they have a car service for cataract surgeries like the slick, new eye surgery ‘assembly line’ in town advertises. Not having any children who are obligated by love or guilt to help with transportation to and from cataract surgery is a huge concern for me. The eye doctor said there is a service in town that will pick you up, stay with you and bring you back home for any medical procedure. "Costs a royal fortunate," he said, "but it’s an option to file away in your back pocket." You can’t just call an Uber or Lyft for rides to medical procedures because they require that you have someone in the waiting room in case of emergencies. I guess having a total stranger you just met two hours ago qualities.

Have you warmed up to using Uber or Lyft? We spent our childhoods being warned about getting into cars with strangers and the only time I ever did it I got raped so now I’m supposed to unlearn all those warning that were drilled into us growing up? Granted, no one is going to want to do bodily harm to an pudgy old woman in sensible shoes…unless they're working as a ‘body procurer’ for a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci. Did you know he dissected bodies in the dead of night to learn human anatomy? He started out paying grave robbers to supply him but when they got caught taking a shortcut and helping a vagrant into the next world, his new 'body procurers' would get unclaimed bodies from the city until Leonardo finally worked his way up to getting a doctor at a hospital to give him access to cadavers. Anyway, back on topic. A few years ago I thought I was ready to try Uber when my arm was in a sling then an Uber driver in a town near-by killed six people and wounded two others and in between him shooting random people he was picking up Uber customers! At least with the medical patient courier service my eye doctor told me about I have to believe they go through a thorough screening. If not, don’t tell me. Let me live in blissful ignorance because the odds are good I may need their service someday.

I’ve turned into a quirky little creature, haven’t I. I’m afraid of my back yard, of dying in a car accident, of falling on the ice, of Italian Renaissance Era body snatchers and a hundred perfectly normal 21st century activities like wearing sleeveless blouses, roller coasters and people who dress up like zombies. Not that I was ever a fearless person in my prime. I never jumped off a dock head first, for example, without knowing how deep the water was. I refused to go sky diving in my 20s or to sit in the front row at the stock car races and I’m pretty sure my scary-cat persona was the reason the guy I was dating at the time broke up with me. But I’ll tell you what I’m not afraid of doing that most of my Gathering Girls pals won’t do. They won’t answer their front doors if someone rings their doorbell. Who’s the scary cat now?  ©

Levi and the Music in my Life

Levi had to go back to the vet recently for a recheck of the pus pocket on his lip. It cleared up nicely on the antibiotics but he was still digging and scratching the area constantly. This time we were able to see a 'skin tag' we didn’t see before and it freaked me out when I discovered it a few days before the appointment because I thought it was an embedded tick. Between the veterinary, her tech assistant, me and Levi’s cooperation the vet was able to pronounce that what I thought were legs coming out of the ‘thing’ were not. We were also able to see that the salivary gland near the upper lip where the pus pocket was two weeks ago was enlarged and the vet was guessing it’s plugged and that’s the source of the annoying itching Levi was experiencing. 

She put him on a twice a day drug for itching and it’s been like a miracle. I’ve only seen him digging at his mouth three times in four days since starting the pills. The plan is to reduce the drug down to once a day after a two week trial, hoping to give the salivary gland a rest and chance to correct itself. Going into surgically open it up or remove the gland would be costly and an unnecessary risk at his age. Better to do it with his annual teeth cleaning next summer, if the pills give him enough relief to wait and he's not running a fever. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “It’s always something.” 

Changing topics: I’ve been in the car a lot lately which means I’ve been hearing a lot of music. I don’t listen to it in the house but I’ll explain that later. Yesterday Thomas Rhett came on The Highway XM radio channel singing the last choir of his latest song, “Now I'm twenty-five and I'm drinking wine with my wife at home. Got a couple of dogs and a couple of songs on the radio and we sit around and we laugh about how we used to be when all we cared about was turning sixteen.” The song progressed from looking forward to sixteen, then to eighteen and twenty-one…always looking forward to the next benchmark. That’s what I’ve done my entire life, never happy with the here and now. That is until I got so old the next benchmark is dying and I find I don’t know how to live in the here and now.

Honestly, I don’t understand why people don’t like Country Western music. The songs are mini stories about looking back and looking forward and enjoying where you’re at. They’re about crying and laughing and loving. Sure, a few of the songs are about pickup trucks and hard drinking but more talk about things like skipping rocks on a river and watching sunsets with the one you love. And there’s a lot of practical advice in Country Western songs like in this one Kenny Chesney sang to me yesterday: 

“Scared to live, scared to die

We ain't perfect but we try

Get along while we can

Always give love the upper hand

Paint a wall, learn to dance

Call your mom, buy a boat

Drink a beer, sing a song

Make a friend….”

I don’t listen to music in the house is because 1) it makes me too moody, and 2) I get lost in the song writer’s creativity and that stifles my own if I’m trying to write. Getting lost in their storytelling makes me forget to eat, pay bills and wipe my…dog’s feet when he comes inside. You thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you. I thought about it but I pride myself on not being crude enough that I’d say “wipe my ass” in public. 

When I was in college I took a class on Music Appreciation and we studied classical pieces side-by-side with those written by the new-at-the-time Beatles. The professor predicted that the Beatles music would be around in four hundred years. Years later I got to hear an entire concert of Beatles music played by a full orchestra and I was blown away. The professor was right and I loved his class but the only time I listened to classical music after that was when I was plowing snow. Rachmaninoff’s Flight of the Bumblebee and Beethoven’s 5^th Sympathy could keep me awake like no other tip or trick of professional truckers. I still have my old cassettes but no way to play them without my pickup truck. 

Music played an important part in a different stage of my life. After my husband’s stroke I was back to singing childhood songs in the car everywhere we’d go. Songs learned before the age of five are stored in a different part of our brains, his speech therapist said, so singing them is a way to try to kick-start lost speech to come back. It didn’t work and after a year that "homework" faded out of our world but for the rest of his life Don often belted out, “Jesus likes me. Yo, you know” and every time I’d reply, “I think Jesus loved you when you were a kid." At that point he’d switch the only other song he could (almost) sing, Happy Birthday. Of all the things I’ve written over the past nearly two decades of writing on the web, my favorite humorous essay was about Don and his two songs. If interested, you can read it here. But be warned, the word ‘ass’ does come up. ©

The Vet and the Benedictine Nun

May is the month when Levi gets his yearly appointment with the vet for blood work and the vaccines required for getting the county license tags. Recently they’ve changed the law so licenses and rabies boosters are due every three years now so technically going every year to the vet is no longer necessary, but life-long habits are hard to break. My lifetime, not his. According to the paperwork Levi the Mighty Schnauzer was “ten years, three months and two weeks” old on the day of the appointment but before we got out of there I think we both felt liked we’d aged a month and in dog years, that’s a lot.

The place I take him is an animal hospital with 4-5 vets on duty and on appointment day they had a dog come in that had been hit by a car and all their other patients got backed up in the waiting room. Pooping dogs and peeing puppies and other canines like Levi biting at the bit wanting to play with the cats in cages and the other dogs on leashes. It was a manic zoo. Finally we got into an exam room and when the vet walked in he started the conversation with, “I need to tell you that I might get called out during Levi’s exam. There’s a couple next door with a cat that is getting put down and when they are finished saying their goodbyes and are ready for me to start the process, I’ll be called out.” Been there, done that with this very veterinarian so I understood and said appropriate words about that being hard on everyone. Then I started puckering up. I could feel tears coming and I didn’t even know the damn cat in the next room! I kept it together but it wasn’t easy, especially when the vet got the tap on the door and the whispered words came next, “They're ready now.” Who is ever really ready for that?

The in-and-out in 15 minutes appointment took an hour and a half and for once Levi’s teeth looked good but he’s still getting them cleaned later this summer. His heart and lungs sounded good and the vet couldn’t find anything wrong with Levi’s knee joints and I’ve been worried about them. The next day I got the other test results by phone. His canine CBC chem 11 levels were in normal ranges. Except they say he’s got Lyme disease and he needs another blood test and possibly treatment! I was so shocked I asked them to double check to see if they were reading the right dog’s blood work. He takes all the precaution drugs for ticks, fleas and heart worms and I’ve never seen a tick on him. I’d already paid $224.55 and they wanted another $69.50 for a new test to put a finer point on the Lyme situation. What are you going to do, say no? I did say no to a suggestion that I should also bring in a urine sample to see if the Lyme disease has damaged his kidneys. More accurately, I said, “Let’s see what this new test says first.” And for anyone wondering how you get a urine sample from a dog, you follow him or her around with a pie pan and stick it underneath at the right time, hoping you get your hand out of the way in time. The things we do for love.

I was not in a good mood after the phone conversation with the vet tech and when I clicked the phone off I looked up and saw two mourning doves mating on my deck railing. “Get a room!” I yelled. I wasn’t sure they’d be back this year---I quit putting birdseed out near-by to discourage mice in the basement---but apparently old habits are hard to break in the bird world too. They’ve been hanging out on that railing and building a spring nest in a near-by pine tree for years. I won’t be able to use my living room door out to the deck for a couple of weeks without scaring the doves and they, in turn, scaring me as they fly out of the tree.

The next day I went to Book Club and managed to show up at the right time. Every so often we’ll change from our normal 1:00 to 12:00 and I'll get there as the book discussion is ending instead of beginning. Not this time. The book we’ll be reading for June is My Mrs. Brown, but I won’t start it until I finish a self-published book on my Kindle, written by a new blogger friend, Dee Ready. I knew from reading her blog, Coming Home to Myself, that she’s an excellent writer and the topic of her book intrigued me enough to finally download a copy from Amazon after two weeks of indecision. Prayer Wasn’t Enough is about Dee's years spent as a Benedictine nun in the late 1950s and '60s but given the fact that I call myself an agnostic I wasn’t sure how I’d relate to the subject.

I’ve read 75% of the book and I’m still fascinated by the details Dee shared about living in a strict convent---the clothing and its care, the steps and vows required, the daily routines and prayer schedules, the traditions of the order, the image of hundreds of nuns living all in one place, and, of course, the self-discovery she went through as she struggled for self-imposed perfection. I’m not at the point in the memoir where she leaves that life behind but already I know I'll read the book Dee hopes to publish next covering her ten years after leaving the convent. We’ve all gone through transitions in life---some bigger and scarier than others---but not many of us can say that we’ve been a devoted nun in a former life and certainly not a nun given a name like Sister Innocence. ©