Category Archives: cat

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defiance

I am listening to the Offspring today. Because I have a friend who is not behaving like a friend.

It is what people do that matters, not what they say. They can say they are my friend all they want, but if they treat me badly, I will walk.

The Offspring are fabulous for defiance. Though I need to change the genders on this one.

And not only that: they are fighting opioid overdoses and death:

Bravo, Offspring. Blessings and peace you.

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Embodying a dream

I wrote about the two dreams I had one night, with seven people. Two babies, a boy and a girl. Two professionals, a woman physician and a male policeman. Two rebels, a woman and a man, the man lying or at least misleading the rebel woman. The rebel woman trying to do something that she suddenly realizes is not important and is, in fact, foolish and dangerous. And a quiet woman.

I have been thinking about the quiet woman ever since. My Meyers-Briggs type in medical school came out INTJ, but we are not one thing or another. We have preferences, but we all have to use all the skills. I can be extroverted. I had to work on feeling, that was the really difficult one for me after a frightening childhood. I can pay attention to facts though I sweep them into the intuition very quickly. Medical school is facts and facts and facts, except then there are parts that turn out to change as science changes.

The eighth person is a quiet man. He is not present in the dream. I am thinking about him. I wonder if I will have another dream when I am ready.

I am attending some workshops on line for treating trauma. It is quite fascinating. They talk about working with clients who have aspects like my dream: a small child with trauma. A “fake adult”, aka “adaptive child”, with the tools that the child develops to survive in their childhood. Helping the “fake adult” recognize that some of coping tools may not be helpful or necessary any longer. First, they thank the “fake adult”, for protecting the traumatized child and for surviving at all and for not giving up. I think this is so important, to acknowledge that we have to thank that part of ourselves that did what it had to, that did what it could, to survive. And this can include things that we are ashamed of or fear that others would hate us for if found out. We had a temporary doctor at the hospital who described being a boat person escaping Vietnam at age 8. They were picked up by pirates. “We were glad to see the pirates, because we had run out of water. If the pirates had not picked us up, we would have died.” So there is perspective: death by dehydration or pirates? And she went from a refugee camp and then through medical school and became a physician. Survival and success and I hope that she is thriving.

I like it when a dream has such recognizable symbols. My now retired Unitarian Universalist minister says that we can sit with dreams for a time. What do the symbols mean to me? What is the dream telling me? My dream is in part telling me that I do not need to have the rebel woman lead: she can rest and let the quiet woman take over. And that I am very tired of rebel men who mislead me or run away. I woke up and thought, oh, yes, I see! I am tired of that and ready for change.

Change and transformation can happen throughout our lives, at any age. I welcome it.

Blessings and peace you.

___________________

The photograph is Sol Duc and Elwha enjoying doll bunkbeds. And acting like siblings do sometimes. And then they curl up together.

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Lights and shadows

Don’t get on my bad side, because Sol Duc has powers. I have just started putting each cat in a carrier before going outside and then letting them come out. This is preparation for going on car trips.

Sol Duc decides to cast a spell before coming out of the carrier. I don’t think the STOP sign in the photograph is an accident. How does she do that eye thing? I feel very protected.

Be careful around this cat. And me.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lights and shadows.

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Hammock and filter

I am preparing the cats to travel a bit. I acquired this foldable framed container. The cats are getting used to it. Elwha has decided it makes a nice hammock platform from which to watch me in the kitchen.

We still have smoke from the fires. Seattle is worse than here. The cats are not out for their daily walks until this clears. I am getting lots of knitting and continuing medical education done.

Yesterday I built a Corsi-Rosenthal cube. I bought a box fan and four MERV-13 filters and duct tape. Tape it all into a cube with the filters facing in and the fan facing out and voila! An air filter for my house. Even though I’ve kept the house closed up, the air has been bad for a week. My house is from 1930 and not tight so there is seepage.

Here are the instructions for the cube: https://encycla.com/Corsi-Rosenthal_Cube.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: platform.

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A Good Reaction 2

I am still working my way through my immune response to an influenza shot and six days later, my Covid-19 booster.

I am kicking myself a bit for having them that close together, but at least my immune system responds. I think my immune system takes a shotgun approach and raises ALL the antibodies, and since I most probably have some antibodies that attack my own tissues, it’s not terribly much fun. I’ve had to put pulmonary rehab on hold until my fast twitch muscles work again. They aren’t working and my slow twitch muscles are very pissed off and stiff at having to do double duty. If I do aerobic things, my rib muscles hurt for two days. THAT feels awful.

The good thing (ha.) is that I am having the antibody response but I do not have pneumonia. The working theory is that I have PANS and antibodies to tubulin. Tubulin powers muscles, including lung cilia. Their job is to clean any trash out that gets breathed in. I am at much higher risk for getting pneumonia while the lung cilia are on auto-immune vacation. I am mostly staying home and masking when I go out. A friend got exposed to Covid-19 and refused to test at day five. Well, ok for him, but he could be asymptomatic. So he’s not allowed anywhere near me for at least another ten days. I disapprove of his callousness towards me and others.

Tobacco also paralyzes lung cilia. When I was working I would warn smokers that they might cough more when they stopped smoking, because the cilia would wake up and clean house. “Hey! No one has swept here in years!” A year after quitting smoking, the lung cancer risk drops almost to that of a non-smoker, because those cilia clean house. Isn’t THAT cool?

I don’t know how long my fast twitch muscles will be screwed up. With the last pneumonia, it was nearly a year before the antibodies finally went down. I woke one morning with my slow twitch muscles insanely stiff and my fast twitch back but weak as a newborn kitten. My slow twitch muscles were yelling at my fast twitch: “Where have you BEEN? We’ve been doing YOUR WORK!!” My fast twitch were confused, weak and surprised. I could barely walk down my stairs that day.

Even so, I am lucky. I have a version of chronic fatigue, but because only my fast twitch muscles are affected, I can still do stuff while sick. The people who can barely get out of bed, my working theory is that it is both the fast twitch and the slow twitch muscles that are affected.

And then there are the brain antibodies. Ugh. The silver lining is that the antibodies make me a bit OCD and a bit ADHD, so I am organizing the house. I vacuumed the stairs. That sounds trivial except that I HATE the vacuum. I usually use this peculiar cat hair sponge thing on the stairs, but this time I got the vacuum out. I think organizing and vacuuming are hella funny symptoms of autoantibodies.

Here is a blog post by another physician, also about brain antibodies and encephalopathy. Brain inflammation.

https://www.potomacpsychiatry.com/blog/infectious-diseases-and-psychiatric-illness

Great blog post. And the NIH paper on multiple studies of encephalopathy:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455066/

If I have the energy today, I may try to look up the trajectory of antibody rise and fall after immunization. My brain tells me somewhere between 6 weeks and 6 months, pulling old data from somewhere, but I took immunology classes when I was working at the National Institutes of Health (late 1980s) and in medical school (early 1990s), so there may be new information. Science changes. I am hoping for less than six months really, and meanwhile trying not to get pneumonia.

Blessings and peace you.

I took the photograph in 2021, while I was REALLY sick. Glow in the dark Zombies stealing the cat food. I have to entertain myself somehow when I have pneumonia.

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Boa Black in dishabille

This is my beloved cat who died in February 2020. She was named Boa Black or Feather Boa, depending on the situation. We got her as a tiny kitten at the pound. She had the softest fur and purred the instant I picked her up. She was 17 when she died.

For the Ragtag Daily prompt: dishabille.