I suppose I’d better write a little post about what’s been happening this week, although maintaining some level of denial is necessary.

On Monday Mum called me to tell me Fee was breathing with more effort. Unfortunately I’d been consuming cheap white wine at a party then entire evening (been looking forward for some time to the first party on campus where I was actually on site AND not on call) and was rather impressed I’d even managed to answer my phone.

So fast forward to Tuesday morning, where I was more concious. After speaking to parentals about Fee again - breathing hard, bit fussy with food, a little lethargic but generally ok in self - I had to go to work, but went to collect her in the afternoon (was on equine this week - intermittent work). Brought her to work, where she was examined and my colleague found a mass in her abdomen. Now - this was news to me as I have a mental block when it comes to checking my own animals - I find it very hard to do in case I find something. I know this is not rational, but there you go. I didn’t take this news very well, and while they worked her up I was sent to go and have a cup of tea. Preliminary examinations found fluid around her lungs, heart and in her abdomen. The fluid around her lungs was causing her slight difficulties in breathing, so that was drained. She was started on pain relief, fed, and allowed to settle. Naturally, Fee takes all of this in her stride, and settles down happily in her first floor apartment.

The rest of the week was spent trying to get samples of the mass, and various other organs to try and find out what it was. Currently we suspect it to be an unusually large lymph node, though it is also unusually firm. Small samples were unproductive so we took a bigger sample today, but that’ll take a few days to come back. Top of the list is a tumour, specifically lymphoma, which is a tumour of the white blood cells. If this is the case, surgery isn’t possible, as it’s within the blood and lymph systems (if it is lymphoma the big lymph node is a sign of the disease, not the cause, so removing it doesn’t particularly help), but chemotherapy animal-style is possible. Animals-style means it’s used at lower doses than humans so that it doesn’t affect quality of life - though this also means that although we can put them into remission we rarely cure cancer in animals. We can’t treat her until we have the diagnosis, as the treatment renders any further diagnostics untrustworthy - however, she is coping well currently.

Fee herself has been a star - she has amazed people at work by knowing her own name, staying still for xrays and ultrasounds and for completely trusting people, and for purring whenever anyone talks to her (although this is slightly inconvenient when trying to listen to her chest). She had her chest drained again Thursday and may need it done over the weekend but other than that she’s been chilling out on pain relief (I don’t think she’s in pain, she just gets very happy while on it so we thought we’d continue). Everyone at work has likewise been amazing - she’s received random visits from people whom I haven’t even directly spoken to - word spreads it seems.

She’s home for the weekend. She’s obviously not 100% - very thin, breathing more heavily, shaved for her scans, a bit weak and wobbly and spaced out, and needs more time to sleep - but she’s wandering around, eating acceptably well for a poorly cat and asking to go out.

So - until we have the results and (assuming it is lymphoma) until we see how she responds to therapy, we’re in a holding pattern. This too is a coping mechanism - can’t do anything until then, so no sense worrying about what might be. As Mum says Nan says - don’t worry your worries until your worries worry you.

Magical Marco is ten times as slick as the last time,
The last time you saw him.
Now you can see why we really adore him.
You might think his new show is sick,
Sawing a pigeon in half with a stick (knife).
Look at the pigeon, now it’s in two.
Oh my, it’s rear end is having a poo.
Look at the mess in aisle two,
Aisle two, that’s the place where we saw the Ragu.
There’s so much Rag…….

Starts off making sense, then degenerates. As expected perhaps. I could have altered the lyrics to something regarding stew instead of poo, but thought line 8 (linked to the original) is just inspired. Loving the new MPW show of course - Marco killing and eating more little animals. I now want to eat cockles and venison tartar. Not to mention the rabbit hotpot from last week.

Remember - free the chickens. It’s possible to be both an advocate of humane animal husbandry and of the consumption of meat. Eat wild animals - you can’t get much more free range than that.

From Saturday’s do (friends of parental units came round for a BBQ):

PC - “Kai, I thought you were a vegetarian!”
Kai - “God no. I eat bunnies. And horses. In fact, the whole idea of vegetables worries me.”

I gots me a new shiny. A black 160GB iPod Classic. A student was selling it for 3/4 of the Apple.com price so even though my podlet is more or less working (requires a bash against the wall every now and then) I took the opportunity to snag this new shiny one. I’m so in love with the way you can scan through album covers that I’ve just spent 2 hours making sure all 4658 of my songs have album covers (technically 4657 since one is a .wav of Thom purring and can’t have a cover set). Tomorrow (or rather, later today, since it’s gone 4am already) I plan to sort out the misbehaving audiobooks that are masquerading as music albums. It even has a tunnel version of Breakout! I can’t quite come to terms with the idea of videos and movies yet - that’s a bit advanced for me.

Also on my new shinies list is a Alba TV/DVD combo - since moving into halls in November I have been using our spare TV and even though I have a powered booster antenna I could only get BBC 2 and Channel 4 - bad reception. Luckily I rarely want to watch ITV or Five, and parental units record BBC 1 progs for me. I bought this Alba TV for £35 from another student (end of year, they’re all emptying their rooms!) simply because I’m fed up of watching movies at lap height on my lappy. The weird thing is that despite the fact I have attached the Alba to the same booster aerial it now picks up BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4! Bonus! Plus, unlike the spare TV it has analogue connectors also (no scart, but the little red, yellow and white ones) which means it can communicate with my PS2.

All’s well with the world! Just have to wait for iPod to finish syncing then I can go to bed. And shortly afterwards get up again.

Darn DNS - dunno what that little DNS outage was due to. Got a very confusing email back from support where the English was sufficiently broken that it wasn`t clear whether they were advising me to take a certain action or that they`d taken said action. So I did nothing, and it started working again anyway.

Anyone else having their least fun pollen season ever? All the hayfever sufferers (and it is suffering, let me assure you) I`ve spoken to are, like me, drugged up to the eyeballs and still snuffling. Mother blames farming. “Crops” she says, specifically blaming rapeseed in particular. I feel this is somewhat unfounded, especially because as far as I know, the rape isn`t out yet, and due to the habit of Hertfordshire farmers rotating their crops, I`m worse this year surrounded by wheat\barley than I have in previous years surrounded by the ol` fields of yellow. You never know though, maybe she`s right (I have to say that bit - she`s my mum).

Firefox has this interesting and bizarre bug of occasionally having a spate of activating Find whenever I type an apostrophe or forward slash, hence the single quotations and backslashes present in this post. Apparently other people have this same problem, and those responsible for the silly browser can`t work out why it`s doing it. Arrow keys stop working for the duration also. Maybe it`s some kind of Grammar Nazi, designed to prevent contractions whilst also forcing us to accept what we have written and deny any kind of retrospective corrections.

Either way it’s driving me nuts IT’S GONE AWAY! Where did it go?! Why did it leave?! I’m goin’ apos’phe cr’zy! It’s m’d I’m tellin’ y’all! MWAHAHAHAHA!

Little circles.

I read Ben Elton’s Blind Faith over the last week - a generally acceptable tome, an image of the future with eerie references to Goog’ing people, Tub’ing their vids, daily blogs and Facespacing them. Nothing amazingly interesting but hey, it’s a book, and books in general are rarely bad. I wouldn’t buy it again, I might have library’d it. Acceptable though - and ironic (hence little circles) that I talk about a book that presents future life as the culmination of the current facebook/myspace/blog etc sharing trend on my blog…

I had a reason for posting this blog, for getting out of bed and turning on laptop and posting this blog and I can’t remember that reason. However whilst it loaded and whilst posting I have enjoyed listening to one of my favourite emotive numbers:

Juliet, *cue drum riff*
When we made love, you used to cry.
Said I love you like the stars above,
I love you ’til I die.
There’s a place for us.
You know the movie song.
When you gonna realise
It was just that the time was wrong.
Juliet…

I’ve remembered! QI! Call me a cynic (I provide a comments feature for this very reason, please use it) but listening to the QI themetune (that I randomly have on my iPod just above “Private Investigations - Romeo and Juliet”, hence the distraction) gives me a warm, fuzzy and above all defensive feeling. As if being clever and being interested in things for the sheer value of being interested in them is frowned upon in today’s society. Being a smartarse (smAR-TARss) about something that doesn’t directly relate to celebrities or sport does to some extent make you a little bit just a teeny microscopically tiny bit Sad. Admitting to such interests makes me a little wary - and a little apologetic. As if to say “sorry I’m interested in the subject of random dog breeds and opted to bring it up today - I’ll go back to my cuppa now and be quiet”. I can’t help it - random fact of a nature that is no doubt invaluable to some but currently of limited value to me does compel me to learn it by rote, whereas not-so-random fact related to my profession does not interest me in the slightest. I suspect this is related to what is required of me, i.e. if someone should insist I learn the genetic variations of the cream gene in horses I shall no doubt spend the next few months learning the in depth pharmacokinetics of thiopentone. I am only interested in what I don’t have to know, and I choose to take that to previously unreached levels of obsessive-compulsivity. Oh yes, “compulsivity” is a word.

Hello everyone, I am Kai, and I am clever.

Sorry.

Beer cans. They are sensitive little fellows and will, if you do not take due care, erupt in a frenzy of froth and foam if you do not take proper precautions. Shaking them really isn’t advised. Dropping them is just foolhardy.

Obsession/occupation of the moment is Russell Brand. I read his Booky Wook over the last week (good, it was; on par with Marco Pierre White’s and better than Gordon Ramsay’s). Then to today I bought one of his DVDs, which also was good, though perhaps not as good as Eddie Izzard. See, despite inebriation and obsession my ability for comparative reasoning is not impaired. Though my spelling is, resulting in this post taking 47 minutes to write in total.

Although of course my personal history does not not relate to Russell Brand’s at all (never taken drugs despite friend’s doing so, from a nuclear family etc) I do find his book and his shows easy to relate to - the slightly chaotic “Everything’s fine but please remember that ‘balance’ is an intrinsically unstable condition in that a tiny move either way results in instability”. And also we share a First Joke. The Queen’s Legs joke, Google it. Bar the Knock Knock Doctor Who joke and Ding’s Green Car gag (a classic) the Queen’s Legs was my first remembered real joke.

I love that I see a tab and having forgotten why I opened it I glare at it and declare ” Tab! Why are you here?! You mean nothing to me! You appear under your own volition?! How is that sensible?!” The use of question marks with exclamation marks just next to them pleases me.

I’ve gesturing a lot which is usually a sign that I should not engage in online discussions; however, damnit I will!

I broke my plate this morning, and so far this evening I’ve stepped on it twice. This is perhaps an indication that I should remove it from my floor. Either that or I avoid ingestion of fair amounts of wine before stumbling around my room. And beer.

Oh, what a circular post.

Why does my apple tree (who’s called Annie, for those interested in the names of our trees. The other is called Clarabelle) put the effort into producing these tiny proto-apples, only to dump a fair number of them on the lawn in their pre-apple embryotic state? They’ve got little pips in and everything. It’s hardly an efficient use of energy. Admittedly dissecting one of these proto-apples (how else could I discover their pips?) did offer me some distraction whilst waiting for Facebook to upload a shed-load of photos from Easter Breakfast. I’m a little behind with my photoficationism. Easter 2008 is one of the best delays - the longest was the Interns and Residents’ meal from Christmas ‘07.

So today in time-honoured time-waster fashion I’m sitting in the garden (literally sitting in the middle of the lawn, slowly getting a damp bum) surrounded by various animals. Charlie the rabbit (recovered from his flystrike problem) is having a good lunch of grass, Pumpkin the cat is a more reluctant companion, having been deposited out here by mother. Chill was around but has since gone off to sleep somewhere - having Pumpkin accidentally roll onto her put her off hanging around. Thom’s magically appeared in hedge also.

Got the PhD No more details about it yet but got it

Went to see LOTR the stage show this evening in London - ’twas very well done - obviously not the smoothest storyline as fitting 3 books into 3 hours is nigh impossible, but superb effects and circus tricks. Well worth a see!

So I am off work for a week yay! On Friday it was the final year revue, which was very good (my favourite sketch being the “Street vet” of the future, diagnosing a dog with “Hypotyroidgizzim”, and the vet version of four candles). On Saturday I went to Alton Towers with AnM, her sis and her sis’s friend, and went on all the roller coasters bar Rita (which closed by the time we got there) - was brilliant! Plus I accepted food from a stranger (guy offered me his leftover doughnuts which were exactly what I’d wanted!) and generally had a great if somewhat chilly time!

Monday, despite being off work saw me back at work (I contemplated writing “I’m not here” on my hat) with one of my cats getting her thryroid removed. Fe was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism in Jan and has been on treatment for a while, was stable and so was booked in to have the naughty little gland removed. Because she’s have the good one removed as well (the good one turns naughty almost always within a few years) there is a risk of damaging the parathryroid glands (lit. “next to thryoid”) which control calcium levels. Low levels cause inappetance, twitching, seizures and death, so I booked her in this week so I can stay at home and keep an eye on her for the next few days.

Suffice to say, once the opioid euphoria had worn off she’s her normal pee’d off self. The camera doesn’t capture the true bright blue colour of her throat (antiseptic spray), and combination of the blue, the bald patch, her slightly drugged and dizzy behaviour and no doubt the smell of hospital have led to Spock fluffing up in terror every time she comes round the corner! Bless - the other three haven’t even noticed.

Once her sister is stabilised she too has to be booked in for the same op (coincidence or what). Her sister is proving harder to stabilise though - her naughty gland is very naughty indeed.

While I was at work waiting for Fe to be done I met up with the Filly. Filly’s now doing a PhD and we had a long chat about PhD’s etc. which was interesting. I still haven’t heard about my interview results yet - it’s been 2 weeks now - I can only assume they’ve offered it to someone else and are waiting for a decision. I have emailed them but no more info is forthcoming. No worries - even if I don’t get it I have 5 more months to find another PhD if that’s what I want to do (and currently it is).

So for those following my job shenanigans - an update. I got two interviews, one for job1-with-little-pay-and-many-hours and one for PhD-with-little-pay-and-very-flexible-hours- where-one-can-also-locum, I went to the PhD interview and won’t know til Mon/Tues whether I have it or not. However job1’s interview is Tues also, and as much as I like the people I work with I decided I can’t afford the job. So today had to send an email to my boss cancelling my interview. Of course there’s a sense of guilt for not staying there, but I wouldn’t even be able to save on that salary, let alone actually get somewhere to live. So today was decision day. If I don’t get the PhD I’m quite interested to go back into practice, perhaps with charity, and see what happens.

In other news, Charlie the rabbit got flystrike. Which is rather rubbish for a vet. In my defence, I see him once a week at the moment and though my parents care for him well, they can’t pick him up. It takes only 2-3 days for the maggots to get going. Nothing too serious - only 10 maggots and the skin is fine, but now his appetite is rock bottom. I think he’ll be coming back to work with me tomorrow for syringe feeding, since he’s only nibbling grass and ignoring all other food currently. Ok in himself, just not eating enough.