Running Chick

I brought Spencer to the vet yesterday afternoon.  Since he was diagnosed with renal disease about two years ago, I bring him in every six months to get blood work done and see how his kidneys are doing.

He’s been doing really well these past few months. He had a little episode in July that had nothing to do with his kidneys but otherwise, he’s been doing just great. About a week ago, he started throwing up – not uncommon for him or for his disease – once or twice per day but he was still eating & drinking & acting just fine, so I wasn’t really too concerned about it.  I also knew I had his checkup coming up, so I figured I’d mention it and maybe they’d give him an anti-nausea shot and it’d be no big deal. On Sunday, he was still eating & drinking normally, but the throwing up doubled. By Monday, he couldn’t keep anything down and was off his food. Bad signs.

When I picked up to go to the vet’s, he was obviously showing the signs that he was an unhappy kitty, he was hunched over and hiding in the darkest, quietest place in the house. Still, though, I figured that this was due to his kidneys being worse and the dehydration from all the vomiting. The blood test results came back and, good news, his kidneys were stable. His BUN was slightly elevated from July, a normal amount for his disease, and his creatinine was unchanged, a really good sign. I’ve been giving him a probiotic called Azodyl since the end of November, and the vet thinks that’s really been helping to slow his kidney disease down.

The bad news – his liver levels were through the roof. Not just slightly elevated, not high, alarmingly high. So high that they thought the tests were incorrect, so they ran them again.  Vets conferring with one another to see if the results make sense, kind of high. Vets going “Wow.” kind of high. When vets do that, you know you’re in trouble.

Just for reference, there are two enzymes in the liver that indicate it’s health, alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST). 

Normal feline levels of this enzyme:

Alanine Aminotransferase (ALT): 30-100 IU/L
Aspartate Aminotransferase (AST): 14-38 IU/L

Spencer’s levels:

There’s a couple of things that could be going on, pancreatitis or maybe liver cancer, but in general, his liver is failing.

The most important thing is that he keeps eating, so they gave me a topical anti-nausea medicine called Metoclopramide that I rub on his inner ear twice daily. He’s had two doses so far, and it doesn’t seem to be helping. He’s still throwing up and he’s still not eating. He is drinking, which is good, but eating is the key factor here.

If he continues to not eat there’s really only one medical option. Feeding tube. When the vet told me that, I made the decision that that wasn’t going to be an option. I will not put him through that. Maybe if he were significantly younger, but doing that at his age just seems cruel. And selfish.

So, I’m home from work for the next few days trying to nurse him back to health. We’re taking things hour by hour now and hoping that this nausea medicine will kick in and he’ll eat something.

It’s not like going through this at any other time would be better, but this is a particularly trying time for me because I’m in charge of a big project to relocate my department to another building and we’re moving next Thursday. There’s still a lot of logistics to be worked out and it’s all on me. Thankfully, I have a very understanding boss and I can easily work from home.

Also, this happening almost exactly two months after Simon is particularly crushing. I don’t even feel like I’m at peace with him being gone and now this is happening with Spencer. It’s hard, so very, very hard and I am an emotional wreck.

Right now, though, my priority is Spencer and everything else is a much distant second.

Man, I have the worst time coming up with witty, creative titles for my posts. “Running and Yoga”. How lame. I should just write a little program that randomly creates a title and I’ll use that. Probably would be better than what I could come up with.

Anyhooters, I’m running again.  I’m taking things very slowly right now because I don’t want to overdo it and annoy my legs. So, I’m trying to go between one & two miles a few times each week. Last week, I think I ended up with just under five miles. This week, I’ll go a bit farther, and a bit farther than that the following week. You get the picture.

There are good and bad points to this approach. I do like that my runs are short so I’m not outside for long when it’s cold. I like that I can be out & back in less than 30 minutes, heck maybe even less than 20 minutes, and my clothes don’t get all stanky from sweat because I’m barely breaking one.

But I don’t like that my legs barely feel like they’ve loosened up before my run is over and unless I haul-ass, I hardly feel like I’m doing anything for my cardiovascular system. Also, it’s annoying to pile on all my running gear for only 15 minutes of use. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have worked myself up to three miles, which somehow my brain has defined as an real run, and I’ll be happier.

I’ve been reading a lot about running injuries and how lots of them come about from having a weak core, so I started some core training last week:

I hemmed and hawed over whether I should get this dvd because, while Jillian’s workouts are pretty intense, I can’t stand her harping about how I should be gurgling my heart or how my heart should be ready to shoot out of my throat. Girl, please. No I shouldn’t.

Anyway, I signed up for Amazon on Demand on the Roku and got a $5 credit which made this video around $4, so I went for it.  Her program is designed to be done five days/week, but I tend to get bored & lose interest when I do the same thing over & over again so I’m going to shoot for three times/week. I figure it’s better than nothing. And yes, it is intense. And it’s not just my abs that are getting worked, it’s arms & shoulders from all the planks and legs from all sorts of squats & lunges. I feel like I got a good all-over workout when I’m finished.

I also started doing yoga pretty regularly. Here’s one of my regular sessions, Candlelight Yoga with Sara Ivanhoe:

I get this one off of Netflix and it’s a really good for relaxation and light stretching. At the end of this session, I just want to go & take a nap.

Finally, and this is turning out to be my go-to yoga/stretching video, I do Yoga for Runners with Erica Schnike. I got mine from Sport Skool Yoga on the Roku and I couldn’t find any pictures or details about it. But, this is probably the best all-around dvd that I have for stretching. I don’t know the names of all the different poses that she goes through, but they really seem to target all the areas in my legs & hips that are tight. Of course there are a couple of nutty poses that leave me wondering what they’re supposed to be doing, but they’re few and far between.  I do this session right after I get back from a run so I’m nice & warmed up and it feels really good. If I’m feeling ambitious one day, maybe I’ll document all the poses here.

Namaste, people.

My blag, it was getting a little old looking. Bags under the eyes, crows feet, wrinkles. So, I did what any self-respecting Real Housewife of Beverly Hills would do and gave it a little refresher. It got yanked and plucked, pulled and tucked and presto! It’s looking renewed and refreshed.  Hopefully it won’t show up on Awful Plastic Surgery.

I didn’t intend to spend my two week vacation working on the blog, but that’s pretty much what happened. I have no idea how many hours it took, and quite frankly, I don’t want to know. Let’s just call it a butt load and be done with it.

Anyway, just a quick fly-over. There’s some new stuff in the sidebar - weather info, random images from my gallery, posts by category, quick search and a few new pages dedicated to my photography, exercise gear and favorite links. Hope you like it, but if you don’t you’re going to have to live with it. This was way too much work for me to do more than once every two years.