Anyway… The week-long course of Flagyl which was so stressful for George made absolutely no difference, and both cats had been dewormed with Strongid before we got them. But apparently they need some more medication, because I just discovered a truly massive pile of cat vomit (the first time either of them has puked since we got them), which included three 6-inch long segments of tapeworm. Oh my freaking lawd. I have lived with cats almost my entire life and I have never seen anything like that. Wow.

Sooooo, um, I have a call in to the vet and tomorrow I’ll pick up more meds. Man, I hope it’s pills and not liquid.

Today her temperature’s down, she can talk a little (although she still coughs if she talks too much), she’s been awake all morning, and she’s clearly on the mend. She doesn’t get the next dose of antibiotic until this afternoon; hopefully the rest of the doses won’t give her as much trouble because they’re half the potency of yesterday’s hit. No matter how good she looks, she’s not going back to school tomorrow, but I’m hoping that she’ll be ready to go back on Thursday.

Other than the fact that their litter box is a freaking toxic disaster site, they seem happy and unbothered by their symptoms. Fred seems to be sneezing and coughing less. George’s eyes are still irritated, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Here are two very cute pictures of them snuggling with each other.

The worst thing right now for me is the cats. We took them to the vet on Monday — as predicted, it was somewhat traumatic, but everyone survived. Unfortunately, I did get meds for them… The fecal sample was negative for parasites, so we’re not sure what it is causing the (severe) diarrhea; she prescribed a course of Flagyl, twice a day for a full week. This is a liquid (I could have gotten it in pill form but chose liquid because I foolishly thought it would be harder for them to spit out the liquid) that I have to squirt in their mouth (0.5 ml for Fred, 0.7 ml for George) every morning and evening. Fred is surprisingly mellow with it — doesn’t really struggle much, swallows it down and kinda shrugs when I let him go. George, however, is a nightmare; I have an 8 inch long scratch on my leg that he gave me during this morning’s dose. He now runs away and hides whenever he sees me (so much for building a relationship), and when I squirt the medicine in his mouth he doesn’t swallow, just drools. Worst of all, after 5 doses (out of 14 total), I’ve seen absolutely no improvement in the diarrhea. So I’m stressing an already-stressed cat, making sure he hates me before he even gets to know me, restraining him and shoving crap down his throat twice a day, and it’s not even working. I bought some unflavored yogurt today for them. Hopefully the probiotics will help their guts. I might even try mixing George’s meds into the yogurt, if he likes it. If he’ll even take it from me. *sigh*

Besides the diarrhea, George has some sort of virusy thing causing a weepy and inflamed eye, and Fred is sneezing and coughing a lot. It seems like Fred’s trying to work out a hairball, but as far as I can tell he never actually coughs anything out. I was Googling around for different strategies for the hairball thing and saw that really severe hairballs that are too big for the cat to cough up can cause diarrhea and may require surgery to remove, but the vet palpated their abdomens really thoroughly on Monday and didn’t notice or report anything like that. I’m just so bummed about how unhealthy they are, and how traumatic the medication is for George.

- We had a disastrous visit to our dentist last week. We’ve been going to her for many years but we’ll never go back there again. *sigh* Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that we’re in the market for a new dentist, preferably someone who’s not prone to taking his/her bad days out on the patients.

- I seem to be unable to fully learn this lesson: Crock pots and slow cookers are only a convenient means of meal preparation if you get the food in there in the morning. I’ve got a batch of ribs cooking right now that isn’t going to be done until almost 10:00 tonight. Grrr.

- Alice had her ballet recital — her last ballet recital — yesterday. She’s pretty firm that she’s decided to stop ballet at this point, for various reasons. Here she is, backstage with one of her classmates. Here is the last ballet bun I ever have to achieve. And here she is, in costume as the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty, posing after the show.

- The cats continue to adapt. Fred’s pretty much a-ok with living here; George is still rather skittish, but has long stretches when he just hangs out and sleeps in a box in the living room. He’s mellowed a lot. Moving the food upstairs has helped considerably with drawing him up into the living space. They both really love the girls, and they’re pretty chill with Anth, but they don’t really seem to like me a whole lot, possibly because I’m the mean one who put them in a cat carrier and drove them in a scary car far away from their homey pet shop, or maybe because I’m the mean one who cleans the diarrhea off their butts and their paws (both of them have had terrible sick poops since we got them, even though (???) I’m feeding them the same stuff they were eating at the store), or maybe because I’m the mean one who runs the dishwasher and the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner. (I dunno, they don’t hate me or anything, I guess I just want a lap kitty and neither of them is up for that at this point; they mostly want to play with the girls, or eat, or have horrible poops in the litter box….) Unfortunately, I have to get them back in the carriers and drive them to the vet tomorrow, which I predict will be unpleasantly traumatic for both of them and which will undoubtedly reinforce their opinion of me as the big scary monster. Fingers crossed that the diarrhea, etc. is fixable with a change of food or something, and doesn’t require a course of medication, because I don’t want to also be the mean one who shoves pills down their throats twice a day. *sigh*

Concerns so far: Fred’s a jumper, so it’s going to be a challenge keeping him off of the counters, making sure none of the plants on the windowsills get knocked down, etc. He’s also extremely interested in the guinea pigs and jumped on top of their cage last night, which freaked them out (understandably). It’s impossible to tell whether this is “wow, those are cool wiggly things, I want to smell them” interest or “wow, those things look delicious, I want to rip them apart” interest. As for George, besides the extreme shyness, he is an eater, which means (a) he’s a big fatty boy, (b) he’s going through the food in a nervous eater way, hitting the food bowl every time anyone comes down to see him, and (c) he will eat scraps and bits of anything he finds on the floor — like dead leaves tracked in from outside, spiderwebs he finds in the corners, shiny bits of the toys that were sent with him from his foster home, etc. We’ll definitely have to be extra-careful about any little bits we leave on the floor.

On the upside, there’s this.

I’m not entirely sure it feels like the right time now, either, but last night we submitted an application to adopt this guy and this guy from a local rescue organization. We went to the pet store after school yesterday to buy hay for the piggies and “Cream” (we won’t be keeping those names, BTW) and I just about fell in love. “Dooley” was sleeping for a long part of our visit, but he did wake up after a while and was quite friendly, especially with the girls. I’d said right from the start that, if we were going to get cats again, I’d want “teenagers”, ideally around 9-12 months old, so that we could get to know them as actual cats with personalities and not interchangeable balls of adorable fluff before we decided to adopt them. I wanted males, because I’ve found boy cats to be reliably sweeter than girls, and I wanted two cats who were already friendly with each other. Meeting these two last night just felt really right, and we’re going for it.

This is not to say that I am not freaking out. I am freaking out. This is because (a) we have not had any cats in over a year, so I’m “out of the groove” as far as cat care, and (b) the last few years of Lilith’s life were increasingly intensive in terms of the care and accommodations that she required, so that last time I had to provide cat care it was a real pain in the butt, and of course (c) I am living with a really uncomfortably high baseline level of stress these days, and I kept saying that we’d think about cats when things settled down a little bit, but of course that’s never going to happen, so I’m just taking the leap. But I’m feeling really intimidated and overwhelmed about it, making up disaster stories and worst-case scenarios and really losing track of the fact that people have cats and they get more cats and the cats just hang out and it’s totally fine and not a giant deal. Hopefully once the application process is completed and we get to visit with them some more and they come to live with us, the stress reduction of having cuddly furry things to pet will outweigh the increase in my workload that results when it turns out that, shockingly, 92% of the workload of caring for them falls onto me.

Some of the sites that work just fine for me include:
- Google
- AccuWeather
- YouTube
- beanmom.com and all sites & lists hosted there, thank gawd

This site says that Facebook is up, but this site says it’s been down for two hours.

Silver lining: Alice will have no distractions from getting ready for school this morning, since she can’t get to her Facebook.

In other news, we finished turning the key on Sammi’s palate expander last week. We actually only turned it 28 times, so there’s 2 more to go, but the orthodontist appointment was on day 28 and he said “close enough”. I asked Sammi if I could do those last couple of turns anyway but she wasn’t up for it. And speaking of Sammi’s teeth, on Sunday night I was flossing them, and one of them fell out. It was a baby tooth, thankfully, but not one that anyone had noticed was loose, so that was shocking and surreal.