Well, I’d have a ton of nice photos to share of my father, the spooky house across the street from my parents’, and some artsy-fartsy TTL shots of the family, but the memory card in my Canon up and died this afternoon with a mysterious “Card Format Error” message and the dreaded Yellow Questionmark Of Death. So, you’ll have to settle for some family photos.
My Dad is doing very well; when last we left him, he was sitting upright in a chair, surveying the wreckage of his turkey dinner, and waiting for the nurse to decide it was time to move him back to the bed. All signs point to “better”, including his lung capacity, appetite, skin color, and personality. This whole excercise has been nervous-making but he seems to be coming through fine, and we’re hoping it will lead to a serious improvement in quality of life for him. So keep your fingers crossed.
In the meantime, before the memory card blew up, I found a feature of my Canon I hadn’t noticed previously, and started experimenting again with through-the-lens shots with my Duoflex II. The manual focus feature seems to fix on the very closest of the details in the picture plane, while leaving the distant ones blurry. I have to do a lot more experimenting with it to refine the technique.
Over a tray of clear liquids, which is a good sign. His appetite is strong and he’s looking much better.
We’re in the admitting ward of St. Joe’s, waiting for my Dad’s surgeon to pass the word so that they can wheel his tired hungry ass down to the OR and get this show on the road. My father hasn’t eaten since dinner last night, and I can hear his stomach groaning and gnashing and constricting from across the room. He’s being very calm about the whole thing, but I know the section of his brain that controls his appetite has swollen to four times its normal size, and it’s releasing chemicals into his bloodstream which are making the voices tell him to EAT THE CHAIR, EAT THE CHAIR, I DON’T FUCKING CARE, JUST EAT THE CHAIR. My father going without food for 12 hours is as common as a bear using a bidet; unfortunately this misfortune has been compounded by the omittance of a remote control in our waiting room. The benefit to this, however, is that we don’t need to sit through this episode of “Charmed” at a volume setting of 96.
Update: He’s out of the surgery and recovering without a breathing tube.
Sorry, I posted this from the vet’s office yesterday and meant to follow up with details (typing out words on a Motorola 551 keypad is as much fun as sticking bamboo up one’s own fingernails) but I got caught up in finishing a rush project.
Sage has been losing weight pretty steadily for the last three months, and his back legs have begun to get erratic and shaky. His water intake has increased dramatically. He’s been weak and unwilling to haul himself up onto the bed with us this last week, which is sort of like the sun suddenly refusing to rise. We’ve had problems with one of the cats missing the litterbox while urinating, and when I clean it up, it’s sticky and never seems to dry completely. Before we left New Jersey on Monday the first thing Jen did was call in an appointment for him.
After a protracted fight with one of those little test strip machines, our vet concluded that Sage is diabetic. One blood test and about a half-hour later, the results were confirmed: his blood sugar was 601, an astronomical sum compared to the standard 70-110 shared by humans and cats. The sticky urine is due to its massive sugar content—he’s probably too weak to make it all the way into the litter pan after navigating the basement stairs.
The vet gave us a quick course in insulin injections, which boiled down to grabbing a handful of scruff and shooting 3cc’s subcutaneously under the skin, on their stunt cat Tommy with some saline. Jen administered quickly and professionally, and Tommy happily obliged my fumbling attempts to hold both him and the needle correctly, drooling all over my sleeve, knowing he’d get fed for his trouble. (I am terrified of needles, both giving and getting.) I was able to inject on my second try, and Tommy made it out alive.
We picked up the insulin and a 100-pack of needles, and worked out a crude system where we distracted the other cats with canned food while we gave Sage a special diabetic formula, and while he wolfed that down (the resemblance to Randy, the little brother from A Christmas Story, eating mashed potatoes with his nose, was uncanny) Jen shot him with the insulin. He didn’t even notice.
The vet tells us it’s going to be a while before his sugar evens out and recovery is noticeable, so we shouldn’t expect him to bounce back tomorrow. For us, this is frightening, considering what we went through with Penn, but having a solid diagnosis and clear treatment options provides a huge sense of relief—this is Jen’s first husband, after all.
He was born July 25, 1945 in Point Pleasant and was a graduate of Toms River High School, class of 1964, Ocean County College and Northwestern University Traffic School.
Tom Dugan served in Vietnam as a sergeant with the 173rd Airborne Division and was awarded the National Combat Infantry Badge and the Bronze Star.
Tom began his career with the Dover Township Police Department in 1968. He was promoted to detective in 1976 and to sergeant in 1977. Sgt. Dugan retired in 1994 after 26 years of outstanding service. Sgt. Dugan’s two sons followed in his footsteps and are currently Toms River police officers.
His life will be celebrated by those family members he left behind, including his wife, Nancy Dugan; his oldest son and daughter-in-law, T.J. and Sarah Dugan; his daughter and son-in-law, Robyn and Paul Guichard; his youngest son, Brian Dugan; his parents, Tom and Grace Dugan; his sisters and brothers-in-law; Patricia and Lowell Gutridge and Kathy and Harry Cafiero; and by his beloved granddaughter, Samantha Dugan. Tom has another grandchild on the way.
Tom Dugan was a loving and supportive husband. He was an outstanding father. His newest role, as “Grandpa Friday,” was his most enjoyable. He served well as both brother and son. His living example touched the lives of all who knew him and his presence will live on in the minds of friends and family forever.
Visitation will be held from 2-4 p.m. and 6-9 p.m. Sunday at the Anderson and Campbell Funeral Home, 703 Main St., Toms River. A funeral Mass will be held at 11 a.m. Monday at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, 509 Hooper Ave. Toms River. Cremation will be private. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in his memory to the American Heart Association, 2550 Route 1, North Brunswick, NJ 08902 or www.americanheart.org.
Bad news on the phone today, making up the trifecta (and hopefully, last) of bad news for the rest of the year. This was unexpected and totally unfair; a kinder, gentler man I’ve never met. It looks like we’re driving to Jersey within the next week to pay our respects.
My Dad is doing well, although they had to check his pulmonary function this morning and stop in to the ER to check on a fever this afternoon. From what we understand, the pulmonary stuff is a side-effect of the medication they gave him after the surgery.
My pop is doing pretty well. He’s been on some heavy antibiotics since his appendix came out, but one of the side effects is anxiety, which makes it hard for him to sleep. Today a call to the docs resulted in some new meds and some benadryl to help knock him out. He looks better this evening than he did yesterday, and he seems to be firing on more cylinders. We got to sit around the table and have dinner as a family this evening, and that felt very good.
Upstate New York is as picturesque as ever, if your idea of compelling subject matter includes ruined barns, abandoned cars, and empty, widswept fields. Which mine does. I had to struggle not to screech the car to a halt on the way in to town to snap photos every half-mile. Perhaps tomorrow I can break away to shoot a little while my father naps. I’m also going to try to get up and visit my Grampa, hopefully in the morning when he’s awake, and catch up a little with him.
My Pop is out of the hospital after getting good blood tests back; the infection is gone, so he’s simply trying to rest up and heal. We’re loading up the Jeep and driving north to see him tomorrow for an impromptu Thanksgiving visit. I’m looking forward to seeing him.
This morning I went into the office to pick up some stuff for an early client meeting, and it was quiet and lonely.
Penn, the Holy Orange Terror, is not in a good way. After much fucking around, the internal medicine vet got back the results which neither confirm nor deny the presence of FIP. In his professional opinion, though, he thinks it’s nonspecific cancer of some kind, which sucks, because we can’t treat it with anything.
After several days of forcefeeding, general apathy and lack of sleep, the little guy was wandering around like a meth-head on a four day bender, so we brought him back in to the referring doctor (herself a subject for a later post in detail) for some subcutaneous fluids, a steroid shot, and a healthy painkiller/tranquilizer to help him sleep. Of course, because he’s Penn, he’s burning through the trank like it’s a glass of Coke, so he’s still awake but very interested in checking out the floor from eye-level. (If you remember, this is the cat who went through an entire pharmacy of attitude adjustment medication in the search for the One True Drug that would allow him to roam the house free and not view Geneva as the target of ninja assassination. Jen recently threw these expensive drugs away, as they were all taking up valuable space in the egg holder of our fridge, and the urge to self-medicate with some of them has come up now and again.)
I picked Penn out of a lineup at the Baltimore SPCA for two reasons: He was orange, and I have a love for orange cats. He was also the only cat in a room full of cats begging for attention who (I thought) was smart enough to be meowing constantly, at a metronomically precise rate, to get my attention. He was staring straight out of the bars of the cage at me, his little mouth yammering at a frantic pace, until I asked the lady to pick him up, and then he was quiet. He crawled around my arms a little while until he found a comfortable spot, and then he started purring contentedly. I was hooked. (Little did I know that his method of gaining my attention was also his standard method of being alive; this hyperactivity got exponentially more hyper as he got older.) His given name was actually Dandy. I can’t think of a more horrifying, stunting name to give a child or a pet than Dandy—besides, perhaps, Britney.
His brother, Teller (originally Raymond) took the opposite tack. Teller laid in the bottom of his cage on his back, playing contentedly with a yarn ball, oblivious of the people outside the cage staring at him and forty other cats. I thought this hard-to-get ploy was pretty slick, and as soon as I picked him up, he seemed to fit perfectly in my hands. Again, this naiive process of selection has come back to haunt me in later years, but at the time it seemed reasonable.
Back at home, in my rowhome in Canton, we settled into a comfortable routine, and the boys seemed to get along with each other pretty well. After I finished the basement, I would let the boys run free in the house, and every once in a while one of them would sleep in the sidewalk-level window. Before long, some of the kids in the neighborhood saw them, and they became a fixture on the walk home. I had the opportunity to introduce them to the kids, and one of the girls couldn’t get the name right, so she called him “Mr. Ben.” This name stuck, and we’ve been using it ever since, along with Pennyonce, Penndandy, Mr. Pencil, Pendleflex, Pendleton, and Pennsyltucky, to name a few.
As I’ve mentioned here before, merging two households of cats was 4/5 successful. Penn, who thought he was alpha male, did not recognize Geneva’s rightful claim to that title, and they fought to the point of bloodletting.
After having Geneva stitched back up, Penn got banished to the upstairs office (dubbed the Pennitentiary) and the atrium by himself, and in the summer he had the run of the attic as well. The first year of captivity was pretty lousy, as he didn’t get to see as much of us as anybody wanted. We weren’t in the office more than a couple of hours a day, and the loneliness got to him. His favorite trick was to wait until we were comfortably asleep and then he’d sit on his haunches and scribblescrabble at the office door, making it bonk against its hinges, until I got up and put him out in the atrium.
I’m having a hard time with this situation because I have a lot of guilt over having to lock him up by himself. The other cats got to glom all over us in the cold winter months, stapling us into the bed under their sheer weight and leeching our precious body heat; they had plenty of lap time on the couch, and they got to socialize with guests who found themselves unlucky enough to be trapped in a house with the crazy cat people. Penn had to sleep and eat by himself for two years. There were many days when I had bad things to say about our problem child, and plenty of days when I just wished he was gone so we could have some harmony in our household. For these thoughts, I’m feeling horrible, like Penn deserved a better Dad than me. I am a pretty selfish, misanthropic human a lot of the time, and I didn’t spend enough quality time with Penn when he was on his own.
After our failed attempts at chemically altering his behavior, I looked into adoption services with little success. There is no easy solution for adoption when the cat is full-grown, and I couldn’t bear to think of Penn sitting alone in a cage at a PetSmart for three months waiting for someone to pick him, especially after he’d already been through that experience before.
Since Jen’s been working from home, and especially this last year after I joined her, we’ve been around him for eight or ten or twelve hours a day, and he’s been much happier and a lot mellower. Jen set up a wine box with a pillow in between our desks and he’d spend long afternoons asleep with us, relaxing us while we stressed out and staying up with us to hit deadlines. He became a fantastic studio cat, only occasionally spilling the odd glass of water or scrabbling at the door. (He never did grow out of his habit of meowing constantly the minute I got on the phone with a client.) This summer we remarked more than once how different he’d become, and that the change made us both feel better.
This last month has been tough for all of us. I didn’t notice the changes in behavior or weight loss until Jen pointed them out, and because they were gradual at first, it took a long time for me to accept that something was wrong. As his condition worsened, the changes sped up until he became a shadow of his former gregarious self. I feel guilty about this too, although from what the doctors are telling us, there really is nothing we could have done anyway. That’s cold comfort, though.
Last night we corralled the other cats in the basement, moved his box into our room, and let him stay with us for the first time in ages. He laid on the bed and stared off into space, unable to sleep, and he was like that when we both drifted off. This morning, after the painkillers wore off, he gave us a wheezy purr as we scratched his back, and that made us feel a little better, like he actually realizes we’re there and that we love him. I’m making an appointment with the vet in the afternoon, and I have to decide if I want a wooden box with a plaque or something more ornate for his final resting place, but that seems kind of garish for a working-class cat like Penn. I’m also wondering where I’m supposed to put this thing. On the mantle? On my dresser? In the closet?
This sucks.