Had dinner last night with ciannait and made some new friends.
Looks like most of these were there:
ciannait, gordona, lwood, ravan, wolfs_daugher, iceblink, kshandra, solkitten, gconnor, miche_connor, medancer, snowwy. I friended you (those who were not already on my flist).
Things we learned this week that should be written down… boring
I forgot to post about this yesterday, but Sophie had a full-on seizure, right in the middle of everything that was happening with Harley. This was Saturday at 3:20 pm. She started off twitching a little, and then went into convulsions with her entire body involved.
I quickly hustled her into a box and started off toward the emergency vet. About 2 min into the trip she realized she was in a box (and got her wind back, most likely) and started complaining.
According to the emergency clinic doctor, seizures can happen as a result of insulin overdose and resulting low-low blood glucose. We are going to need to back off the insulin, and test her much more often than we have been doing. We’re going to go from 3 units twice a day to just 1 unit, maybe 2, just in the morning. More testing will tell us if that’s the right level.
Sophie is our oldest, and she so far just keeps going, like a tank.
Miche already posted about this, but I wanted to post also, for anyone who is on my flist and not hers.
Harley died at about 5:40 today. It became clear to us that it was time to let him go. In addition to the pretty rampant cancer (stage 5 lymphoma) he was facing additional challenges, including leukemia (due to cancer, not viral), loss of liver function, not enough protein in the blood and resulting leakage of fluid into his abdomen, and finally pneumonia. Treatment for all of these would have been grueling and the prognosis still grim. I truly believe we made the right decision to try and fight it, but the aggressive chemo took its toll.
We spent about a half hour with him before doing the deed. He was clearly happy to see us and after a while, ended up going to sleep while we were petting him, and the doctor was able to give injections without startling him, so he just dozed off and a few moments later, was gone.
Harley had his second chemo today. We’re trying to get him to eat but so far he’s not interested in any food.
It’s going to be a challenge to keep him eating and hydrated. Current plan is to just keep offering food, every hour, through the night too.
He has had a lot of different meds (chemo itself, steriod, anti-diarrhea and anti-nausea) that his grogginess and lack of appetite could be caused by any of those (most likely being the chemo and resulting dead cancer cells getting dumped into his blood to get filtered).
Thanks for the good thoughts, and please keep them coming through the weekend. If he makes it through the weekend then things should get better. This is of course not going to cure him but might bring back the harz we know and love, for a while anyway.
Harley is still in the hospital, 3rd night. His cancer is identified as one of the more serious ones (large cell lymphoma combined with leukemia).
We did get to visit him again today, briefly, and he was happy to see us. Right after seeing us the doctor started him on chemo. Apparently it’s common to give chemo even if surgery isn’t done, and this can sometimes help cats get some quality of life back for a time, but it would be temporary if so.
Thanks to all the well-wishers. I haven’t replied to everyone individually but I will… for now, know that I’m reading all the replies and that I’m very grateful to everone that responded for taking the time to write. Thank you.
Harley has cancer. This is a huge blow to us since we just lost Simon, six weeks ago. M and I are stunned and feeling broken…
This week at work we’ve been experimenting with MogileFS (link) which is a “filing system” capable of storing/retrieving many files across many hosts. It’s not a true file system, meaning that you can’t mount it and look at it with “ls” or “cat” files, etc. but using a custom perl module you can put files in and take them back out.
Some interesting facts about it: It’s based on HTTP GET/PUT so I believe it would be a good complement to other systems we have at work (without going into too much detail, it’s no surprise to anyone that Shutterfly receives lots of picture files from users and stores them for later printing :) Also, the MogileFS tracker module takes care of ensuring that files are replicated like you want; for example, if you want 2 copies of each file living on different nodes, after the initial upload the file will be duplicated appropriately. In the event of failure of one of the nodes, other nodes that hold the same data as the lost one will duplicate the items again to ensure replication is maintained.
Rest of this is probably boring to many
These are my notes from reading “Crucial Confrontations” (multiple authors, Kerry Patterson listed first, more info on http://www.vitalsmarts.com/cc2book.aspx). Here’s a quick quote showing what the book is about:
Behind the problems that plague organizations, teams, and families, are individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises, broken rules, and missed deadlines. Others neglect to keep commitments or just plain behave badly—and nobody steps up to the issue.
New research demonstrates that crucial confrontations – conversations that occur not just when there is disagreement but disappointment – are not only irritating—they’re costly. These disagreements sap organizational performance by 20 to 50 percent and account for up to 90 percent of divorces.
This is the second of three books, after Crucial Conversations and before Influencer. I read the third one first and worked my way back to the second.
Work on me first: Choose “what” and “if”
Work on me first: Master my stories
Confront with safety
Make it motivating; make it easy
Motivation-specific
Ability-specific
Pop the question
Move to action
Contingency plan: Deal with fear, make it safe
My notes from reading the book “Influencer”