RIP, William McClure

A good man.

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I'll keep the list, just in case...

Well, it's been over two weeks since Isadora bit me, and subsequently died. The vet invoked the rabies protocol, as she should have. However, King County did not feel it necessary to test Izzy for rabies, since she was current on her shots, had no signs of rabies, and there was a perfectly plausible explanation for her unexpected death. So we proceeded on the assumption that the risk did not justify the extreme measures, and so far, that operating assumption appears to be borne out.

I'm not showing any sign of rabies, and this far out from the bite, I probably will never do so, but--just in case--I'll won't recycle that list of people to bite quite yet</oldjoke-again>.

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Facultative rabies

(Facultative: capable of adapting to different environmental conditions)

Well, this past week can be taken out back and shot, as far as I'm concerned.

Isadora had been sick with kidney disease and an upper-respiratory infection for a little while, but we thought we had it under control. She was getting fluids intravenously, and we had a plan for when she resumed eating, and how we would manage her kidney disease--the prognosis seemed good.

Since our vet clinic is not an emergency facility, and no doctor is present on the weekend, I got a call from the vet Friday a week ago, suggesting I take her home and provide hands-on care Saturday and Sunday--syringe feeding and subcutaneous fluids--and then bring her in Monday to restart the IV. Sounded like a plan--I was going to attend the Western Washington Wildlife Rehabilitators conference at the UW Saturday, but I could be a little late to that, np--so that's how we proceeded. I picked up Izzy, subq-fluided her, and then left for the conference. When I got back that evening, we did the same routine plus a syringe feeding.

Sunday, same deal. That's when she decided she'd had enough of this crap, and bit me in the right index finger knuckle, HARD! I think I'm going to have a scar from it.

By Monday morning, it was red, hot, and so swollen it had that Botox look: no natural wrinkles anymore; half of the back of my hand was almost perfectly flat and fluid-filled. And it hurt like a bastard! We're uninsured at the moment, due to unemployment, so I don't routinely go to the doctor, but I wasn't about to let this infection go systemic, either, so it was off to the emergency room for me.

I dropped Izzy off at the vet's on the way to the ER, and warned them about her biting me. We actually have observed this behavior, called "The Cobra", in the past: when she feels bad and over-interfered with, she bites swiftly and hard, without warning, compared to the absolute lovecat she always is when she feels better. Since she gives no warning, I didn't want anyone else taken by surprise.

The visit to the Overlake ER was the best it could be, given the circumstances--it's an ER, after all, nobody's idea of a good time (I hope!). But the staff was competent and kind, and since no gunshot wounds or anything like that were coming in, I was able to be seen right away. The nurse practitioner who saw me was friendly and patient, and willing to answer questions. She thought it was a Bordetella infection, and although penicillin is the first line against that infection, the almost-fact that I am allergic to penicillin made doxycycline the recommended way to go.



Figure 1: Image of Bordetella bronchiseptica from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/Bordetella_bronchiseptica_02.jpg/240px-Bordetella_bronchiseptica_02.jpg



Figure 2: Doxycycline, related to tetracycline

With a sling to immobilize my dominant hand (to remind me not to use it anymore than necessary), and a container of antibiotics, I headed home. I had just gotten settled in when the phone rang. It was the vet, and she asked me some questions about the bite. Then she said she had some bad news, and I knew before she told me that Isadora had died.

We're all shocked--we thought she was getting over this upper respiratory thing, and would go on to have her kidney disease successfully managed. She thought so, I thought so, Iain thought so--but whatever it was she had, it was too much for her.

Well, that was bad enough. But wait, there's more!

It turns out that King County has a "rabies protocol" that automatically kicks in when an animal bites a human, and then dies shortly after. She had to report it to the public health department, and was waiting to hear back from them whether they needed to get Izzy's head to test the brain for rabies.

She did the right thing in invoking the protocol, even though I'm (almost) sure we're in the clear. I'm just neurotic enough to worry about the tiny possibility of it, even though we agree she showed no signs of rabies either here or at the clinic, and her staggering was plausibly due to her weakness in not eating for so long, rather than the neurological degeneration of rabies. Her "flu-like symptoms" are more consistent with an upper-respiratory-tract infection than the symptoms Wikipedia's entry on rabies describes, and the bite was far from unprovoked. I was bugging her with syringes and needles, and "The Cobra" goes back for years now.

It looks like the public health department is going to agree with us, and not insist on testing. So that's that, except for the next couple of years, in my more paranoid moments, I guess I'll be interpreting every little sneeze or shiver as the onset of my own personal rabies case.

I told a conservationist friend, and said that, just in case, I was preparing a list of people to bite </oldjoke>. "Facultative rabies", she proposed. I like that.

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Good kitty Isadora

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville

(by Paul Verlaine)

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One foot in front of the other

I'm kind of numb right now.

I need to go back and check the dates, but since about June 2008, we've been through the following feline emergencies:

• Isadora had her external ear (pinna or auricle) amputated, due to chronic infections.
  
  
• Cleo almost starved to death due to inability to eat; removing half her teeth gave her her life back.
  
  
• Simon (aka Caspian) got really skinny, which turned out to be due to kidney disease; we gained a few months by treating him, but lost him in November.
  
  
• Cleo lost her appetite again in January; this time, it turned out to be liver disease of some kind. Putting her through a liver biopsy to determine exactly what disease she had didn't seem indicated, given that she's such a poor surgical risk that we wouldn't operate anyway, so we treated her conservatively. I syringe-fed her, forced pills down her throat, and administered fluids subcutaneously through the skin on the back of her neck. That bought us a little time, but it ultimately wasn't enough; we lost her at the end of January.
  
  
• Isadora's had a cold for about a week now, but until yesterday, seemed pretty much herself, just sneezier. Yesterday morning, though, she was totally sacked out when we left in the morning, and when we returned in the afternoon, she hadn't moved. That's kind of odd for Isadora, who likes to strut around like she owns the place, and I picked her up to see if she's ok. While not skinny (and certainly no longer Isadora the Hutt of old), she definitely seems to have lost weight. We thought it might be due to our changing their kibble, so I got out some canned food as a treat to get her to eat. She was very interested in the food, but somehow couldn't or wouldn't manage to eat it, and as she walked away from it, she staggered. It looked very much like Cleo toward the end of her liver disease, so I got her into the vet first thing this morning.
  
  

We lost a human friend (a real mensch) very recently, too, but I don't feel ready to talk about that, and mixing it with a discussion of cat emergencies doesn't feel productive right now, so we can just stipulate that I've pretty much been mainlining cortisol for a few months now and leave it there.

Anyway, the vet called me, and I thought we were going to talk about the cold. It turns out Isadora is a lot sicker than I realized--it's her kidney disease, which has been kind of low-grade since March 2007, flaring up again with a vengeance. We don't know why--maybe the cold, or something else, got her to stop drinking water for a while, she got dehydrated, and then the other symptoms spiked up, hard and fast.

The good news is, she's not as sick as Simon was, and the doctor thinks she can be successfully treated for some time to come. What surprised me was that she asked me if I wanted to do so, having just gone through it with Simon (who, to be fair, HATED his treatment, and made it clear it was an ordeal to get fluids or pills).

I dread going through this routine again. But of course, I am going to do so; there is no question about it. The fact that Simon just went through it doesn't change anything; it's not like there's just one chance at life for a kidney cat in our household and it's Izzy's bad luck that Simon got there first.

I do appreciate her asking me that; it was considerate, and I know she loves Izzy and is an advocate for her. At the same time, I am sure that if Izzy had only a poor chance at some quality time, or were likely to suffer from treatment as much as Simon did, she would tell me so honestly. She's a good vet, and having access to her to care for our cats makes this, if not exactly good, way less sucky than it *could* be.

But at the same time, it is stressful as well. I was feeling like a real Angel of Death there for a while, and when Izzy got yesterday this morning, I was beating myself up about changing her food, about what in our house could, unbeknownst to us, be poisoning all our cats one by one, and so forth. As the vet and I talked, though, it became clear that this is just the statistical cluster from Hell, though--our cats are stratifying into two groups, the older/sick ones and the younger/robust ones.

None of the younger ones have been to the vet in at least two years, and none are showing any signs of any illness. We've just got two broad groups of cats, and the circle of life is being played out. The clustering, though, is stressing me out; I'm sure that if they did a CAT scan of my head right now, they'd see the outline of the skull, lined by a thin layer of gray and white matter, and most of the image would be one huge cortisol-induced ventricle right in the middle.

Of course I am going to give Isadora her chance, and treat her kidney disease. But as to how to carry it out, I think it's not going to be conscious thought so much as just keeping going: one foot after the other....

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Saturday

A drama in 3 acts.

Act I: making applesauce with friends.























Act II: an unexpected discovery at the bead store.

I stopped in to look for a mountain climber charm to top off a clock Dale made commemorating my friend and colleage Damian; what they had instead was a fossil shark tooth!



Act III: Fuck.

Opened my email for the first time today. An old friend, who I thought was making a good recovery in hospital, just entered hospice.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

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Autumn brunch

So I've been spending quite a bit of weekend time at the house of the PI for the bear reproductive biology project, working on potential publications, and it's a nice place to work--a right place for right livelihood.

We've had some nice brunches before and during the writing sessions. I stopped by the store to get some fresh vegetables on the way, and the atmosphere is very autumnal:



I couldn't decide whether I liked that tomato in the bottom right of the frame, but I certainly noticed it--it looked like the movie Alien if Veggie Tales had produced (ha!) it:



It did say something to me, although I'm not sure quite what; in the end, I decided to go a different route. I already had blueberries and Italian plums that Emma had invited me to pick in her garden; noticing an unfamiliar fruit--a tamarillo from New Zealand--I decided to get one to try at brunch:



In the end, it was a good thing that I only got one--not sure what she experienced it as, but to me, it tasted like kiwi meets tomato meets mango meets soap. We finished all the other fruit, but not the tamarillo.

Fortunately, she knows some gorillas who love all kinds of fruit, so it turned out not to be wasted.

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Frank's pin

(this is another one of those "do not adjust your screen" blurry photos. I am having a bear [ha!] of a time photographing the jewelry I make. I probably should take a class in photographing jewelry, as I've seen some nice examples over at Etsy...)

So I promised Frank a long time ago I would make him a pin, and for his birthday last month, I made good on that promise--sort of. You see, the project was originally envisioned to be a bear outlined in copper wire, looking something like this, from the Bear Taxon Advisory Workgroup site:



But, as with so many of my projects, the problem turned out to be scale--it was a lot easier to sculpt copper wire at the original size than at the roughly 1/4th-size that would be more appropriate for a pin. So, under those selective pressures, the bear evolved into a neuron, which now sits on my bookcase, and Frank was still pin-less.



Emma was encouraging that, even if it didn't fit the original vision, Frank would treasure a homemade gift from me, so I made a couple of tactical revisions in order to get it done in time for his birthday. Because he's such a cat-lover, it seemed like it would be ok to swap the ursine theme for a feline one, and when I saw this big leopard face at Ben Franklin, it was so appealing that I decided ready-made, in place of home-sculpted, would be ok.

I went with yellow and black beads to reinforce the "leopard" theme, and this is the finished product, although it didn't photograph well:



It looks focused in the viewfinder, but then the flash on the beads or something else unfocuses it--I'm not sure what the problem is.

I'm happy with the pin, in a kind of Grandma Moses naive way, but I want to drive my style to end up ultimately in a different place. I don't think this will be representative of my future work.

Frank loved his homemade birthday pin, but I still want to try to carry out the original vision one of these days as well.

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In its own habitat

I house-sat recently for the friends I gave my first stained-glass piece to.

It was good to see it in natural light in its own home.

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Bearrings

(Emma, Ruth, if you're reading this, stop! Wait until your packages arrive this week before reading any further, 'k? :)



Finished my first pair of bear earrings ("bearrings") tonight. These are learning pieces, so I'll give them as gifts to friends.

Terry brought the golden bears back from the bead show in Arizona a few weeks ago. I'm using the colors pink, blue, and yellow because of what they mean in reproductive cycle cytology--pink is acidophilic cells, blue is basophilic cells, and yellow is keratinized.

Also, since we want baby bears, not to lock them into rigid sex roles or anything, but pink and blue are well-established baby colors, too. So the colors of the beads in these bearrings have a lot of symbolism.

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Hooding ceremony

Our department held its first ever hooding ceremony, and Jill, Nick, and I were the three doctoral graduates to receive our hood from our professors--a very symbolic gesture of being welcomed into the academy as a peer.



I'll try to get some pictures of the ceremony itself from people who were in the audience. In the meantime, this is Mr. Raven and me before the ceremony, so I have the cap and gown, but am not yet wearing the hood.

Mr. Raven is wearing a stole of gratitude--it's something the academic garment people offer that represents a tangible token of appreciation from the graduate to someone who has provided special help to the graduate.

Since I wouldn't have been able to do this without his support, I wanted to acknowledge that publicly; hence, the stole of gratitude.

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PZ @ DL

Last night, we got to meet PZ and his posse at Seattle's Drinking Liberally. It was my first visit there, but it definitely won't be my last--the crowd was so big that I didn't get a chance to talk to PZ that much, but I did meet and talk to some very engaging people, whom I'd like to meet again.

Even without DL's announcing it on the list, word had gotten around, and the crowd was huge--2-3 times the usual, according to a regular. At first, a lot of the regulars didn't know about the upcoming visit--I did get to see one of them almost do a spit-take on learning that one of his favorite science-bloggers was in town and would be there that night.

Here's PZ with kat.



I actually got more chance to talk to Alaric (who really knows from bad science fiction movies and homebrew!) than to PZ,



because of the crush around him, and then our friends George and Emma arrived, so Mr. Raven and I hung out with them.

One thing is clear about PZ, though--he really is such a prof :) -- he's genuinely nice, and really interested in hearing about other people and what they do.



He really has the air of the best mentors I've had. Sorry to blow the militant, fierce, tentacled reputation, PZ, but there it is.

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