My Big Fat Orange Cat

I don’t know what’s gone on this year. I’m gaining weight like crazy. I’m not eating more–well okay maybe I am. I’m exercising more and I keep gaining weight. Mostly since September.

I’ve been trying to be mindful and I’ve noticed something–when I focus on eating healthy I tend to loose weight. I tend to gain when I focus on weight loss–I think I am so focused on not wanting to be fat that I don’t think about getting thin.

Also I notice that I tend not be hungry really when I eat when I start gaining, but then I’m never full either so I just eat because–it’s like something to do and has nothing to do with hunger. Nothing satisfies really but heavier things tend to be more so because they are sort of like being stuffed.

I am thinking I really want to do a cleanse after the first of the year and then perhaps do a low carb diet again. I did well on South Beach combined with the Breast Cancer Diet. Basically the BCD is eating a ton of veggies and high fiber which works well with SB. It just means I’m more mindful of avoiding breads–even if they have high fiber. It’s a healthy way of eating because I can eat so much and still get a ton of nutrition. It’s also the only time I’ve ever stuck with any sort of diet for any amount of time. I didn’t feel deprived really at all which was nice.

For now, I’m just trying to watch what I do. I am working on the focus of getting excited about weight loss.

I’m also wondering why is that we don’t focus more on weight loss in acupuncture school. I mean it is about health. It’s not about a quick fix. But it can help. And less weight will increase health but there isn’t a whole lot out there from a Chinese medicine standpoint about weight loss. Deepest Health just had an interesting discussion on this.

Something to think about.

One of my friends has a very old dog. He’s slowly going down hill and is beginning to find himself less and less comfortable.

She is worrying about how will she know when it’s time.  Of course there are her other concerns. The holidays are coming up and there are all these social things that she wants to participate in and have fun at.  She doesn’t want to go to a holiday party fresh from the veterinarian.  Then when people ask what she did or how her dog is, guess what the answer gets to  be.

She wants to do the best thing for her dog.  She’s worried she’ll miss a clue.  She’s worried that he’s trying to say something that maybe she won’t know.

In all my years as a veterinary receptionist no one ever said they choose the wrong time. People second guess themselves about a lot of things (should we have done that surgery?  Why did we put them through this and this when they only had this short time left…) but rarely do they second guess themselves about the choice of euthanasia.  I have wondered once in my life when a cat’s quality of life and my own collided.  This cat was in kidney failure but was still pretty happy. However he had no bladder control and whenever he would jump he would pee all over everything.  And he loved to jump  And while he wasn’t allowed on the kitchen counters he jumped there a lot. And near my food.   How many dinners did I get to toss?  Sigh.

Sometimes I wonder if I euthanized him too soon.  But I know that he didn’t have that much longer and there was no hope.

I worry that I am waiting too long for my Georgia.  But she is so content to just snooze all the time.  She isn’t uncomfortable from anything that I can gather.

It’s always a tough decision. I think it is far harder on us than on our pets. Here we are grieving and they haven’t even left us.  Here we are thinking always of their demise and they are still here and unconcerned.  They understand in some way that death happens and it doesn’t matter exactly when if you have lived fully. We need to understand that so long as they go out with love it’s a good way to go.

One of the difficult things about working in a veterinary clinic is watching other people loose their pets. You can’t not help be affected by it.

People who love their pets and bring them in and find horrible diagnosis’ are always hard. You fight with them and support them in all their decisions because you’ve known them for a long time. You know their pets are loved and they are doing the best thing for them.

Other times disasters happen and emergencies walk in. Sometimes you know these people. Sometimes you don’t.

I remember one evening as we were closing up, a man came in.  He had been in before but not often. His dog wasn’t old. Generally it was healthy. He had just gotten home from a trip and picked the dog up at the kennel. It wouldn’t stop seizing.  He came right over.

We got him into the clinic, helping him carry this large doberman into the back.   I worked the front so I waited there, cleaning and getting things ready for the morning, hoping for good news.  He waited up front hoping for good news.

Our doctor came out and talked to him. Nothing we had done in the intervention had stopped the seizing.  She couldn’t give more without risking the dogs life. He had been seizing for half an hour at this point and given that we couldn’t interrupt the problem, the prognosis wasn’t good.  Seizures become more serious the longer they gone, with the potential to damage more and more brain cells.

She explained all of this to him and he agreed it was for the best to have his dog euthanized.  He signed the papers.

Because it was an emergency, our doctor hadn’t filled out all the paperwork for billing so he and I had to wait once again.  I waited, again preparing for morning and doing some light cleanup around the desk.

He waited sitting in the front office with his head down. One of the techs brought out the collar and leash his dog had on him when he was brought in.  I remember the man holding it in his hands, his knuckles white. He was  big man and perhaps 50 or 55.  He was there alone.   The pressure on the collar as he grasp that, squeezing the life out of that piece of cloth said more about the pain he was in than any tear.

Paying the bill, he did so without speaking much and didn’t meet my eyes.  I had worked in the office long enough to know that to have offered sympathy would have broken through all his defenses and frustrated him.  He didn’t want anyone to see his pain.  His world was one where men don’t cry.

To this day I hope that he had a wife to go home to or someone he could talk to about what had happened.  I really hope he didn’t go home to a lonely house, made even more lonely by the surprise loss. He had come home from a wonderful trip only to find sorrow.   We never saw this man again but his hands haunt me.