Overall, a pretty crappy day. She-Wolf has cancer. Sales/shares badly needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

If you can't tell, that's a shot of the two dogs sacked out beneath the tree today, unaware of what's coming. We'll get to that in a minute.

It was . . . not a good day.

I woke up with a migraine. I'm always grateful now just to wake up, in light of what's going on with me, but that was tempered a bit by the sledgehammer blows inside my head. Thanks to Wings working on my head and neck and back (this all comes from the damage to my neck in the accident decades ago), it took the edge off enough for me us to attend our friend's memorial this morning, at least.

After leaving the memorial, we had a rather unpleasant experience, especially for me: yet another example of a white woman inserting herself where she didn't belong, co-opting Wings's father and exploiting his memory, saying something that apparently turned out to be a lie but that was incredibly hurtful to me personally, and openly erasing me while demanding a hug from Wings, getting my name wrong, and then telling me she probably couldn't remember it because it's so strange. Yeah. I walked away. but the amount of pain inflicted on me in that exchange runs very deep. 

Then we had to renew the rental for the O2 concentrator. They don't currently have a portable in stock (it's $400 a month anyway, instead of $150). Wings wanted to order one to buy outright, but that's more than $3K, and they need something like half down, and we don't have it. We wont't have it for a while, either, because of what else happened today.

It was indeed She-Wolf with the bleed New Year's Eve morning; Wings caught it this morning. Could have been something as simple as a bad UTI, but likely not; could also have been a bladder stone, but we had prepped ourselves to hear the worst. It's not the absolute worst, but it's not far off. She-Wolf has cancer: transitional-cell carcinoma of the bladder. It's not early-stage, either; it's through most of her bladder, and that organ's walls have thickened immensely. It looks as though the walls of her intestines have thickened, too, and her spleen is very enlarged, so we already have metastasis — or it may just be inflammatory response. Her prognosis is not good. at best, she probably has months, not years, and there's always a chance that things could go suddenly sideways very fast. If that happens, it will break our hearts and absolutely destroy Raven. But there have been some studies of off-label prescribing of Piroxicam (an anti-inflammatory) in dogs with TCC of the bladder, and in a significant percentage, it's helped. A very few have gone into full remission; a decent number of the others have had it back off enough to buy them quite a bit more time and good quality of life, apparently. Those dogs, however, were not, AFAAK, diabetic. She-Wolf is.

That said, the vet (who is our regular vet's partner, in half the week) is a straight shooter and a hell of a good guy, and he's comfortable with our level of knowledge and expertise and ability to work with her. he did tell us that we had every right to try a veterinary cancer center, to ask him for chemo, whatever, and I asked him point-blank which would give her the best quality of life (we suspected it would be the pharmacological option). He said, "For that goal, if it were my dog? I'd go with the meds." So. Almost $250 today for vet visit, ultrasound, and X-ray; heaven knows how much tomorrow for the Piroxicam and some supplements they found that are indicated for this (it's new territory for all of us). We already have veterinary mox and pred on hand for the horses and dogs, and he's okayed using that, one course of mox and 10mg of pred per day consistently along with the new drug.

And we'll see.

Prayers, good vibes, whatever you got for our beautiful little girl would be welcome, too. Needless to say, some of my stuff's getting back-burnered, because hers is emergent.

I'm completely wrung out at this point. I need to eat, I need to spend some time hooked up to the O2, and I just need not to start bawling now, so the rest is all cut and paste; sorry.

[Added, because I'm forgetting everything today: all that's up at my site; the Ko-Fi thing. Sorry, everyone; I'm not all here tonight.]

So, yeah, that's another big expense, although thankfully we have today's sale to help with that. But there's a lot of uncertainty with the new year now (and a lot of worry on more fundamental levels than just paying bills and so forth). For now, we still need to make sales, and they will be harder than usual not merely because Christmas is essentially over, but because there is no real tourist traffic, much less spending. We made it through the last week of the year, but looking ahead for this year, we don't have what normally gets us through the rest of the winter (and the weather will change, even if it's only to get really, really cold), much less for the emergency medical expenses of the last six weeks (which included a new bill two days ago for nearly five figures). Forget what remains to be done on the house for now; it's all the rest. But sales are not just what's going to keep me alive and Wings healthy; it's going to help other folks, too. Given the circumstances, I'm leaving up the donation link, too, and the registries have some new items on then, mostly lower-priced, to replace stuff damaged by the RV or given away when we first moved into it seven years ago. And as soon as I can get the folks at Wordpress who were happy enough to take my money to correct their various errors, I'll have a means to subscribe, donate, and eventually buy some things outright on the new site. So please share our links, because we've got to make some sales:

• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Wayfair gift cards, to replenish all the furnishings that the RV has destroyed in one way or another.
• Partial registry #1, from Bed, Bath and Beyond. There are new kitchen-y things on it now, stuff that I didn't realize we'd need to replace (either because the RV ruined it or because we gave it away when we had to downsize).
• Partial registry #2, from Wayfair. Still waiting for them to resolve this fulfillment/shipping problem they have with their site. Even so, I've added some things (kitchen/dining room stuff mostly), most of which are comparatively reasonably priced. Now, it's going to be mostly odds and ends that make this place more liveable, because of the sheer volume of stuff destroyed by too many years in the RV (e.g., by the oven and stovetop, by the wiring, by the water, by the mold, etc.), or that we simply gave away seven years ago because we had no room and no place to put them and despaired of ever being able to use them again.  

As I've also been saying, I am still catching up, and will be now for a while. But this is the holiday season, and the sales/commissions from these few weeks are what keep us alive throughout the whole long winter and spring months (to say nothing of what's in the offing medically), so please continue to share the links. And please refer folks to Wings's site (and if you have an endorsement, too, so much the better). I'll be trying, slowly but, I hope, steadily, to get caught up over the course of this week. We have some massive expenses coming down the pike, and a lot of testing yet to be done before I'm out of the woods. So please keep sharing all our links. For now, I'm just so damn grateful to be alive, to have a healthy heart, to be back home with the love of my life and our dogs, the whole world is beautiful, even in spite of my terrible depression. Thanks again, to everybody; we love you all. And, if wishes can make dreams come true, a blessed Spirit Moon, the ability to sit atop the mountain and face the world below, and a happy, healthy new year to all of us.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.