Writing off the last few weeks

Firstly, apologies for being quiet for so long; it’s been an interesting/emotional/stressful/ hard/busy/rollercoaster of a time (as usual). I think the last few weeks probably deserve to be written off.  Catching up with the blog has become a daunting prospect recently, but here goes:

To start with, our little cat, Abi was very seriously ill for a couple of weeks, and for a while we were certain we were going to lose her; a heart breaking prospect which was needless to say, very hard to face, and together with multiple trips to the vets each day for a week or more, was totally exhausting.  She was eventually diagnosed with dysautonomia, a feline version of the secondary condition that I have (a very peculiar coincidence) for which the long term prognosis is generally very poor. 

Abi on one of her visits home
between spells at the vets

Whether it’s the medication they’ve prescribed her with, or whether she has beaten the odds, who knows, but for the moment at least, she seems to have made a full recovery (touching wood frantically).  She is still very thin, and has lots of patches of hair where they had to shave her for all the scans, cannulas, blood tests etc, but in every other way seems back to normal.  I know it’s a cliché, but we feel extremely lucky still to have her.  As you can imagine, she is now more spoilt than ever, sleeping on the bed, titbits galore, and has resumed her previous place at the head of the household!

 

A consultant I saw six weeks or so suggested I try a different painkiller from one of the ones I’ve been on long-term.  What seemed like a good idea turned out to be a very, very bad one.  Weeks of disrupted sleep, nausea, nasty headaches and general grottiness followed as my system was thrown totally out of balance.  I persevered for a while to see if the side effects would settle down, but whilst it may work better for some people, this definitely hasn’t been my experience.  So it’s back to the old regime, but at least it’s reassuring to know that these were definitely serving their purpose in reducing every day pain, and I wasn’t just taking them for the sake of it – always hard to know when taking medication long term.

So, all in all, the last few weeks haven’t been much fun, but it has been such a boost seeing Abi get stronger by the day.  I did promise her one afternoon as she was lying in my arms and I could feel her slipping away, that if she pulled through, I’d never tell her off ever again.  I think she’ll certainly put that to the test!

Apologies again for not writing more regularly, but I will endeavour to get back on track as soon as everything settles down and gets back to normal – whatever that means these days!