We got some good news today– finally. Elwood’s biopsy showed no lymphocytes. The biopsy isn’t 100% accurate, of course, but odds are excellent that Elwood doesn’t have lymphoma. He definitely does have hapatic lipadosis (fatty liver)– but his chances of surviving that illness are 60-70% instead of the 0% he would have faced with lymphoma.

He’s still shorn, slightly groggy, and intubated– but his future looks a little brighter.

This snarky little parody just about sums up why I hate PowerPoint so much.

Some drunk woman is down in the street in front of our apartment building, slurring loudly, “The hookers are inside! They’re waiting for you! The hookers are inside!”

Of course, as conversations overheard outside our apartment go, this is definitely trumped by one I heard outside our old place:

Woman #1: He thinks just because he took me out for sushi, he gets to fuck me in the ass. Nuh-UH!

Woman #2: That’s right, girl, you got to set limits.

Jimmy Choo: the shoe of choice for getting buried in the desert after a long night of stripping.

Or so Jason has taken to calling Cash. He’s usually pretty naughty, but he’s been bathing Elwood and holding his paw– well, sort of. I hope it does Elwood some good, because his condition is still touch and go.

Damn, why didn’t I think of this before? Attributing your lazy shaving habits to activism is genius. So allow me to announce that I am not shaving my legs again until we achieve world peace.

Elwood is trying to recover from a long weekend in the ER, after having had more surgery. But the rest of the animals I know seem to be doing well, including Rachel’s rat Alejandro, who is making his film debut in this short documentary, “Fishing for Peas.”

Well, it’s been a rough week for me, but even rougher for one of our cats, Elwood. He went into the hospital last Saturday because he wasn’t eating well, which can be very dangerous for cats: if they don’t eat for a couple of days, they can get a disease called hepatic lipidosis, which is fatal if it isn’t aggressively treated. Since it was Labor Day weekend, our regular vet was closed until Tuesday, and we had to take Elwood to an emergency vet. The emergency vet turns out to be an emergency vet chain, complete with all the corporate whoredom that usually accompanies big chains. They use only equipment manufactured by their big parent corporation, regardless of whether it’s the best; they only use consultants who work for one of their subsidiaries, whether they’re the most qualified personnel or not; and good luck ever talking to the same veterinarian twice. While it’s not uncommon for veterinary offices to have a team of 2 or 3 vets making rounds, it’s pretty disturbing when there are around 12 vets, none of whom ever sees your pet twice.

In addition to being the McDonald’s of pet care, this vet clinic was suggesting the most aggressive possible courses of action, and after speaking with their jackassed internal medicine specialist, I was determined to tranfer Elwood to his regular vet on Wednesday morning. The internist had performed an ultrasound on Elwood Tuesday morning, and after waiting all day, I finally got to talk to him. First he told me that Elwood’s liver was gray. Well, yes, ass, I guess it would look gray on a grayscale imaging device, wouldn’t it? What does gray liver mean?! Then he informed me that if I was reluctant to do major surgery procedures on my very sick cat without having any diagnosis– wow, I wonder why I’d be concerned about a little thing like that– that there were really no other options, unless I wanted to “proceed empirically,” which, according to the doctor, means that “we would take a wild guess.” You know, last I checked “empiricism” does not mean “wild guessing.” Finally he tells me that there’s no chance Elwood will start eating on his own if I were to take him home, which was a strange proclamation, given that he had no idea what was causing Elwood not to eat.

I had him back at my vet’s the next morning. The vet wanted me to take him home and force-feed him a little food every hour in the hopes of enticing him to eat. He did well with the feeding, and managed to eat half a can of pureed tuna and a spoonful each of strawberry and vanilla ice cream. We came back in today for some more poking and prodding. Tomorrow morning we’ll have the results of more extensive bloodwork and a radiology report on Elwood’s most recent ultrasound (my vet wants to send them to a cat liver specialist at Cornell to check out some potentially odd spots). In the meantime, my vet went through all 87 ultrasound images with me, so that I’d know what he was concerned about, and where he was coming from with his treatment plan.

So poor Elwood is now at home, very uncomfortably attired with a Victorian collar and a nasogastric feeding tube, since my vet wants to make sure he gets enough coloric support, and a little cat food and ice cream won’t do it. But the tube did not require surgery like the other type would have, and if he starts eating well on his own, it can come out very soon. I’m just hoping he keeps napping through his next feeding– I have to tube-feed him hourly– because I really don’t want him to sneeze the tube so far out that I have to push it back down his nose myself. If that happens, I have to restrain the cat’s four clawed limbs while holding his head and pushing the tube all at the same time. I’m sure that would be challenging even with Jason here, but with him out of town….