Monday, 17 Dec 2007

Did you know it costs over $100 to get CPR for a cat? At least that’s what the emergency vet/hospital charged when we brought Bear (Berlioz) (one of my three cats) in on Friday night. [-- I had written a long paragraph about the circumstances and symptoms and timeline leading up to this event, but realized on reading it that the reason I wrote it was probably just to assuage my own feelings of guilt at not taking better care of him, or to defend myself, so I deleted it]

Net result is that by the time we brought him on Friday evening (about an hour after we got home and heard him meowing in obvious distress) he was in very bad shape. While they were putting an IV in him to get him re-hydrated he went into cardiac arrest. They were able to bring him back and he had a heart beat but a few minutes later he had another and they weren’t able to bring him back.

I don’t like my cats, and I know I don’t take the best care of them - food, water, a place to go to the bathroom and a roof over their heads are all I provide. But this is not something I would have wished on any of the cats. And Bear was a good cat. Annoying at times, but unique and generally affectionate. Personality-wise the most pleasant of my 3 cats.

It is tough to sit in an examining room with 2 teenage daughters who loved this creature and have to hear with them that Bear died. I didn’t think it would effect me much since I don’t like the cats, but it was very emotional for me. Part of it was I am sure due to my love for my daughters and feeling compassion for their pain, but part was for Bear - I felt bad for his pain, and sorrow and guilt that i hadn’t noticed symptoms of whatever was wrong with him earlier and gotten him to the vet sooner. regret that I hadn’t been a better caregiver for him. and this cat has lived under my roof for close to 4 years now. a temporary arrangement that mostly through my laziness turned into a permanent situation.

I do miss Bear. I am not looking forwards to picking up his body from the vets, or to trying to bury him in the frozen snow covered ground in our yard. I am not looking forward to figuring out what the financial consequences will be in paying an unexpected $345 vet bill that wasn’t in my ‘budget’.

But I do miss Bear.

Monday, 17 Dec 2007

Despite last Thursday’s snowstorm stretching my normally @90 minute commute from work to home into an all but interminable 9 hours (Yes, I said hours[see comments for related note]), I think yesterday (Sunday) morning’s snowstorm was even worse - at least in terms of it’s effects on me. “What could possibly be worse than a 9 hour commute?” I hear you asking. Well, trying to deliver 264 newspapers in the early morning in whiteout conditions when the road is so slippery (even when plowed) that if I stop my car on a level surface I won’t be able to get enough traction to move so will be stuck until someone wakes up and happens to wander by and offers to help so I can’t stop and deliver the paper where people want it but just have to throw it in the driveway knowing many of them will be completely buried when the plows come by later - when even the slightest incline makes a road impassible by car forcing me to do my route out of order so I can always be heading downhill or in way too many cases (some for basic slipperiness, more for streets not even plowed by 9:30am) parking at the bottom of a street (curse these dead end streets) and walking the length of a street carrying 6-8 papers weighing probably 5-6 pounds apiece - then walking down the SAME street again to deliver to the rest of the houses because there are more than 8 people on the street who get the paper - walking through 4+” of completely unplowed snow in the freezing cold while it’s sleeting quite heavily - worrying while driving that I am going to get stuck and be stuck for a very long time, feeling so exhausted towards the end of my route that I wonder if I can actually make it walking to the end of this street to deliver the papers, wondering over and over again if this is really worth it.

The good side I guess is that sometimes it might b e good to push yourself to find out what your limits are, just what one is capable of. For me I found it’s less than I thought. Objectively I don’t think that walking 8-10 ”blocks in the cold and sleet should have been that physically demanding but either due to the several hours of stress I’d been experiencing due to worries about getting stuck or the minimal sleep I had the night before or the fact that I am VERY out of shape and get very little physical activity, or just the fact that my body is aging and I can’t do anywhere near as easily in my 40’s what I could without thinking about in my 30’s or the combination of some or even all those factors - but it was _exhausting_. When I got home at 10:15AM (5 1/2 hours of delivery later, 7+ hours after I left in the morning) I was so exhausted I took a warm bath and soaked until I caught myself falling asleep a couple of times then went to bed and slept until about 5pm. Woke up and played some violent racing videogame and did some housework. Wasn’t really hungry, I think the extreme (for me) exertion made me physically sick - my stomach didn’t feel quite right - it still doesn’t today over 24 hours later.

I probably just need to chill over the whole “get people their papers on time” thing - it’s just a newspaper after all. I put immense pressure on myself - probably because I need this job just to be able to pay my basic bills - and even WITH this job’s income supplementing my decent full-time job income I am not current on my credit card payments . But with the newspaper delivery income I am able to stay current (barely) with everything else - child support, the house, the car, insurance, heat, college fund for kids, other utilities, gas for the car, groceries, etc (in decreasing amount order) - so I need the income. So I stress about people complaining and losing the route.

So no objectively, it’s not “worth it”, but I need the cash. I can’t imagine how many bad decisions have been made over the years for that reason.