Spent the day in the big city taking Lily to the animal hospital for her chemo, and other than a little weight loss, everything is going great:
NEW WORD: FLOCCULATION!!!!!
She has been shedding a bit more and her fur feels coarser, but the doctor said that is normal and not to worry. It’s also 5 kajillion degrees outside, and I would be shedding if I could.
The weight is something to keep an eye on, but she is still eating every day. I think the weight drop may be attributed to her going off the prednisone, which made her eat like a horse. They prescribed some mirtazapine to stimulate her appetite (holy fucking shitballs is that expensive), so I will keep an eye on her.
Regardless, she has been cleared for the beach, and was issued a regulation nautical bow by the nurses:
On the way home I stopped at the Brown’s Orchard and Cider Company and picked up some cooking apples for dad, some gala apples for my mom, and I picked up a five lb bag of Gingergold and a fiver of Honeycrisp. The Gingergold were so good I can honestly say they were life changing or life affirming or something. I actually pulled over to eat it so I wouldn’t be driving distracted. IT WAS THAT GOOD.
It’s nice to know nothing unsettling happened in the news today while I was busy with Lily.
*checks headlines*
I’m going to go water my plants and pretend everything is ok.
Joseph A. Miller
Hurray!! I love Lily!! One of the all-time goodest girls ever!!
TenguPhule
Hah! That’s the John Cole we know.
Garbo
Good news. Welcome update. Love to Miss Lily.
TheOtherWA
Yay, something good happened today! That photo of lovely Lily is exactly what I needed.
MelissaM
That nautical bow seems more fitting for a yachting adventure. I hope she enjoys her vacation at the beach!
trollhattan
Lily! Who’s a good girl?
rikyrah
Lily looks beautiful ? ?
TaMara (HFG)
Such a pretty girl.
I am getting nothing done today and since I’m on a tight deadline…well just F it all. Ok, back to the grindstone.
BruceFromOhio
This is splendid, glad she continues to thrive. Ain’t it good to be home?
Schlemazel
Well, there had to be some good news on this shitty day. Thanks & brava for Lily
Mnemosyne
I’m a little shirty right now because it turns out that there are buckle clips on the sides of my post-surgical knee brace that nobody told me about, so I was wasting a lot of time trying to take it on and off using the velcro straps. I seriously was like Eleanor in “The Good Place” finding out that there were stairs all along: “Son of a bench!”
debit
Excellent news about Lily!! She’s a tough girl and blessed to have you, John.
SiubhanDuinne
In a 48-hour period comprising Woodward-Kavanaugh-NYTAnon, I think we all need a little ChemoLily in our lives.
She is so lovely. Thank you for sharing her with us, John.
RoonieRoo
I’m so glad she is cleared to go on vacation at the beach with you!
laura
The beach is calling and Lily must go to the beach.
She deserves it for fighting the good fight, and you deserve it, because you’re her ride.
Seriously, you deserve it because you’re good people Mr. Cole.
geg6
All the love to Lily! She’s such a sweetie. Love the bow!
What a day. Good to get some good news.
SH121
Hey Lily….
You can do this girly. Remember you are loved.
schrodingers_cat
My guess its the border baby-snatcher, the self designated man in charge.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: Oops wrong thread. That belonged in the one before. My guess about the author of the anonymous letter.
Shell
Okay, that bow has to be one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen.
Czanne
Mirtazipine should not be expensive. It’s long off patent. (As old antidepressants go, it’s a pretty good drug except for the “you will want to eat everything within a 5 block radius” side effect. It’s one of the first line for PTSD when bad sleep is disrupting the sleep-anxiety-depression triad and a lot safer than amitriptyline.) It should cost around $10-15 for 30 days of 30 mg.
So if it’s costing a lot more than that? There is a problem.
mousebumples
IRL Pharmacist checking in: Mirtazapine is a people drug, depending on what dose she’s on, and that may be cheaper than getting it at the vet. The 7.5mg dose is ridiculously expensive, but 1/2 of a 15mg tablet should be much more reasonably priced. (It also comes in 30mg and 45mg.) The Orally Disintegrating Tablets are also crazy expensive, but I doubt that’s necessary – or that the people-flavor of those ODT tablets would taste good to a dog.
Glad to hear that Lily is continuing to do awesome with her treatments! :)
burnspbesq
FWIW, prednisone is the worst thing about chemo for humans, too. Shit is so evil, it should be called Trump.
CliosFanBoy
what a sweetie. ahhh, I can feel my blood pressure dropping./..
Mary G
Yes, knowing Lily AKA “a perfect little lady” is doing well is what I need in the face of all the crazy today. (It cracks me up to see that they put that in writing; I honestly thought you were exaggerating.) Love the bow. I can’t remember if she went with you to the beach last year or if this will be her first time at the ocean. So happy that she is going either way.
In other news, the teen returned last night around midnight after 24 hours of running away. His mother was all out of fucks to give yesterday and stayed off her daytime job to clean out his room and pack his clothes. She also had her husband put a lock on the teen’s bedroom door and a new dead bolt on the side door we all come in and out of, so he had to ring the bell. She was at her night job and her husband was passed out cold, so he was lucky I was still awake, though I took my sweet time getting out of bed to let him in.
I told him that his whole family, including the cousins in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Geneva, Switzerland were up in arms and unanimously demanding he be sent to a strict military boarding school in Guatemala, which wasn’t really the homecoming he was anticipating. His mom pulled out the sofa bed in the family room and he is still locked out of the bedroom except to go in for clothes and schoolwork. He was off again this morning, but showed up to school around noon, and now they are arguing outside because she is enrolling him in anger management counselling starting at 6 p.m. today.
Miss Bianca
@TaMara (HFG): I’m with you. I have two articles to write, and other stuff to take care of, and I’ve just been glued to the news all fucking day, can’t help myself. AAAAAAAGGH.
CaseyL
Ahhh. Lily with a bow. It is possible to breathe deeply again. Such a perfect lady-dog.
So – are you taking the entire furry tribe with you to the beach?
TheOtherHank
You’d think if she was flocculating that would make her heavier. Yeah, I know, I know, fluctuation, but still.
jimmiraybob
DON”T CHECK THE HEADLINES!!
Damn, not fast enough.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
Yeah, it sucks balls. I had to take it once before donating white cells, and it knocked the shit out of me for the better part of a week.
Mnemosyne
@Mary G:
He definitely needs a full evaluation, including for learning disabilities. It could be so many different things that for once I’m leery of making an internet diagnosis, but I would guess that his mom is going to have at least a few people say that it’s Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), which is usually but not always tied in with ADHD. Any drugs that he’s using to self-medicate (especially pot and alcohol) are only making matters worse.
It’s actually pretty common for kids with mild to moderate undetected learning difficulties like dyslexia and ADHD to have a sudden breakdown in high school when they’re expected to be much more self-regulating but, again, I am not at all an expert. It’s just the one set of possibilities out of many available that I personally am familiar with.
WaterGirl
Since there’s a lot of Lily love on display here, I will confess that I still have an open browser with a Lily post from April. It was titled “Maybe Just One More Dog Post” and it has 3 photos of Lily in bed, all tucked in. Each shot was progressively closer. So adorable I haven’t been able to bring myself to close it. It calms me to look at those photos of Lily on crazy days.
zhena gogolia
I love you, Lily! Sweet baby!
dexwood
Lily is actual goddamn proof the world we live in is not one crazy ball of insanity. Thanks, Cole.
StringOnAStick
I’m allergic now to those damned common landscape junipers and get horrible, brain freezing dermatitis if I even let a bit of them touch me. The solution is 1 week of Prednisone and man does that suck. It makes you more susceptible to infections for 6 months afterwards too. Hate it, but if it’s that or the dermatitis, the Prednisone wins.
Elizabelle
Lily looks so cute in her nautical bow. I hope she enjoys the beach.
Elizabelle
@WaterGirl: I know which photos you meant. I saved them, too.
ellie
She’s a sweetie.
I know, right? I have been busy the last couple of days and I heard Woodward wrote a book (I can’t stand him) but I thought I would see what the WaPo had to say and then the oped in the FTFNYT and good lord! I think I will go back to being busy.
Yarrow
Aww…sweet Lily. so glad she’s doing so well. Love her bow.
I’ve been with my dad in the hospital since the middle of the night. I’ve had zero sleep in almost two days and I do not know how I’m functioning or if I am. All things considered he’s doing fairly well so that’s a huge relief.
Citizen_X
Given the context, I’m pretty sure they meant “fluctuate,” but flocculate is a word: it means to clump together.
And it was in my favorite new term I learned a few weeks back: “organic-metallo flocculates!” Those are clumps of clay minerals and fish poop and whatnot that, while still floating, are referred to as “marine snow.” Once on the sea floor they are mud, once compressed & cemented together, they become shale.
dexwood
When Prednisone works, it works well, preventing complications. Our hard lesson with the medication came with the treatment of our sweet Bouvier des Flandres because it can cause ulcerated intestines. It isn’t common, but it happened and the infection overwhelmed him.
opiejeanne
@StringOnAStick: That’s terrible!
I rarely see them here but in SoCal they were everywhere. Cat-pee shrubs, I called them because of the smell. Stench. They did that on their own without help from a cat.
Tom Hamill
@Czanne: I think my vet charged me a lot, but I was able to get the vet to shift the prescription to CostCo and it was much, much less.
Mary G
@Mnemosyne: It’s hard. The family is Adventist and when teachers suggested meds in the past they recoiled in horror. I’ve been trying to gently nudge his mom that way, but you know how it goes. Some of it is just that he turns 15 this month, and in my admittedly very limited experience that age requires insanity as a rite of passage.
opiejeanne
@Citizen_X: i’m married to a Civil Engineer. He has discussed flocculation with me on more than one occasion, wrt water treatment but not the kind of water you should drink.
Steeplejack
Any of the big brains here have any experience with a recent virus called WeKnow.ac on the Macintosh—you know, the computers that never get viruses, suck it, Windows zombies!
Bro’ Man dropped it in my lap a few days ago, and after almost nailing it I am stymied. I’ll save the gory details until I get a bite.
Mary G
@Yarrow: Always puts the political insanity in perspective, so sorry you had to go through that. Glad to hear he’s doing better and will send good vibes for further recovery your way.
Agree with everyone about prednisone. I’ve been on it or prednisolone for almost 40 years for RA and it is hard on the body.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Bro’ Man dropped his Mac with the virus in my lap, not the virus itself. That would be unseemly.
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: It’s like their mental age for purposes of self-direction and organization lags way behind other kids and the difference between what is expected and what can be achieved gets wider and wider. Fortunately we got a diagnosis before the age at which self-medication was a likely outcome.
Tinare
How did I not know about Brown’s Orchard? Thanks I now have a stop planned for Saturday.
Mnemosyne
@Mary G:
If people have said in the past that it could be mild-to-moderate ADHD but the family is resistant to the idea of medication, there are a few other things they can try, like a high-protein diet coupled with a serious exercise regimen (like a minimum of 1 hour of cardio every day) plus therapy. At a MINIMUM, if they suspect ADHD, he needs a good diagnosis and therapy, because otherwise he’s going to spend all of his time being angry and frustrated because his brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s.
Kids with untreated ADHD are more likely to end up with a criminal record and/or prison time because they have a hard time controlling their impulses, so it’s not something to mess around with.
TomatoQueen
Hello lovely Lily Beachy Girl in your jaunty bow! Give Mr Cole extra tail thumps for taking such good care of you and for telling us of a new-to-us apple, the Gingergold. Better than Honeycrisp is going some. XXX.
Steeplejack
@Tinare:
I GPS’ed it, and it’s right at the edge of my “crazy one-day expedition” limit—250 miles. But it reminded me to Google places closer to me, although I won’t be able to do anything until mid-October.
Mnemosyne
@Yarrow:
Oh, no! I hope Dad Yarrow is out of the hospital and comfortable back at home soon.
I know you’re drained right now, but when you’re both feeling better, you may need to sit down and have that long, tough conversation about what he really wants, and the hardest thing of all will be to not allow your own reluctance to lose him to influence his decisions. It’s always better to know for sure what your loved one would want you to do in a crisis than to have to try and guess. If you had that conversation a while ago, it may be time to revisit it.
p.a.
@TomatoQueen:
Seconded. Honeycrisps are AA++. Going to have to look for Gingergolds.
TenguPhule
@Steeplejack:
Congratulations. You are the proud new user of a $2,000 paperweight.
trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
Am a LITTLE surprised you did not advise Cole that not only can his dog’s test flocculate, he can also flocculate his backyard when it’s flooded.
Steeplejack
@Yarrow:
Sending good thoughts for you and your dad.
Barbara
@Mary G: I only know what I have read but if it is ADHD, delaying intervention raises the risk that frustration and expectation of failure can become ingrained in the psyche.
Barbara
@Barbara: That is, I don’t know your nephew except by what I have read.
Mnemosyne
@Barbara:
I didn’t get diagnosed until I was a grown-ass woman in my 40s, but from the articles I’ve read, emotional maturity lags by about 2 years, so Mary G’s friends are basically dealing with a 12-year-old’s emotional capacity in an adolescent’s body — not a good combo.
I haven’t told this story for a few years, but my nephew (on my husband’s side) ended up needing to go to a psychiatric boarding school in Montana around his junior year of high school because he was having major issues with his ADHD (and was eventually diagnosed as having comorbid mild bipolar disorder as well). It was an actual specialty school with a therapeutic curriculum paid for by the school district, not one of those scary “boot camp” places, thankfully. He did really, really well there and ended graduating on time, on the honor roll, and with some helpful tools that his therapists taught him.
eclare
Thanks for the update, all the best to your girl!
eclare
@Yarrow: I hope your dad continues to do well, that is tough.
jonas
Shorter NYT op-ed writer: “I Was One Of the ‘Good
GermansStaffers’. Please Don’t Indict Me.”JPL
@Mary G: My thoughts are with both of you, since sleepless nights don’t help with the stress level.
Take care Mary and Yarrow.
Czanne
@Tom Hamill: Always a good plan. Also, Costco will cut down tablets as needed. They’re my first line for any scrip, h sapiens or four feets.
But seriously, the side effect of “eats everything not nailed down”? Take that part seriously. I don’t have a scrip pad; don’t want one. I’m brain software, not hardware. But I’ve had more than one client tell me they’ve replaced the contents of their kitchen with nothing but vegetables because two whole celeries & a family jar of peanut butter is a marvelous mirtazipine snack. Also the Costco size bag of meatballs or a dozen eggs. It’s not like Ambien eating. Mirtazipine seems to ramp up around 13 hours after last dose, until about 2 hours before next dose. The side effect does go away after about 6 weeks.
opiejeanne
@TenguPhule: Nah. We have a guy that cleared a nasty virus off of my Mac that I thought had killed it. I think my dad sent it to me in an email, never was sure where it came from, and I’m pretty careful.
opiejeanne
@Yarrow: hope your dad feels better soon, and you can get some sleep. Been there, done that, it’s not fun.
Yarrow
Thanks everyone for the kind wishes. It was a long day but my dad is doing much better than I thought might be the case and we have a plan moving forward for the next few days so that’s good.
@Mnemosyne: My dad has done that work. It’s always a good idea to review it from time to time and a few things came up during today’s event that we need to go over. It’s good advice for everyone, though.
stinger
Four of the sweetest words in the English language: “cleared for the beach”. Love that little girl in her jaunty seafaring neckwear!
J R in WV
@burnspbesq:
Many years ago, just before going on a trip to Colorado to rockhound in the mountains, I was exposed to some toxic fumes and developed whole body eczema, weeping sores and an itch that wouldn’t quit. My family doc gave me an injection of two steroids, one fast acting but brief in effect, and another that came on slower but lasted longer.
He also prescribed a course of Prednisone. I was at or above 10000 feet mostly, and getting way more exercise than usual, for 3 weeks. I lost weight despite eating like a horse the whole time, and converted the fat I lost into muscle mass. We actually collected on a 14er, near the top, I got a nice little smoky quartz.
I felt great by the time I got home. Not to dispute the common effect of prednisone, but it didn’t work that way for me. And the itch stopped before I was out of the medical office building.
Carbon DiSulfide was the toxic waste I was exposed to… primary side effect besides eczema is insanity, big surprise, right?