When it Rains It Pours

This is Kenzie. In one of the yesterday’s photos she was the one laying on my legs while Allie was laying beside me. She is my crazy monkey girl and is currently screaming at me to throw a hairband for her to fetch while I am typing this. Along with everything I talked about yesterday, we got some bad news about Kenzie recently as well. It turns out she is Diabetic and after taking a second round of bloodwork to verify it… we will have to very soon begin giving her insulin shots every morning and evening. Insulin is nonsensically expensive and while an injection pen is in theory going to last us a good while with Kenzie, I am now deeply concerned about the expense for those who have to take way more doses.

I was at first appalled when the vet said that in a lot of cases folks end up putting the animal down when they have diabetes. I could never consider something like that with Kenzie, but when the cost of upkeep is going to add one to three hundred dollars a month depending on severity I guess I can see how that would put folks in a really tough spot. I am thankful that we will be able to weather the burden and that our Vet did a ton of legwork for us and found the cheapest place for insulin pens and needles and we just had to then go acquire them. At some point this weekend we will be taking her into the Vet to be taught how to deliver the shots correctly, and then this gets added to my daily routine.

I am also thankful that Kenzie takes meds well and will pretty much tolerate us doing anything. I hope that streak continues when that “anything” is poking her with a needle twice a day. She has finally stopped screaming and is laying down beside me now on the box that a PC Tower Case came in. I was so slow getting my system transferred over into it that she claimed the box as her domain, giving her a way to be close to me while I sit in my office chair. When I finally swapped over to the new case, I put the old case in the box and taped it back shut so she would continue to have her own personal perch. For the longest time she laid beside me on my desk, and there is a blanket sitting there still for that purpose… but she prefers the cardboard box.

Now we get on to the title of this post that is both figurative and literal. We are going through a nonsensical amount of rain right now and coming home from the store yesterday I got completely drenched, along with the four sacks of groceries I was carrying. When I got everything into the kitchen I went back into the living room to take off my jacket and lay it up to dry when I noticed a bunch of water on the coffee table. I had a moment where I was trying to figure out if I accidentally sat the wet sacks down on the table, or if it was something else. Then while trying to figure this out I heard a distinct drip coming from the rafter above the table. We have a very slow leak and it has happened once or twice before, generally speaking when the rain is blowing horizontally due to the wind. So that is another thing on the list that will have to be dealt with as we get someone to come out and look it over. I am hoping it is just a case of the flashing pulling up or something like that.

Tonight however… I am hoping to get some relaxation in the form of mindless Diablo 3 grinding. It is the opening of a new season and with it comes something I have never done before. I have a plethora of Demon Hunters, Crusaders, Barbarians and Necromancers… but I have never before gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to 70. Grace confirmed that the Haedrigs set this time is a good one for Wizards and as a result I am planning on pushing myself well out of my comfort zone and running up a finger wiggler. If this works I might even knock out the Witch Doctor next season.

There is just something relaxing about our quarterly ritual of grinding up fresh characters in Diablo 3. Given all of the nonsense happening right now in my life I really need something peaceful and relaxing. I’ve had pretty fraught evenings of late where I never could quite settle into playing anything in particular. So I am looking forward to having a purpose tonight.

Lastly before I close things out. I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their comments yesterday. They really do mean a lot even though I told you that you didn’t have to make them. I mean I knew that my admonishment would do nothing, but I also sorta felt like I needed to let people off the hook. We all have a lot of things that we are dealing with and my burden is by no means more significant than anyone else. That said I really do appreciate the constant reminder that I have a bunch of people out there that care about me.

3 thoughts on “When it Rains It Pours”

  1. I’m so glad to hear you can afford the medicine! It’s one of the reasons we don’t have pets at the moment, especially not a cat or a dog. I’d be too afraid to not be able to afford medicine – and sooner or later, a cat or a dog will need it because they live long, after all. Also, this is one of the prettiest cats I’ve ever seen! <3

  2. Kenzie looks remarkably like a cat I had when I was a child. She had an identical blaze across her forehead and almost exactly the same coloring and markings. We had any number of animals around the house when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s. We always had at least two cats, sometimes as many as five, plus rabbbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils and anything that didn’t run fast enough when it saw me coming.

    When anything got ill we took it to the PDSA – the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals – which is a charity that provides vetinarary treatment for free to those who can’t afford vet bills. I have no idea if we were really that impoverished – it seems highly unlikely given the nature of the house I grew up in but I was too young to know or care about things like that. I don’t recall us ever going to a regular vet, though, or paying money for any treatment.

    I don’t have any pets these days and one reason is the ferocious cost of keeping them alive. I’m not sure how it’s ended up being so expensive, or why the expense is so readily accepted. If we end up with pets once again in the future, which may happen when we move house one day, they are all going to have to be insured. I can’t imagine what my grandparents would have said about that.

    Good luck with the injections. I had to give myself blood-thinning injections for two months this summer and it seems to be pot luck whether it stings or not, depending on what the needles happens to hit. It seems like a very unfortunate thing to have to do to an animal that can’t rationalize away the discomfort, if there is any, but I’m sure your bond of affection will see the both of you through.

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