resolutions
In case you were wondering, I got the entertainment center into my apartment, although I still need to go to Home Depot and get plywood cut for the cabinet’s back and shelves. E. from my cohort has a jeep, which turned out to be JUST big enough to contain the EC. She helped me get it into the apartment and wouldn’t even take my $10.
I’ve rearranged the furniture again to accomodate it, and I think I’m going to have a lot more room available in the living room once I get those shelves in. I’m also thinking of using the bottom shelf of the cabinet for liquor storage. I didn’t use to have so much liquor that it didn’t all fit in the kitchen, but then my friend Katherine, who was a bartender, moved to San Francisco and gave me all her booze. Maybe I should just have a party.
In other news, my cat Bart (short for Bartimus) has been diagnosed with (probably) a recurrence of the Demodex mites that afflicted him LAST YEAR.
This is very upsetting, because I had to give ALL THREE CATS LIME SULFUR BATHS ONCE A WEEK FOR TWO MONTHS to treat that infestation, and he seemed to recover, and in fact looked fine until last month, when he was starting to get a few scabs here and there that I thought were the result of tussling with the other two, but then over the past week I noticed him licking patches of his stomach raw again, and it was just like the damn mites all over again.
So we went to the vet this morning (boy, the #9 bus sure is crowded at 10:30 on a weekday morning), and they couldn’t find any evidence of the mites on his fur or skin, but then again, they couldn’t find any such evidence last year, either–they only found them when they ran a stool sample, because cats tend to efficiently groom the mites off their hair and into their digestive tracts.
Which I remembered, and so I had actually brought a stool sample, but it takes some time to check them (they have to send it out to the lab), and anyway, the vet said it really did look JUST LIKE last time and every other feline Demodex infestation, so we might as well assume that yes, they really did just lie dormant for ten months.
Fortunately, since they really don’t know shit about feline Demodex, the recommended treatment has changed since last year. They gave me a bottle of Frontline spray to use on all three cats weekly and a two month supply of liquid heartworm medication to give Bart daily–they treat canine Demodex with heartworm meds routinely, but canine Demodex tend to live further down the hair shaft and are thus more vulnerable to internal medicines that then permeate the skin; they don’t really know how much it will help with a cat.
The medicine is labeled for cattle use, however, and is cheap, so we’re giving it a go. If he isn’t improved in the next couple of weeks, she said to bring him back for steroids, just in case it’s actually an allergic reaction to something, but I kind of doubt it. He never had allergies before, and the last time he had these symptoms, he also had Demodex mites. I just hope this treatment actually works.
September 29th, 2005 at 9:14 pm
Yeesh. Here’s hoping this treatment solves the problem more permanently for you this time.