end of june

i'm the main doer of laundry around this joint, but the laundry is piling up. our washing machine conked out last sunday, nearly a week ago. early in the cycle it simply decided to quit draining. we had a guy out to look at it on wednesday. it's the pump, and maybe other things on top of that. this is our second calypso machine to falter within the last 5 years or so - unfortunately we didn't get in on the class action suit. we decided it wasn't worth having it fixed, and now there's piles of dirty clothes around and kara's running out of things to wear. it's not so terrible for me, as i work at home and can wear jammies all day long if i choose. still, we're going washing-machine shopping this evening or tomorrow. and we're not getting another calypso! we're hoping to catch an early 4th-of-july sale or something.

as we know, we weren't going to go anyway, but it's still unfortunate that our intended vacation spot, star island, is closed - because of fire safety issues - until at least august. so my parents, sister, and brother-in-law aren't going either. no one's going. at all. the buildings on star are mostly wooden and mostly over 100 years old (then again, our house is wooden and over 100 years old too!), and apparently there are questions about the electrical systems. the thing seems a bit of a mess, and it seems not a lot of information has been released. it's sad for a lot of folks. though i suppose we don't want a big fire, and deaths, i feel bad about everyone's holiday plans. no one gets a star island vacation this july. i guess we'll all shoot for 2008 now.

even though we weren't planning on making the trip east, kara and i are still planning on taking time off from our jobs. neither of us have had more than 3 or 4 days off in a row in years and years and years. now we have 2 weeks coming to us, starting in the middle of next week, and we're not giving them up. of course, now we're not going anywhere, not doing anything special. i'm going to start writing again, at long last, and kara's going to be doing her school stuff. we'll probably take in a movie or two, at the cinema. there's the art on the ave (half a block from our house) on the 8th, my colonoscopy on the 11th (yay!), and the walk/run on the new tacoma narrows bridge (we'll be walking) on the 15th. that's what we have planned for our summer vacation.

and - the news you've surely been waiting for - kara did get her pin yanked yesterday. it actually wasn't so much yanked as pulled out gently and smoothly. she said it didn't hurt, but she regrets that she forgot to ask the surgeon if she could keep the pin. she remembered as she was driving away, but it was too late. so that's unfortunate. but her finger does seem to be healing fine. a bit of blood oozed from the pin site at home last night, but it wasn't bad. and the nail will probably grow back. she's to keep the finger bandaged when there's a good possibility of bumping it, so at least while she's at work and while she's sleeping, probably. she'll follow up with the surgeon again in 2 weeks, and maybe again after 2 more weeks.

i'm not ashamed to say that i'm glad we're about done with june. it's been a rough month, what with the dog attack, max and kara getting hurt, and losing sagan. we still cry for sagan. she was a very good dog, smart and sweet, except for that one little bad quality. anyway. july just better be better.

scope

i went to see my new doctor last week and he saw a bit of blood where he didn't think there should be blood. a colonoscopy is apparently in order. my luck, eh? harumph. the procedure is currently scheduled for july 11, when, were it not for max's longevity, we would be basking on star island, in the isles of shoals. well, i'm quite sure the scopy will be a great deal of fun too. damn it.

remainders

here's a picture of max x2. he got his sutures out yesterday but these snaps were taken the day before yesterday. he's a sexy beast, no? and yes, those sutures are indeed purple, so don't tell me those folks at the emergency clinic don't have a sense of style! anyway, the sutures came out yesterday and he seems fine. as fine as he can be, at least. he's still doddering, of course. his hair is growing back. and he's been barking and moaning a lot during the day this week, while kara's at work. i don't know if he misses her or sagan, or both.

and there's yellow, lounging on the mat on our porch. these days he's actually being at least as much of an asshole as he usually is, as that mat where he's lying is at the top of the ramp max uses to gain access to the house from the back yard. yellow effectively blocks max's access, and he takes a swipe at the old man when he tries to pass. not a good quality in a cat. he's also been needy lately, meowing at me for attention. he likes being picked up and cuddled with. but during my workday, if i go downstairs for a bowl of cereal or something, when i return he's curled up on my chair. he hisses when i lift him off.

eliot, the suspected mouser, sits on the far side of the backyard, not quite aware i was capturing his image with my zooming lens. he comes back into the house filthy, with the sex parts of plants buried in his fur. when he joins me on the bed i spend time grooming him, picking off the foliage. he's a sweet boy, though, and snuggles with me and kara in the evenings.

that's all the animals. no rumble, no sagan. we will be getting another dog, but not until max is off on his final voyage. we'll let him live this last portion of his life in as much tranquility as we can.

and kara (not pictured) has had more pain in her finger, feeling pressure from the pin within, since being back at work and more active. and me (also not pictured)? heck, i'm fine. i'm a cmt!

monday

today kara goes back to work. it's been 2 weeks since the incident, 2 weeks ago this evening. mostly at this point i'm worried about max. since the incident his separation anxiety (from kara; not from me) seems to have intensified. on friday evening kara went out with some folks from work and i stayed home with max and the cats. max was pacing and moaning and barking almost the whole time kara was gone, a bit more than 4 hours. i hope he doesn't do the same today while she's gone because, frankly, i have to work. and i worry about his discomfort, of course. i wish we could give him more pain meds, but he's already at the limit. he just has to cope. i think he slept all right last night, or at least i slept all right. a couple of nights ago, though, i think maybe friday night, he was up and moaning for hours and kara kept having to go into his closet and calm him down.

anyway. today kara goes back to work. yesterday she changed her bandage and i got to see her finger for the first time since her surgery. sorry the picture isn't so great, but the act of taking the dressing off, the tugging of the tape, etc, gave kara plenty of pain and she wanted to get the whole thing over with. you can see the pin sticking out, though, right? (she can feel the pin inside her finger.) and there's no nail there. a surprise was that her finger started bleeding again when she took the dressing off, bleeding from the nailbed, where there's a bit of a trough. she had planned to leave the finger unbandaged for a while, out in the air, for a few hours, but the blood and discomfort changed her mind, and she bandaged it up again.

it didn't look quite as gross and horrible as i had imagined. it's not pretty; i'm not saying that. i got a little queasy, but not so bad. i still ate dinner afterwards. kara recovered after a while too. we don't know if her nail will grow back. again, the pin is supposed to come out next week.

certifiable

yesterday morning i took the exam to become a certified medical transcriptionist (cmt), after studying the breadth and scope of the medical field for several weeks, and i passed! i am now officially a cmt. my wall certificate and my pin are in the mail.

the exam was much easier than i would have imagined. the first part consisted of multiple-choice questions and i knew about 80% to 85% of those answers right off the bat. they were plainly easy. of the rest i was able to eliminate a few of the choices and then take an educated stab. it was a strange mix of very basic questions and random off-the-wall specialty-specific questions. the second part of the exam was transcription from audio and proofreading. where i work, at multicare, we must have some extremely difficult dictators, because the sample of dictators on the exam yesterday was comparatively clear. understanding them was not a challenge at all. the proofreading questions were by and large simple as well; they just took close reading.

i'm sure i didn't totally ace the test; i got some questions wrong - i would be very surprised otherwise. but the bad thing is i don't know which ones i missed and they won't tell me. i'd like to know what it is i don't know, so i can come to know it. duh. i was told, however, by someone on the inside of the association for health documentation integrity (ahdi) (formerly the american association of medical transcription [aamt]) that i cannot be told which questions i missed because the association wants to maintain the integrity not only of health documentation but also of the cmt exam. i might tell potential test-takers the questions or something.

and i can understand that point of view, but i didn't even get a percentage grade when i took the test. i don't know by what margin i passed. this individual on the inside (she's a fellow of the american association of medical transcription [hence a faamt, and maybe soon a fahdi]) tells me that in eventual permutations of the exam, test-takers will get a percentage grade or at least something along those lines. that's the future, though.

so i have to live with knowing only that i answered enough questions accurately to satisfy the ahdi. which i suppose i can do. i don't particularly think that the exam was a good indicator of one's skill as a transcriptionist. i only had to actually transcribe, at most, a sentence or two on any given question. a better test, in my opinion, might have the applicant transcribe complete reports, for example. but these things are not up to me. (obviously such an exam would be considerably more painstaking to grade.) i suppose the point is that i'm now a cmt, one of only two in multicare's transcription department (the other is my friend kristi who took the exam last week!), and that means something.

mouser

there was another animal attack in or around our house yesterday, though one considerably smaller in scale, at least from our point of view. just after we finished dinner, kara very nearly stepped on this here mouse that was on the floor on her side of the bed. it was already injured. at first we thought it was dead, but then i saw it move. kara reports that eliot had been behaving suspiciously earlier in the day, so he's our prime suspect in this matter. he's brought us live birds before. (when we were living in lynnwood, yellow once brought us a live rat in the middle of the night, but that's another story.) without too much difficulty kara scooped the mouse into this box with a magazine. but rather than offering it medical attention, or driving it to the emergency clinic where i'd taken max last week, she dumped it in a neighbor's yard, merely in the hopes that eliot wouldn't engage it again. and the mouse could well be dead now. (or maybe it's okay?) come to think of it, the event was probably at least as traumatic for it as last week's attack was on all of us. if not more so. it's just a matter of perspective, isn't it?

on second thought

i misspoke the other day. things aren't closer to normal. i don't think so, anyway. a week ago today things were normal. a week ago right now sagan hadn't attacked max yet and everything was fine. things have changed. the attack took place a week ago today. and now sagan is dead. and max still looks horrible, but better than he did. kara had surgery a few days ago and still is in a lot of pain. she's off work this week and is taking a week off from school as well, probably for emotional reasons as much as physical ones. it's still weird to me that sagan is gone; it's weird that i sat there with her on the floor of the exam room in the vet's office and watched her die. the house is emptier without her. i'm much more affected by this than i was by rumble's sudden death back in december. no offense, rumble sweetie. there was just so much terror surrounding sagan's demise.

anyway. things will normalize in time, of course. kara made the bed yesterday, changed the sheets, and usually bed-making day is dog-washing day, but there's no sagan to wash any more. (max is too fragile to bathe properly, so he just gets brushed out really well.) so things aren't normal yet. max should get his drains out today; his appointment is in about an hour.

settling closer to normal

kara came through her surgery fine. i haven't actually seen her finger yet, because it's bandaged and is supposed to remain bandaged until next thursday. however, the gauze is already fraying and the end of the tape is loosening, so i don't know that she won't take it off and peek at her finger, even before the weekend is out. allegedly, her fingernail was removed and a pin was put in place. she had local anesthetic and a nerve block, and while the surgery was going on she discussed whisky with her anesthesiologist. the procedure only took half an hour, and things went quite smoothly.

it's been a whirlwind of a week. this morning i was up and thinking about letting sagan out of her crate before i remembered that she's gone.

here's a little taste, if you will, of what she did to max. (the image enlarges significantly if you click on it.) his leg is shaved in that one spot because there was a catheter there during his anesthesia. there's a drain there on the top of his head and another one in his neck. despite all of that, he seems relatively all right. still old and demented and creaky and fragile and unstable on his feet, but relatively all right. he's actually rather camera shy, so it's hard for me to get a good shot of him. he sees the vet monday and the drains should come out then.

it's saturday today. i'm off work and am about to go on a few errands. kara wasn't up to going out to dinner last night, so we're thinking about a lunch at an irish pub we recently discovered (though for all we know it's been there for years!) called doyle's. it's next door to king's books and we might well browse there a bit after we eat. then she'll do a bit of schoolwork and i'll study some for the exam i'm taking this coming wednesday. i'm back to work tomorrow but she's off for another week. on we go.

wood

here's to us! - it's our anniversary! - 5 years ago today kara and i were married by reverend raspberry in her backyard in everett, wa. precious few were in attendance, but i daresay the ceremony took. and today we're celebrating 5 years of wedded bliss by having kara undergo surgery on her left ring finger. the nail will be removed and it's possible that a pin will be placed in her fingertip to hold the broken bone in place while it heals. the surgeon won't know about the pin until he gets in there and looks at it. this will happen this morning, in a few hours. i think kara is mostly worried about the anesthesia; she was told yesterday she would probably have a choice between general and local, and if she does have a choice, she'll choose local. the surgery should take an hour or an hour and a half. it's probably a relatively simple thing and there probably isn't anything to worry about. still, it's a little scary. surgery!

sagan's ashes are going to be scattered at the foothills of mount rainier. isn't that nice? the vet's office offers that service. i don't know if someone from there takes a drive out to the mountain once a week or once a month or once every 6 months, with ashes. maybe they have a contract with a helicopter company. i don't know.

kara and i disassembled sagan's crate the other day, wednesday, the day after she died. i carried it upstairs, and we'll let the next dog use it. in the meantime, though, there's a big empty space in that room. we've been calling it "the sagan room" but now we'll have to come up with another name. maybe "the study," as kara sets up her laptop in there sometimes to do her schoolwork. i'm not sure if that term will catch on, though. anyway, the big empty space is disconcerting. that's where sagan used to sleep.

depending on how kara feels this evening, we might take ourselves out to dinner. we'll see. it's been a strange and terrible week, but we have a good marriage.

beginning of aftermath

kara and i and max, and yellow and eliot, are still alive. and sagan is not.

i ended up taking her to the vet yesterday, a place she knows, where she gets a lot of treats. initially there was some administrative complication, in that sagan had bitten kara and drawn blood, so the city requires 10 days of quarantine prior to euthanasia. the techs at the clinic called all over town, trying to find a place for sagan to stay for those 10 days, and i imagined kara's reaction if i ended up returning home with an alive and well sagan. it would not have been good; kara's really gone through the wringer on this one. this took a long time to sort through, and i hung out with sagan in the exam room. happy, clueless sagan, enjoying the attention i was giving her.

eventually the vet said that if i signed a piece of paper to the effect that i would not hold her liable, she would perform the euthanasia anyway. i sighed and signed it, and she did it. i was with sagan all the way to the end. she was happy and accepting treats and loving from me the whole time. the first shot put her gradually to sleep, and she snored loudly, the way she always did. i stayed with her, talking to her and petting her. the second shot was to stop her heart, and that one took a while to take effect too. she was a strong dog at 74 pounds, all muscle, and the vet said she had injected enough for a 100-pound dog. i stroked sagan's face as the vet listened to her heart. then it was over. sagan died yesterday at about 5:45 pm, pacific time.

it seemed very peaceful. sagan seemed at peace. of course i don't know what went through her mind in those last minutes, what kind of fear or confusion or disturbance or pain, but i hope that my presence made things as easy as they could possibly have been under such awful circumstances.

we gave her 4-1/2 good years, we hope. we chose her from the pound back in 2002 when she was only days from being euthanized. we think she was about a year old then. the evening after we chose her, while she was still at the pound, she attacked someone or did something to make people frightened, and we almost didn't get her. she was evaluated at the pound for maybe another week before they let us take her home. so i suppose it could be said that we gave her 4-plus years she wouldn't have had otherwise.

so our family is reduced again. there is indeed a distinct hole. i was shaky all day yesterday, and i'm still shaky today.

max is a little more creaky than usual, with his head wounds and his drains. he does look like something from a horror film, a dog clumsily stitched together from parts. kara's finger hurts when she bumps it but otherwise it seems stable. we changed the dressing last night. she's on her percocet and she sees a specialist tomorrow. she is definitely shattered by these last 36 hours.

she thinks the whole thing is her fault, because she was playing with max when sagan attacked him. it's not her fault, i keep telling her; sagan had a thing about her giving attention to max, and that's not kara's fault. she thinks she should have trained sagan more, worked with her, but i think sagan had those highly aggressive tendencies deep in her, and they weren't something kara could have trained out of her. it's the way sagan was, that's all. sometimes kara sees it this way and sometimes she doesn't.

the cats seem all right, but then, it's hard to tell with cats.

trauma

i don't have a lot of time this morning before i have to start work, so this will be a briefer account of last night's incident than i would have liked. i apologize to myself and to y'all.

sagan attacked max again last night, at around 6:30. she grabbed hold of him with her jaws and wouldn't let him go. it took kara a lot of effort to get her off him, and then sagan grabbed him again. finally we freed max from sagan, and he and kara were both bleeding. i took max to the animal emergency room and kara drove herself to the tacoma general emergency room. max stayed overnight at the clinic. i went to be with kara in the er. we were in and out in a little under 5 hours, which probably actually isn't so bad. the nail on kara's left ring finger was avulsed and its root was exposed. there was also a small fracture of the distal phalanx. (she was seen by an arnp named sabine, one of the very few er dictators whose reports i actually usually enjoy typing. it was interesting to see her in person, after just hearing her voice for a couple of years.) kara will be off work for at least 4 days and will see a plastic surgeon/orthopedist (a man whose reports i dread typing) on thursday. she might need surgery. the nail is still attached, loosely, but it is dead and will fall off. he might take it off; we don't know this. the management might be more conservative.

i collected max from the emergency clinic earlier this morning, at about 5:30. he was stitched up and has two drains in place, one on his forehead and one on his neck. he is a real mess. it's quite amazing, actually, to me, that he's still alive after such a trauma. he's a much stronger dog than i would have thought, ancient as he is. he's quite groggy now. he does look a fright.

and then there's sagan. i do believe she has attacked max for the last time. we are looking hard at taking her back to the shelter this afternoon. of course this means she will almost certainly be killed. she is in her crate now and she knows she has done wrong. she can tell she's in serious trouble; she can read us. this would be easier if she weren't such a smart dog. if she weren't so terrific otherwise. it won't be easy, but i might be taking her for a ride after work. it's difficult to meet her eyes as i pass her in her crate. i know she knows.

we got back from the emergency room at about 11:30 last night, but it took me several hours to get to sleep. i kept seeing kara's mauled finger and max's mauled head. i have to start working in a few minutes. kara is downstairs, crying, and trying to rest. she has a percocet prescription to fill.

we are fairly devastated here, in short.

after a bit

i'm aware it's been a few weeks. sorry. i've been feeling a bit blank of late. i still feel a bit blank, actually, but i thought i'd poke my head in.

i've been studying for the certification examination for my current profession, an exam i'll take in something like 11 days. sometimes it seems the more i study, the less i realize i know. the medical field is sorta vast. sometimes i feel quite confident about my chances at passing, because i'm generally a fairly bright lad, and other times i realize i don't really know how i'll do. but i'm just studying and trying not to worry about it so much. if i pass, what do i get? nothing, really. letters (cmt) after my name - woo hoo! it won't give me an immediate raise or other benefits at my current job. it'll make me feel good about myself. i might have the respect of my peers, and even my supervisors. (maybe.) and if ever i leave multicare and still want to do transcription, having those three little letters after my name might bump open a door or two at the human resources departments of other employers.

and if i fail, i can hang my head and take the exam again in 6 months.

otherwise ... it's june. it's warm and sunny in the pacific northwest, though i heard rain could be coming. i think we'll grill this afternoon. our anniversary is just under a week away, and i need to make a reservation. things are good. i've got no complaints.