Merry Christmas

I'm now just about 96 hours post-treatment. I'm feeling the sides from the interferon, mostly fatigue, but I'm enjoying not feeling the ribavirin "hat" — the pressure that forms across the middle of my forehead and encircles my head. Correction: past tense. I don't feel it anymore! That's a serious improvement.

Saturday, the second day post-shot, we went up to see our friend J and her mom in central Arizona. Whether it's chemical or situational, I was much more engaged and maybe even fun to be with on the 90 minute drive. The kids laughed, although I couldn't tell for sure whether it was at my jokes or at me.

I mentioned last time that J has fought ovarian cancer and that it looks like it's back. She and her mom, "M", take care of a nice little house and make whatever money they can through crafts or doing bookkeeping and billing.

Bluntly, the situation looks bleak over the long run. J has a bit of life insurance that will allow her mother to keep the house. She has no medical insurance and a lot of debt. She divested all of her assets putting them in her mom's name and keeping the debt in hers. Nonetheless, she is feeling good right now and stays in the present. A few weeks ago I talked with her about options and she said that she's not going to go through another six-month round of chemo with a 15% chance of remission — remission here defined as pushing the inevitable back six months. She really can't see the point. She's my age, which has brought reality home to me more than once. If she finally decides not to take the chemo, the cancer will not have beaten her and she will not have given in. She will have taken a hard decision not to be defined by her disease. It looks like we're in for another rough year.

J and her mother's avocation (not to mention distraction) is a prolific tribe of feral cats that has adopted them, and which they feed excessively. They remind me of my grandmother who at one point also had a dozen or more cats hanging around. When we were up there before Thanksgiving last month, M, the mom, commented that she'd spent nearly $70 in November on cat food. With my rural background, I might approach the issue a little differently, but it's not mine to say. I privately wondered how long the situation could sustain itself.

The tipping point arrived a couple of weeks ago. They got a cold snap followed by some snow and the hoard of kittens came down with some kind of respiratory infection. Naturally, the kittens went to the warmest spot they knew when they got really sick — M and J's patio. And naturally more than a few turned up dead. It took a lot out of J to spend a week burying a kitten or two every day.

When we were up there this week, they had brought three kittens inside and had set up a kitty infirmary in a bathroom. One appeared to have made it last week and they found a home for it. A second was looking very weak on Saturday and died the night we left. Then there's the third.

Guess who has a new kitten.

My oldest daughter's cat is now sixteen and starting to fade. She's doing pretty well, but the arthritis in her hips is getting worse. My younger daughter got a kitten for her birthday this past summer (three guesses from whom). We got a fair amount of not-so-subtle pressure to take the new one. Alright, alright, whatever. I choose my battles judiciously. Sometimes an appeal to common sense, reason, and practicality is more trouble than it's worth in the long run. We won't have three cats for very long. Needless to say, the kitten is very cute — a calico with a brown patch over one eye and a butterscotch patch over the other — and a fighter. When the dog comes to visit she growls and hisses and doesn't back down for a second. Mother Nature's system is brutal, but it does find the fighters.

Christmas Eve

Several years ago we fell out of the tradition of Christmas Dinner. The time leading up to Christmas is too crazy and Wife didn't want to spend Christmas cooking. We now instead have our big dinner on Christmas Eve. A couple of years ago we made a standing rib roast. It turned out really good that year. We hadn't done it in a while, but this year Wife found one at a good price. I think it's going to become a regular tradition. Wife still had some wrapping to do, and I told her I'd take care of dinner. I spent a couple of hours in the kitchen on my feet. No way I'd have been able to do that last month, or even last week. I enjoyed cooking it and it made Wife so happy that it's probably worth my time to plan a repeat performance. Maybe a New Year's ham and black-eyed peas next week.