Around two weeks ago I became concerned. Or, rather, more concerned than I already was. Bugs went from spraying once or twice every three weeks or so, to spraying every day and sometimes several times a day.
Barney says, “What’s up with that, bro?”
Bugsy says, “One day, grasshopper, all may be revealed.”
Back in April, the homeopathic vet treated Bugs’s urinary thing by giving him a remedy that was supposed to support his overall constitution. I believe the vet’s theory was that when Bugs’s whole being got righted, the urinary symptoms would no longer be required and they would cease. But when I told the vet about this recent spray-fest, he agreed it was time to treat the spraying directly. He prescribed a new remedy, I administered it, and last Thursday I tested Bugs’s urine again for white blood cells.
For the first time in this three-month period, this test showed improvement.
Can I hear a hallelujah.
Barney is relieved.
The vet cautions that we need to see improvement over time and not just in the short term. But I am reassured. Since treating with this vet, I have discovered some stubborn belief-sets I hold that doubt the theory behind homeopathy. But Bugs’s improvement now, instantly appearing after the new remedy, seems so clearly connected that I’m ready to call it causation and not coincidence. But really – whatever. I am just so happy that Bugs is better.
He’s still spraying, mind you, around every three days or so now. But with that I can deal. All I need is just a little more than mere hope or faith that Bugs is, or will be soon, feeling better. And now we have objective evidence that he might, and I am so happy.
Bugs being winsome.
Barney can relax now. Another, in his series of interesting sleeping-positions.
Just to show that I really did come round the kitchen corner and find him like this. Not in the middle of moving. Sleeping. Not moving.
In other happy news, here is Miss Minuet a/k/a Minnie. It is blisteringly hot now, in Arkansas, hence the sweat.
Is she not a beauty? Minnie is one of the horses I am doing FELDENKRAIS® with.
Here is excellent old Riley, another horse plus scenic Arkansas Ozarks view.
Riley is a patient angel for letting me also ride him. I don’t know how to ride. Riley, plus human trainer, are teaching me what to do. I feel myself to be a slow learner.
Here is a representative sampling of the thirteen cats who share Minnie’s and Riley’s human’s home. So many cats because this is in the country and, alas, this is what happens when you live in the country. Humans – using the term loosely – dump their unwanted animals in the country and real humans, the ones with a heart like the horses’ human, take them in and care for them.
What happens when I do FELDENKRAIS with the horses feels mysterious and miraculous. First, I forget myself. I simply abide with these magical beings. They take in what I offer with my hands. They seem to like it.
Today I was showing the trainer how amazing it is that I can suggest mini-microns of movement and these enormous half-ton animals respond, light on their feet as feathers. I was saying just look at this, when I do this, I’m hoping this mini-movement will encourage him to lengthen his back. Whereupon the blessed animal promptly stretched his head long and down and the trainer said, just look at that. He got it! a longer back.
Marvelous. Horse heaven.
catself 
I hope this latest remedy is the one that works for Bugs!
I have to confess that reading about Bugs’s travails has activated my own “stubborn belief-sets . . . that doubt,” not so much “the theory behind homeopathy” — I am agnostic about that as about so much else — as the ideology of it, the purity (an alarm-bell ringer in medicine as in governance), the shunning of most if not all things allopathic. Partly it’s just that I myself couldn’t tolerate the anxiety and uncertainty you have so patiently endured. I would want my own anxiety relieved sooner (because urinary symptoms in male cats are so frightening to me).
My belief goes toward seasoned old experienced vets with common sense, whatever their modality (and maybe your homeopathic vet is one such). There’s one here in Chapel Hill (where I am temporarily) to whom I took Buzz 7 years ago after he’d been treated at an emergency clinic for an acute kidney infection. He was better, but he still wasn’t eating. I took him to Dr. Diehl, who told me something I’d never heard before: that cats have trouble shaking off a fever even after the cause of the fever is gone. They sort of get locked in that groove. He gave Buzz a tiny dot of aspirin (which in even “low-dose” human quantities is deadly to cats) and, if I remember correctly, a tiny dot or shot of a steroid. That was the end of it. Buzz is now 14.
Incidentally, he had a chronic ear condition (lots of black wax) in one ear that, after reading about children’s one-ear chronic infections being treated this way, I banished by transferring the microbiome in his healthy ear’s wax with a Q-tip.
(A steroid is something I would normally try to avoid at all costs.)
OMG! Beautiful post!!!
Have a delicious week and a wonderful Monday!
I cannot decide which part of this post I love the best!!!! Such love, grace and beauty in all the beings. Thank you friend.
Oh Barney!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you know his urine PH? I find Jack and Eli are far more uncomfortable and likely to pee around when their PH gets too high..
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