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And we also have a new kitten Molly!

Molly

I was thinking he’d “crack my back” with an adjustment. Nope. He asked some questions, tested out my range of movement, and then brought out a strange looking instrument.

It looked like a cross between a door jam and a syringe. He said that dentists used to use them to crack teeth (maybe they still do?). The door-jam part could “aim” the slight jarring jolt it gave to a fairly precise location. You could adjust the strength of the jolt by twisting the thing…. wow, this is a really bad description. I need some vocabulary – hold on…

Ok, it’s variably called a Chiropractors’ reflex gun, tapper, muscle activator, adjuster, impact tool, or chiropractors’ adjustment tool (CAT). Evidently, it can release a force of up to 32 pounds to a very localized area. It belongs to the genre of “thrust adjustment” devices (I will resist the impulse to make a bad joke, I will resist…). He tapped a few spots on my back, tested my range again, tapped a few more spots.

And guess what? The pain subsided quite a bit, and I immediately had more range of movement.

I’m unclear about how this thing works, something about muscles firing and impulses and “resetting” muscle groups. I haven’t been able to find much on the theory, except for some verbiage about muscles that have gotten out of balance. Clearly I’ll have to do a little more research on this. It looks like you can get one of these for something like $150-200. I’ll be looking on EBay, etc. It really made a difference. Or maybe I’ll just use a hammer (grin).

I undid a lot of the good because I had to ready the house for Ben’s birthday party – including the cleaning, lugging supplies, doing decorations (including the helium balloons), moving a table outside, etc. I’m pretty creaky today after doing all that yesterday from 7-2.

If Ron hadn’t rescued me, I honestly don’t know how I could possibly have pulled it off. My back was slowly improving, but I was still waking up unable to turn my head to the left, unable to sit for any length of time without stiffening up, unable to move around much without spikes of pain, the whole thing.

I would have felt awful if Ben’s birthday party didn’t come off as planned because of Mommy’s back pain.

Now if only I could get a good massage…

Zoom was abandoned in the park that borders our property about a year ago. He adopted us.

He’s very shy, but he trusts us. When I go out on the deck with my morning cuppa java, he is usually waiting for me. He greets me with chirps and miraows and mutterings, and once I settle down and have my first sip he jumps into my lap and snuggles in.

We’ve gotten very attached.

I put flyers up around the neighborhood last night, and sent an email to the neighborhood list.

There have been multiple sightings of two/three coyotes in the neighborhood, and other cats have gone missing. Concerned, I once tried to take him indoors, but he climbed the walls. He is an outdoor cat.

When my stepson brought his dog Evie over – a pitbull (a very sweet and intelligent pitbull, but a pitbull nonetheless) – he zoomed up a tree immediately. Got himself down too. I was hoping that he would zoom out of danger.

My deepest fear at this point isn’t even that he is dead, but that he’s just injured and can’t find his way back home. I know that he’d be back if he could get here. I’ve searched the woods out back and across the street – nothing.

My hope is fading.

Hee-hee.

The real Zoom adopted us – I think he was a kitten tossout in the park. He is the sweetest cat I’ve ever known. He chirps and mutters to me, and asks permission to jump in my lap by touching my shin very gently with his paw and blinking at me.

I haven’t been able to get a good photo of him yet. He’s always on the move, hunting and exploring and zooming around. He’s very very shy of anyone except the three of us.

There is a big dark grey cat that terrorizes him a bit, but the opposum leaves him alone.

Fair enough (grin)

My cat Little One was “named” during the time that I was working on my MA in Philosophical Theology and Ethics. It was important to me to affirm “just a little one,” especially as a counterweight to all the reading and talk about a big, universal, all-knowing one.

I took her to the vet because she appeared to have a hole in her lower jaw, in which cat food was stuck. I couldn’t clean it out well enough. I remembered having my wisdom teeth out, and so I was thinking that she had probably lost a couple of teeth or something like that, and needed it to be irrigated and sewn up, and to be given a round of antibiotics.

In the 24 hours or so before I got her there, she really went downhill. Although she ate and drank, she was listless and seemed very frail. The vet said that the problem was actually a cancer in her jawbone that had burst out. She was also severely dehydrated and had hyperthyroid and was probably in the process of kidney failure. She couldn’t get enough water or food. Even heroic measures wouldn’t have helped for very long, and she was most likely in pain.

I decided that it was time to let her go. I could have taken her home – she probably wouldn’t have lasted another 48 hours – but after the experience of having done that with Pookha, I decided it would be better for it to be a quick and painless death. She cuddled in my lap, wrapped up in a little blanket and purring, for about 20 minutes. I talked to her and soothed her and said goodbye… Her heart stopped before the injection was even finished.

Tip – After you’ve participated in ending your beloved pet’s life, it is advisable to sit in the car for a bit (and cry or whatever else you need to do) before you try to drive, no matter how much you want to get out of there and go home. I almost got into an accident trying to leave the parking lot.

I’ll miss Little One. She was a rescue cat, and she only trusted a couple of other people besides me. She and Pookha (d. 2003) were there for me when I was away from family, in a new place with no friends. They were my family all through graduate school, and were still with me when I married and had a child. They were my kitty soul sisters.

We do have one more cat, Zoom, who adopted us last summer. He is a total sweetheart, but both my girls are gone.

Now I’m the only female in the household.

Our son Ben got to say goodbye to Pookha, but not to Little One. John was unhappy that he didn’t get to say goodbye – but he understood. It will be more difficult to explain to Ben.

P.S. Yes, it was very hard to explain to Ben why he couldn’t say goodbye. We talked about how you make decisions when there are a lot of things you want to do and you can’t do them all. He says he’s going to miss Little One, and he hopes that she finds Pookha (and Grandpa!) in “that space where Heaven might be.”