Sunday, October 5, 2008

[The Wisdom of a Distracted Mind] At the close of an enjoyable, lazy day...

Standoff...
First, the picture...

It should be noted that, inside the house, Acacia (DeafCat) and Harding (DogCat) are pretty tolerant of one another. Actually, Harding is the tolerant one, and Acacia is the one who likes to set boundaries and torment Harding. If he comes in the basement to join me in my man cave and sit on my lap to get his fat head scratched, she will take a position at the top of the stairs, and once the scratchfest is finished, Harding will not go up the stairs unless I am there to chaperone him.

Still, they're pretty good together, and they'll both hangout in the neutral zone of the kitchen floor together when one of them is hungry. Sometimes, inside the house, they even play. Of course, with Harding being the size that he is (very big), and Acacia being the size that she is (very small), those little playful brawls usually end with her being swatted and sent tumbling across the floor.

Now, that being said, when they get outside, Acacia goes into full-blown bitch mode, and she treats Harding as though she doesn't even know him. She will hiss and growl and make any number of feeble kitty protests at this black and white blob of fur wandering around HER GODDAMN YARD! And, of course, Harding is just flat-out confused.

So, what you see here is, by all definitions, a stand off. And, of course, it's funny as hell.

In the confrontation you see here, for me to settle it, I had to actually go and pick up the furry lummox, Harding, and carry him past Acacia to the back door. Once there, they both trotted into the house, had a little bite, and then started chasing one another up and down the stairs in a mad moment of kitty fun.

Yeah. It's weird, but I gave up trying to figure out the lives of cats a long, long time ago.

Aside from that, I've decided to stop with the DogCat/DeafCat stuff. I think I've gotten bored with it, but it may spring up from time to time. The thing is, I didn't name either of these cats (and I sure as hell would never name anything "Acacia"), but in some weird way, those names do actually fit. Acacia fits about as well as anything named Acacia could, I suppose. But, the name Harding?

That fits him perfectly. Seriously, when I hear that name, I just think of a sort of lumbering oaf who just seems to move about as slow as possible, and let's face it, if my cat Harding had a soundtrack, it would include a lot of slow and lilting tuba solos.


And now for the public service announcement part of today's entry:

In the comments on this entry I made last Thursday, Dawn asks:
Can you try plaquenil like I did? It really helped some...
Now, normally, I'd answer in an email, but considering the gravitas of the answer, and the fact that I know I'm not the only one in the world suffering with the disease I've got, I figure it's best to just slap this tidbit of information up here in the hopes that it may actually save someone a hell of a lot of trouble.

The quick answer, Dawn, is no. I can't try Plaquenil.

And now, the why:

Plaquenil does very, very, very bad things to people with psoriasis. There have been many cases where Plaquenil has caused a flare-up in psoriasis so violent and extensive that the patient had to be placed in a medically induced coma for a good, long while in order to get a handle on it and keep the patient's heart from giving out as a result of that insane level of inflammation.

Seriously. Anything with even the slightest hint of quinine can make things flare up. For example, if I drink a gin and tonic or two, the next day I can expect things to be kind of uncomfortable as I wind up with some burning, itching spots here and there. And, that's from just a smidge of tonic water since, let's face it, when it comes to gin, I am a big fan of the long pour. I can't imagine the shape I'd be in if I chugged a bottle of tonic water.

The scary thing is that some folks, like me, develop arthritis before they wind up with the miserable skin lesions. And, most of the time, that arthritis is misdiagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. One of the favored treatments of RA is.... anyone?

Yep. Plaquenil.

So, for all you psoriasis sufferers out there, do yourselves a favor and keep a note just in case some out-of-touchdoctor tries to prescribe Plaquenil to you. I've had several try, but most are reasonably current. Still, you should be careful.

Anyway, other than that, I hope all your weekends rocked. Did anyone do anything fun?

-DP

--
Posted By Dan to The Wisdom of a Distracted Mind at 10/05/2008 10:11:00 PM

No comments:

Post a Comment