Dante's Update

I want to thank everyone for their well wishes. I really appreciate them!

I would have posted yesterday but wasn't ready to talk about it yet. Don't worry, Dante is home and running around like a crazy cat. But he still has his bad tooth. The vet didn't want to do the surgery.

It was a combination of a couple things. Dante wouldn't calm down in the cage, he was panting and breathing hard all day. They didn't want to anesthetize a cat breathing like that. But that wasn't the main reason. He had an EKG before the surgery to check his heart, and it wasn't good. In fact, it was the worst that it's ever looked. The vet described to me what he thought Dante's heart was doing, simply, it was trying to expel blood from the heart when new blood hadn't yet been pumped into it. He showed me the EKG and the irregularities. He said he hasn't seen this kind of abnormality in a cat before and that it was more than just a murmur. No one there (there is more than one vet) felt comfortable putting Dante under with his heart like that. A tooth wasn't worth him dying on the table. So even though I feel that he would have been fine, they didn't want to take the risk since he was so worked up. In fact, they were so concerned about the EKG they didn't even really care about the tooth anymore.

So what are my options now? Well, not much. Here are my choices.

1) Do nothing.
2) Tell them to go ahead with the surgery no matter what.
3) They can bring in a vet specializing in tooth removal so it can done as fast as possible
4) Go back to see the internist that Dante sees about his heart once a year and get him checked out again.
5) Send him to a feline cardiac specialist to determine what specific heart disease he has because there may be a treatment that could help. And the specialist could determine the best way to handle putting him under.

Of course the best option is number 5. And the vet would recommend number 5, because as he put it, he would hate to have Dante develop problems in the future, only to learn later that they could have been prevented, or at least delayed. But of course, the list is in order of least cost to highest cost. A visit to the cardiologist would start between $500 and $1000 and that just isn't something I can afford right now. So as he put it, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. He is going to get an opinion from the cardiologist for me for free. The cardiologist visits his office about once a week and he'll show her the EKG to see what she thinks. Then he'll call me.

When I think about it, cats never used to have teeth removed when there was a problem, and they did just fine. It would just come out when it rotted out. I know that sounds horrible. And the tooth eventually will become painful to him, but it will come out on its own. I don't think getting the tooth pulled is worth losing him. But I also know that I can't avoid anesthetizing him forever. Sooner or later, he will have to be put under.

My last cat died of feline leukemia virus. He lived a long life for a cat with that disease, over 10 years, but at the end he wasn't good at all. It was hard knowing that he could have passed away at anytime, with no warning.

And now I feel that I'm facing a similar situation again. The difference is, Dante's might be treatable. Who knows when his heart will become a serious problem for him. I try not to think about it and enjoy all the time I have with him, but every time I go to the vet for his shots and check-up I'm reminded of his problem. Veterinary medicine has come a long way but sometimes I think it is better not to know. We had barn cats at home all the while I was growing up. They never went to the vet, we never worried about them. And they lived happy lives, some very long lives. Veterinary medicine can help keep a pet healthy and happy for a long time. But there is nothing worse knowing that there is medicine and technology out there that can help - and I can't afford it.

I can't help but think that if I had a real job I'd be able to help him now, and not later when it might be too late.

Wish me and my cat luck

Tomorrow my cat Dante has surgery to remove a bad tooth. For most cats this is a minor procedure, no big deal. But not for him. He has a heart condition labeled "feline intermediate cardiomyopathy," in other words, he has atrial enlargement to the heart resulting in a heart murmur. He is on a pill-a-day which has helped immensely, at his last EKG and blood work he had a barely detectable murmur, the enlargement was down to normal size, and the blood work was normal. However, there is an increased risk of complications from anesthesia because of his heart condition. His normal vet didn't want to do the surgery initially until he talked to Dante's heart vet who said it should be okay, as long as they didn't use certain drugs.

So in all likelihood, he'll be okay. He runs around like a crazy cat so I know he feels fine. But I'm still worried. My mom says he'll be fine and I'm sure he will be but I can't help it. There is always that possibility that something will go wrong. My parents are coming out tonight so they can drive us to the vet tomorrow morning to drop him off, then Fiance and I will pick him up in the evening.

So I know I'm rambling but I'm worried. I just can't imagine my life without him. So wish him (and me!) luck, put us in your prayers and thoughts. I'm sure he'll be fine, but I can't relax until it's over with and he's home tomorrow evening.

This is him laying in his favorite position!

A day of microscopy work, ending with a wet cat

Today was a day full of microscopy work. I spent the first several hours (9am-12pm) in a small dark room, sitting in a chair that was too short for the scope, scanning over several slides that I've looked at before. I had to send some images to Geeka today and I was determined to find what we were looking for. I think I looked at every single cell on those slides. But success!! I sent her the pictures today so hopefully they are what she needs.

I must admit I was also a bit selfish because by spending time scanning her slides I put mine off a couple hours. I was afraid to look at them. I have been working on optimizing this experiment for a year now (at least that long). Normally slide staining and microscopy work is straightforward but my experiment has several variables that make it a bit tricky. Some parts of the staining became complicated, as well as the experiment that was to be stained. Several times I've thought "This is the one. This is the last time I will ever have to do this experiment!" But every time something different needs to be worked out. This time I felt that this really was the last one. I had done preliminary staining a couple weeks ago and everything looked beautiful. The images came out so good that the Kiwi asked if he could put them on his new web page. My hopes were very high this time.

All that was left was to run the experiment then stain as I did during the trial run, just with one extra antibody in the mixture. Unfortunately, it is the pain-in-the-ass antibody. It is an anti-egfp conjugated to AlexaFluor 488. For those of you who don't know antibodies, this one is looking for a green fluorescent protein. But the color of the antibody (the 488) is also green. So how do I know the antibody concentration is right and is actually binding to what it is supposed to be binding to, when it is green antibody binding to a green protein? For various reasons my committee wanted me to do this, mainly because we thought some of the egfp was being degraded within the cell so hopefully using the egfp antibody would help detect more. But who knows? That is just one complicated aspect to an experiment that should be straightforward.

So the moment came. I was done with Geeka's and I put on my first slide. A little less egfp expression than I would have like but that's okay, that has nothing to do with the staining, it was 'one of those other variables.' I had three colors to look at. . . . and only one looked good, that was the egfp. The organelle staining didn't work. It was very faint, if I cranked up the setting on the scope I could make out the organelle but the background was too high for publication purposes. And the membrane marked I used was extremely faint on the conditions where I used the anti-egfp antibody. Which makes NO sense.

Once again I am disappointed. I'm starting to wonder if this will ever work at all. It's stressing me out. My project doesn't have enough substance if this doesn't work. There are just so many variables. When to add the inhibitor, what concentration to make the inhibitor, how long to leave the cells together, it goes on and on. I'm just so frustrated. I told the Kiwi I'm dropping the egfp antibody. If that doesn't work, I don't know what else to do. I also have a lot of flow data to analyze which I've been putting off. It is essential to my dissertation and I just don't want to deal with it if it didn't work either.

The problem is I'm running out of time. I know I could work these out if I had more time to optimize all the variables but I need to finish asap before my funding is cut off. So we are trying to do as much as we can, as fast as we can. And my boss really isn't into "optimizing" things, he just wants to jump into it and doesn't understand why I can't get it to work.

But enough of that, it depresses me. On a brighter note, Scope Man, the head of the imaging facility and committee member, requested some live-cell microscopy movies to show at a meeting he's going to in Moscow. He's not talking about my research but the technology that collected the data. I spent the afternoon trying to get the movies the size that he needed them, less than 20MB. Since he gave me only a few hours notice, and it just happened to be the day I wasn't in lab, I couldn't get them to him before he left. Since his talk is on Thursday he said to email them. Well, no matter what, the smallest I could make the movies was 80MB. So one of his employees suggested I put them on their website and he could download them from their server. So that's what I did, hopefully it will work. It's exciting that he wants to share some of the stuff that took so long to perfect. Even if he does forget to mention whose data it actually is that he's showing!

And the wet cat . . . while I was relaxing in the tub, trying to read a magazine, Dante was staring at me, of course because I wasn't paying attention to him. Sophie wanted to see what he was looking at so she jumped up on the rim and slide right into the water. All the way up to her neck. I had wanted to grab her and hold her next to the tub so Fiance could get a towel but she was able to jump out too fast. It was all Dante could do to get out the way and try to stay dry. There was water everywhere! That small cat soaked up a lot of water. Water all over the bathroom, down the hall, in the bedrooms. We managed to get her and together dried her off. She yowled and growled the entire time. Dante wanted to know what all the noise was about so he kept sticking his face up to hers while we were drying her. She was not thrilled. When we got her mostly dry we gave them both treats. They had a rough day, they were locked in rooms because the air conditioning dude was supposed to come then this happens. And he didn't show, so they have to be shut-in tomorrow again.

An exciting end to just another Tuesday. Life is never boring with cats. That's why I love them. No matter what kind of day I'm having, they always make me smile.