A Farewell to my Stevie Cat (and an important PSA)

After five and a half years of being my best friend, our kitty, Señor Stevie Nicks, succumbed to heart disease*.

If I had known it was coming I would have taken the time to have a few more days with him to do all the lovey things people do:

Chasing butterflies

Spinning in a field of flowers

 

Drinking milkshakes together

Going for boat rides in Central Park

Snuggling at home

   

But he was sick... and scared, and we lost him so suddenly. He was barely showing any signs of illness, still eating and playful, sleeping with his butt in our faces, drinking milkshakes, and rowing boats, but then he was gone just moments after getting him to the vet, leaving me and Mike shocked and devastated. I don't know how I have managed my whole life to avoid the up-close death of a pet with as many as I've had. It's a really horrible concept and I don't know who came up with it but I would like to unsubscribe, RIGHT NOW.  In the end, I am glad he chose us and we did everything we could to give him the best life possible. I love him so much and I will never forget my sweet Stevie cat.

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*Stevie died of cardiac arrest from an enlarged heart. He had a grain allergy, to the point that he couldn't even eat poultry that was fed grain or he would itch terribly and barf/poop/gain lots of weight. We found him a grain-free food that had all the nutrition he needed to keep him healthy, in theory. Unfortunately, I am finding now, much too late, that grain-free pet food currently on the market seems to contain some ingredient that might interfere with taurine uptake, which cats (and dogs) need to avoid heart damage. The FDA is investigating this, but there are things you can do in the meantime.

Please, if you are feeding your pet a grain-free diet have their taurine levels tested IMMEDIATELY (or as soon as you can afford to).

If they don't have allergies, stop feeding them a commercial grain-free diet. If they do, please, get their taurine tested and consult with a vet on how best to proceed. Once they have symptoms, which, in Stevie's case was only abdominal breathing, it is often too late, but the damage can be reversed if it is caught early enough with taurine supplementation. No one should go through what we're going through now, losing our pet so young, so please, share this information so every cat lives long enough to replace us as the dominant species on the planet.

Lessons Learned

I've learned a couple things in the past few days that I thought I should probably share with you all.

I've talked about the first one in the past, but apparently, it is still a lesson I need to learn as I lay here in buttloads of pain because my brain still hasn't learned the lesson that catching yourself when you're falling is often nearly as painful as just letting yourself fall.
This time, I was freezing so I very gracefully stepped out of my shower for a second to turn off the light which I forgot to turn off (see my last post), but the floor mat wasn't where it was supposed to be so I tried to scoot my foot over to it and pull it towards me so I didn't make as much of a puddly mess, but when I did that, I slid on the pool of water that was forming under my foot. I tried to catch myself with the towel bar, which wasn't happy with my antics and pulled completely off the wall.
At this point, I was doing a naked wet split, half in and half out of my bathtub, and I was falling forward with a pointy metal stick in my hand. Flailing, I tipped forward and was saved by a giant package of Costco toilet paper that was sitting underneath the towel rack, and I ended up planking on the toilet paper, to keep from breaking my leg on the edge of the bathtub. It was all pretty humiliating, and my husband slept through the entire ordeal, including me repairing the towel bar.
I keep having to remind myself when I am in awe of my pain levels that my shower acrobatics are entirely to blame.

I'm not gonna draw it. Feel free to submit your own artist's rendering.




And then I learned that sometimes, it's best to make a comment aloud into your empty house instead of commenting on the internet.
Usually, I keep my political commentary on my own Twitter page. I like to couple humor with fair points, but lately, I've been getting way too bold and when comments on safer accounts didn't blow up in my face, I branched out, and guys, I flew way too close to the sun.

I should have known better. It was a Bernie tweet. It's like MAGA jerkholes are just trolling his tweets all hours of the day and night waiting for some poor sap to comment so they can tell them that they're an asshole who needs to read a book and who has no idea of anything that has ever happened in the history of the world.  In fact, I'm kinda sure that that is exactly what they do.
When you see a comment section with absolutely NO comments that agree with the original post's point, THERE IS A REASON. Other people who agree already know this lesson, that's why they're not commenting. They know that these people will take any semi-valid point you make and purposefully misunderstand it so they can berate you because they need more love and understanding in their life and their moms should have hugged them more.

I just have to say, thank all the fluffy kittens in the world for Twitter's conversation mute option. There was just one guy trying to school me when I muted it, on the ridiculous notion that the current administration might consider cutting safety net provisions and that rich people might not want to just donate money to the government willy-nilly until some of those programs are enhanced. A masochistic curiosity brought me back to find that at least 15 people had joined in after I left to tell me that I was the stupidest person who ever existed and I should be ashamed to use words. I have no idea how many more people are going to join in, but it inspired me to take details about myself and my location off of the page, in case people decide to harass me for my humorously made point.
But lesson learned. Don't comment on Bernie Sander's twitter unless I have some sort of deep desire to be verbally abused.
I wish I had had something like that paper clip dude in Word that had stopped me in the first place.

I should have looked at kittens instead.

My Summer from Hell- Part Two: She's Going To Die

While I was waiting this summer to find out if I had cancer, the night after my cat got the cat equivalent of heat stroke, I got a call from my sister letting me know that she was in the ER with our mother who was about to be flown in a helicopter across Montana to a hospital in my city because she was having a cardiac event that was giving her trouble breathing. The next morning at 5:30 am, I got a call from the ICU doctor telling me to get my ass to the hospital to say goodbye because my mom was about to die.

Thankfully, the hospital is about 8 minutes from my house so I threw on clothes and booked it to the ICU where my mom was absolutely dying. Her lungs had filled with fluid and she was drowning, but she had refused intubation so they couldn't do much to help her.

I entered the room with a crowd of people around her, she was fighting them and was almost unrecognizable with a CPAP mask over her face, out of her mind from the lack of oxygen that was making its way into her blood.

They sort of pushed me forward and told me to talk to her. My mother and her mother didn't get along at all and it just so happened that it was my grandmother's yahrtzeit (that's Jewish for deathaversary, which I always thought was "yard side" as that's how it's pronounced). I grabbed my mom's hand and made her look at me, "It's 7-11, you're not allowed to die today! I'm sorry, but if you insist on dying, you're going to have to put it off so you don't share your death day with grandma."

And my mother is so spiteful that she immediately stopped dying. She did have to go have heart surgery immediately afterward to sustain the whole living deal, but as soon as I got there and reminded her to breathe and fight, she cleared her lungs and was able to be transported across Montana yet again to go to another hospital for her surgery.

It was that night when I got home from the hospital, that my computer died.

And then my husband's computer died, having just died and been replaced two months earlier.

And then I had a hysterectomy.

And then I had weird side effects from my hysterectomy like white-hot leg pain, and 96 hours of full body itching, and phantom uterine cramping that felt like it was tearing me in half.

And then my car died. Twice. (It was the alternator, and then the starter, in a week's time).

And then I found out my neutered cat was an attempted rapist when we let in a cute little neighborhood cat who'd been meowing at our door, then immediately put her out because my cat is horrible and gross, but then she stalked us for five whole nights, howling like she was using a bullhorn outside our windows which, of course, made Stevie howl inside at the top of his lungs for 5 whole nights.

And my state elected a reporter-slamming jerk.

And then I was diagnosed with a breast tumor which probably isn't cancer but might still be cancer.

And then my camera died.

And I was turned down for disability because I have a good attitude which, of course, precludes actually being sick.

And the jerks in our government spent the summer trying like hell to take away my health insurance, which would have meant that I wouldn't be able to be treated for all the Schrodinger cancer I had (or didn't have as the case may be), which I was constantly worried about, which of course made my illness all that much worse (and of course, they're still doing it).

So yeah, my summer had a lot of suckage that just kept on pooping down on me, like a way less appetizing fondue fountain at Golden Corral.

But now that I have a computer again, and  the use of a working camera and I feel slightly less like spending every waking moment binge-watching Netflix (almost done with all eight seasons of Dexter) and playing Candy Crush on my tablet to drown my woes, it is my plan to make up for lost time with content galore, which I hope you will come back for and share.

I also have an actual smartphone now (for the time being, seeing how things go for me) so I'm all over social media as "cheeseblarg" and I'm actually posting stuff, so go ahead and follow me!

So what days of the week are you most looking forward to something to laugh at? Let me know so I can get on setting some kind of schedule, please.

My Summer from Hell - Part One: The Surgery

I just got a computer, yesterday, after 5 months of being without so my first task after restoring all my files and programs is posting for you guys. Thank you, Black Friday sales for decent computers cheap enough I can afford. The last time that I was without dedicated computer access for this long was in 1994, my freshman year of college, but most people didn't have computers then, so it wasn't quite as jarring then as it is now, especially when my entire life exists online.

So I wrote on Cheeseblarg's facebook page a while ago that y'all would find it hard to believe all the shit I had been through this summer, for those of you who aren't following along there, and you probably won't, but I assure you, it's all true, and it's absolute bullshit.

My wish for the upcoming year is that I never have to hear the words, "We're afraid it might be cancer," ever a-fucking-gain from a doctor. This summer started with a mysterious mass in my cervix. I went to the doctor in June because I was experiencing this weird feeling of all of my insides dropping when I stood up for more than 15 minutes which in itself is pretty alarming, but it was accompanied with sweating and feeling like I was going to pass out. Once it got to the point that I couldn't stand long enough to shower without feeling like I was dying, I decided I should probably do something about it, so I bucked up and went to have my lady bits probed by a stranger. I mean, she was a professional, not just some random person on the street with a speculum and a hankering for some gynecological exploring.

Since scraping my lady bits turned up nothing, we went to the next step of sonic spelunking. This revealed the aforementioned "mysterious mass" and then we went to the next step of traumatizing me forever and ever, amen.

Frankly, the whole business gives me more ammunition for the idea that there is a grand conspiracy of hatred for women in this world because I cannot believe that any kind of human rights coalition would allow the equivalent to a cervical/uterine biopsy to be done to any man without general anesthetic. And I've heard that testicular biopsies are done under local and still hurt like hell, but I'm arguing that that is not really equivalent, because testes are not muscles that try to slam shut when you drill pieces out of them causing your entire body to try to escape from what's going on in your nether regions. It was really awful.  So awful in fact, that before I even left that appointment, I made plans with my doctor, before the results came back, to have my uterus and accompanying accouterments removed as soon as possible so I would no longer have a cervix so that procedure could never ever happen to me again.

And my uterus was mint, guys, never been used, though it had been remodeled monthly since I was about 10, so I don't know if I could have gotten full price for it. Anyway, it's totally lost its value now because I took it out of the box. At the end of August, I had them remove my reproductive organs (though I kept my ovaries so they can grow cysts and be generally annoying to keep me off of hormone replacement therapy), and I finally finished healing last month after one of the holes popped open in a cinematic fashion when we thought they were all almost closed.
So that's the story of how I spent 3 months worrying that I had cancer before having a hysterectomy. I didn't have uterine or cervical cancer, but my cervix was faulty and if I had kept it, I would have continued to need biopsies regularly and it would have continued to make me feel like I was dying, and frankly, I wasn't planning on using it anyway, and I'm much happier to have it gone.

Spending all the time in a gynecologist's office, of course, led to appointments with mammography. And instead of just being routine, of course, I got my next, "it might be cancer." I was supposed to be going tomorrow, in fact, to have a lumpectomy to ensure that the tumor they found in my breast during the first biopsy is completely non-cancerous, but I got an ear infection, so now I get to add two more weeks to my 3 months of waiting to find out that this one is nothing too.

And I know that countless people who aren't so lucky would love to be told that it is nothing repeatedly, but having six months of your body constantly trolling you that is mutating and is gonna kill you only to have it yell "PSYCH" after you've had surgeries and near constant stress diarrhea, is relieving as hell, but also really fucking annoying that you had to go through all of that in the first place when your body could have just stopped growing benign tumors in the first damned place.

So that's part one of my trauma. I'm thinking I can wrap it up in one other post, hopefully, next week.

Safety Net, More Like Safety NOT.

I have been contacted by at least 4 of my 5 current medical providers in the past week chastising me for being an irresponsible jerk. The problem is, I am totally responsible and also, that kind of judgment is super bad for my health, guys, stop it.

As I've said before, I'm poor. Yes, we have the sweet sweet financial aid currently, that makes life so much more enjoyable, but since that is a gift from the government (that they expect to get back someday), and it only goes for basic living stuff, we still receive bare minimum safety net services, like Medicaid (Thanks, Obama), and when you have social services, there is a whole lot of hoop jumping that comes along with it.

And I'm not even complaining. I'm getting something incredibly valuable for free, basically. I mean, I paid into the system for a decade before coming to need these services, but I am almost entirely fine with having to fill out endless paperwork and report my every change to these agencies, because basically they are keeping me alive, and for that, I would do an assload of paperwork, man.

The problem is, I did my paperwork. A week after I moved. I went onto their website like their paperwork instructed me to, and I changed my Primary Care Provider, like they told me to, and I waited a month until my new coverage kicked in to make any doctor's appointments, like a super responsible girl, even though I desperately needed to see those doctors then, only to find out that the website we were all told to use, doesn't seem to be attached to anything!

Even worse, after getting the situation squared away by calling their hotline, I asked to make a complaint about the website not working and here's what I was told:

We know that there's a problem. We are working diligently to fix the issue that is making it so that the website collects data, tells you it registered you, but then spits the information out into the ether. It's a particular problem with the medical center that serves your area. Unfortunately, we can't tell those providers that this is an issue we're having so they stop chastising you because we have no way of knowing that you actually tried to sign up, you could be making it up and this whole problem could just be that you people are liars. This problem... that we've been trying to deal with for at least 3 months now... that countless people have complained about. Have you tried not being poor?

I might be paraphrasing slightly. Anyway, it's frustrating enough that I've written this novella about it. There's the whole myth of the Welfare Queen living high on benefits from the government, but being humiliated on a regular basis because technology is hard for the government doesn't feel very royal to me. All I'd really like is for Montana Medicaid's IT department to contact my providers and tell them there's an issue with the website and that their clients aren't just sitting around eating bonbons and laughing in the face of responsibility. Okay, maybe I would like some bonbons too, but I would really like them to take responsibility for their errors, instead of putting it all on the poor people who are trying to do the right thing on a broken system.

buy me bonbons!

Lizard Girl- Beauty Vlogger

So I have been wanting to create some videos of me putting on makeup in fancy ways, but I have Behcet's Syndrome (BS for short) and BS* is fucking up my face.

No matter what product I use, my face is dry and scaly. From basically forehead to jawline, I look like I'm molting. I've tried using moisturizers but they all just irritate my skin further, so I get blisters on my face in addition to scales. And yes, I've tried sensitive skin moisturizer and natural remedies with no man-made chemicals; it's all a no go. Sometimes, even water is too much for it.

When I brought up the idea of makeup tutorials, my skin was clear and soft for the first time in... well, most of my adult life, thanks to the wonders of chemotherapy**. But for some reason now, on the same dosage, my skin wants to pretend it's an alligator, so until I can adjust my dosage to the point that it works, I can either hold off on making videos, or I can embrace a new identity:

*quite the apropos abbreviation
** Chemotherapy is an accepted treatment for BS, which helps my body to stop attacking its own vascular system. I'm not just taking dangerous medicine to have nice skin, though it is a plus... when it actually works.

Neural Network Cookbook- Now Illustrated!

Janelle Shane, a research scientist, has been teaching cooking to a neural network. A neural network is basically Skynet if you didn't know. After letting it look at tens of thousands of cookbook, she set it free to create its own recipes, the best of which you can see here. Taking inspiration from the list, I have some cookbook illustrations for you:

to see additional cookbook illustrations 

My hole is gonna be HUGE!

I’ve been waiting for a while to discuss this, because this friend of mine in high school once told me about this theory she called “The Point of Light” and the idea is that when you are excited about something, the more you talk about it, the less likely it is to happen, and since I grew up in a household where that was basically the rule, the idea stuck. I know that seems like it has nothing at all to do with lights, but it does if you imagine your anticipation to be a pinprick in the dark that lets light in, and the more you share it with others, the bigger the hole in the darkness gets and apparently bigger holes are less appealing to the gods of wish granting. I think her theory might have been slut-shaming me. Anyway, now that Exciting Event I Didn’t Want to Jinx ™ has happened, (and not without a ton on ridiculousness attached to it) I am free to talk about it.

I moved AND I’m not exceedingly poor anymore, thanks to the government (for the time being, as long as President Dickface and his Zany Cabinet ™ don’t fuck up financial aid for old-assed people going to college. That would be my husband, not me.) Mr. Rose is a college student now and we are living in an adorable tiny house on a college campus in Montana with our cat and a veritable menagerie of woodland creatures. It’s adorable. A gopher cut me off as I was going to get in my car yesterday. Bunnies frolic on our front lawns. It could only get cuter if they talked, or carried tiny baskets with them (makes a note to buy tiny baskets).

But the not being really really poor part is exciting for me. When I’ve said I was poor, I mean, we had no actual income for three straight years and very little for years before that. Like, my mom gave us money to cover things we really needed during that time (‘cause who wants to live with a person who needs - but can’t afford - tampons), and the government paid for our food, but otherwise, I didn’t touch my debit card for literally years. I was actually confused when I had to use it again because ATM technology has changed so much in the last 5 years or so since I last used one. And with the influx of money that I now have access to, I have discovered a deep and passionate love for makeup. I want all the makeup. I don’t have all the makeup, and I should probably curb my appetite for it since, holy shit, makeup these days is so expensive, but it is all so pretty.

That’s not to say that I’m good at makeup. I’m not super girly, but I am so drawn to it. And with my art background, I’ve got an idea of what I want my face to look like, but using makeup brushes is just not like painting. It’s hard, y’all. I’ve been watching tutorials on youtube though and mostly it leads me to wonder how is it that I can integrate beauty tips into a humor blog so that Urban Decay and Too Faced, et al, decide that sending me free makeup is a good business decision.

How many of you are into makeup? Would any of you be into seeing what colors I put on my face some time?

Forget Mensez, Here's Period Pocket!

If you have not seen this innovative new product, Mensez**, let me introduce you to it.

Dr Daniel Dopps, Kansas Chiropractor, is marketing a new way to control the ickiness of menstruation... literally gluing the labia shut so your period doesn't leak out. Genius, right!?

According to his Facebook page (which sadly has been taken down already, but this link works), women are idiots for not thinking of this before.

It's such an easy concept, you just apply this "Lip-stick" (get it, it sticks your "lips" together) comprised of amino acids and stuff and then it holds in all your oozing blood flow until you have to pee. Then, some magical formulation of glue that doesn't react to the moisture in blood lets go with the power of pee, and all the blood rushes out where he claims you never even have to look at it or touch it, which seems a pretty amazing claim, since he also says you need to clean up "down there" and apply more of this glue and then hold your labia together, presumably, until it dries enough to stick your junk together.

While this seems like a great idea, I think my idea, Period Pocket, will get the job done in a much easier and quicker way! With just a few pieces and a little glue, you can use your labia to capture all your blood without having to reapply any pesky glue. Allow me to illustrate!

The metal structure to the pocket is magnetic so you don't have to worry about movement making the pockets come unsnapped.

And, Period Pocket doesn't only have to be used during your period. You can also use it to store spare change or small snacks at other times of the month. Also helps with incontinence and overactive bladder*.


Of course, if you can't afford the low low price of $19.99 each month, you can always improvise with a plastic Zip-lock bag and some Krazy Glue. Just cut off the bottom of the bag, glue the opening to your vulva, and then yellow and blue makes green!




*may not actually help with incontinence or overactive bladder. It is really just a deconstructed coin purse.


** This is a real product, with a real patent. Or moreso, it is being marketed as a real product though it hasn't actually been formulated or tested yet because it is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever conceived. Honestly, gluing your labia together...

Why I am a careful and cautious driver.

I think most people can relate to this, but when you're wearing plus-sized jeans and you're poor, it hits home even harder. Every time I watch a medical drama where they are cutting people's clothes off, I gasp in horror and consider only wearing sweatpants in my car from now on.

Dead, dead, deadski.

My best friend of 14 years died in November. She was hilarious and smart and beautiful and a fantastic writer and it's really hard living without her. It's probably harder for her eight year old daughter who she left behind while she lingered in a coma for 6 months, while we all waited, some with more hope than others, to see if she would finally wake up. But damn it, it's hard for me.

When I think of her being gone, I think, "my Tracey is dead," but when I mention it elsewhere in the world, I change it to, "she passed away," or she "succumbed to her illness" or some other euphemism, not because I need to say it, but because I think people will somehow think I'm a jerk for plainly stating she is no longer alive.

I never hear anyone else using dead in conjunction with the death of a loved one. Does everyone else want to use it, but feel the same as I do? Like they have to make it into a poem to talk about it? Like other people might break, or think you just don't care if you plainly say, "Tracey died"?

Is it the proximity of the death? My previous best friend, Aimee, died 10 years ago, (I might add at this point, I'm a little afraid to claim another best friend as this seems to be a trend), and saying, "My friend died 10 years ago" doesn't feel quite as jarring. Does the fact that Tracey just fell through the veil (to borrow from the imagery of Harry Potter, which we both loved), make it seem that she could be right back if only I don't make it plain to others where she is? Is saying "she's dead" like a lock that keeps her trapped in the next world, where as "she passed away" allows for her to change her mind and pop back in, like she went out to smoke a cigarette with Jesus and changed her mind?

My Tracey is dead. She died because of the weird autoimmune disease we both have (had?) and I miss her every day. I miss her when I watch Seinfeld and when I read Stephen King books, and when I see the previews for the new Harry Potter movie that she'll never see unless a next world actually exists and has the same entertainment offerings as ours. I love her, and I always will, and I hate feeling that I have to compose a poem to lessen the sorrow of her loss for other people every time I want to mention that I had a friend and I don't any more.

The Real Reason Cats Knock Cups Over

I am sure you have all seen the hilarious sign that reads: "Please don't leave drinks unattended [the cat's an asshole]!"

What if cats aren't the assholes?