Blanket & Books & Ms. Sylvia

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The baby blanket is coming along nicely. I'm doing the cross-stitching now and it is starting to look cute. I need to get back to the life sweater. It just sits there nagging me to do some more work on it. I keep finding more patterns that I want to try. That and the yarn. Overwhelming.

I finished reading "Strong in the Broken Places" by Richard Cohen. I had read his first book which was about his experience with multiple sclerosis and colon cancer. This one is about five people who have chronic disease, two of whom have terminal chronic diseases. When I was working I was always interested in patients and their families who lived their entire lives with chronic diseases. This is an excellent book for any caregiver, actually for everyone. It helps you recognize that these are people and you have to look past the disease.

I think this is the second book of this series, the books that the TV show "Bones" is based on. I love Bones.

Sylvia is a pretty skiddish dog. She is friendly, nonaggressive, cute as a button but is easily scared. She has a very hard time with the planes that fly over our house and as City Island is in the flight pattern to LaGuardia Airport that is a pretty frequent occurance. Sometimes they come as often as every two minutes. As the weather gets warmer and the windows are opened more, Ms. S. is often found with her head under the couch. Sometimes when the planes are coming in one after another her anxiety becomes so pathetic and she is trembling and trying to find a place to hide. When I took her to the vet for her regular check-up we discussed it and decided to put her on a very low dose of Prozac hoping the anti-anxiety effect would help her. She had been on it for ten days Sunday. Monday morning about 4A she had an "incident". I woke up to her crying and moving all over the bed, something definitely wrong. She either flipped or fell off the bed, I don't know which. By then I got the light on and realzied that she couldn't stand. She simply couldn't get up and she kept trying and falling and trying and falling. You could tell that she was so scared. After about five minutes, she was back to normal. Off to the vet in the morning and we decided the first logical thing to do was to discontinue the Prozac so we'll see what happens. We are thinking that she probably had a focal seizure brought on by the Prozac lowering her seizure threshold. She has been fine ever since. Now we will have to figure out how to handle the planes when it is warm enough to open the windows again.