…and failing miserably, I should add (add to the post’s title, that is).
But this time it’s because of something positive, VERRRRRY positive.
Our (now) eldest cat, Piccolo, is definitely feeling better. He’s not out of the woods yet, but, e.g., yesterday, while we were having lunch, he suddenly showed up in the dining room, followed closely by his little black shadow, Prezzemolo (our youngest). He’d been refusing to come downstairs ever since we got back from the vet hospital, you see…
This seemingly small event was a HUGE event in our household, one that made us beam with happiness for the first time in days (we lost our eldest cat last Monday and have been absolutely miserable…)…I rushed into the kitchen to get Piccolo a treat…and a treat for the other cats, too, of course!!!
Today Piccolo has been downstairs twice. Boy, I hope this positive trend continues!
But what, I hear you ask, does that have to do with my research (post title)?
Well, in the past few days, whenever I go into my study, Piccolo follows me and gets up on the desk, using the cat tower hammock (see photo no. 2) to hoist himself up.
Once on the desk, he always positions himself between me and the keyboard, staring lovingly into my face. When he’s tired of being scratched behind the ears and cooed at, he lies down on top of the keyboard and/or the mouse.
Eh!
There’s no way I can do any work at the computer with Piccolo in the way, as you may be able to tell from these photos.
And so…no research.
Oh well, I guess I can take a break, although it seems like ages since I last wrote a proper research post…But tomorrow is my birthday, and I have plans to do absolutely…nothing…Just a romantic lunch out with Stefano up in the hills around Florence…
Tomorrow, by the way, I’m turning 56, an age I never thought I’d reach after finding out I’d progressed from MGUS to SMM in the fall of 2005.
That was almost TWELVE years ago, though, and hey, I did make it to 56, beating the statistics…
And I also plan to keep on going…at least for a while!!! 😉

First of all, many many many thanks to everyone who’ve sent, and are still sending!, best wishes for my cats’ recovery…on the blog, via private email, AND on Facebook. I appreciate it so much!
They’re both home. Yes, yes, that’s great news, but we’re still not out of the woods, yet. In fact, far from it. Let’s start with Puzzola, our eldest.
I brought her home on Wednesday afternoon, after just one night spent in the vet hospital. Since she’s become so dreadfully skinny, the vets wanted to do a bunch of tests on her, and it was just easier to have them done there, especially the early morning tests. But, duuuh, she was NOT happy there, at all.
When I brought her home the following day, you could almost see the joy in her face. She leaped out of her carrier like a kitten, walked–a bit unsteadily but purposefully–into the kitchen right over to one of the water bowls, and then she proceeded to drink like a camel after a month in the desert. I know, I know that isn’t a good sign. But after all, tests show that she has a UTI, so I hope her high kidney numbers will go down once we’ve treated that. And the drinking might be caused by the UTI…
But before dinner she gave us a BIG scare. Huge. She began walking around like a drunk person, and it seemed that she couldn’t keep her head up, so at one point her head was hanging on one side, then on the other. That was freaky!
After of bit of that head flopping, she almost collapsed on our cotto floor and stayed there for a while, motionless. We watched her like a pair of hawks.
She finally got up and walked over to us, I’d say semi-normally. She has had a few episodes like that since she’s been home, but they aren’t as frequent and don’t last as long. The vet says it’s a neurological problem that might be connected to the fact that she didn’t really get any sleep in the hospital. Hope so. I haven’t seen her do any “flopping” today, although she does collapse on the floor and play dead once in a while. I think it’s her racing heartbeat (caused by the hyperthyroidism…which has gotten a bit worse).
Otherwise, she’s fine. She’s very loving and wants to be petted often. And she jumps on chairs to reach the dining room table, so her will to live is simply amazing.
One important point: I asked the vet is Puzzola were suffering, and she said no, she didn’t think so. She added that this condition will make her tired, but that’s it. Okay, good.
Moving on to Piccolo, well, when he came home on Thursday evening, to be honest I didn’t think he would live very much longer. His liver isn’t in great shape, and then we have the problem of his spinal column, which is the cause of all his pain (at least, that’s what the vets think). The painkiller they were administering at the hospital had turned him into little more than a vegetable. However, he was in NO PAIN on that painkiller (a derivative of morphine), so I suppose there IS a positive aspect to being a vegetable…
After I brought him home, he went and lay down in the cat litter box (see photo, which I just took…). He’s been in and out of that specific litter box, and I don’t understand why, really. Of course I’m keeping it SUPER CLEAN. Anyway…I hope he will leave the icky box once he begins recovering a bit more. To think that he has so many comfy cat beds on the bed in the guest room! And of course we’d be super thrilled if he slept with us! Oh well…
After he got home from the hospital, he didn’t eat for almost 24 hours. The vet told me to stop giving him the painkiller, to see if he’d start eating again. Note: I’m giving him a shot of cortisone every morning.
Anyway, yesterday evening, Stefano and I still couldn’t get him to eat anything and had to force-feed him, using a syringe (without the needle, of course!) full of watery wet food. That was really not fun…not for him, not for us.
On a positive note, today went much better. 🙂
This morning he began eating on his own. I was close to tears, seriously close to tears…of joy, of course.
Now, I still have to take his food upstairs to him (he hasn’t been downstairs since I brought him home). Then I have to place the food right under his nose and coax him to eat it (sometimes using my finger…he will lick ANYTHING off my finger, normally), and this takes quite a while. No problem, I’m a very patient mom.
But hey, the good news is that he’s EATING ON HIS OWN…And drinking a bit of water, too, so I probably won’t have to give him an i.v. And I also don’t think we will have to force-feed him again. YAY!
I just don’t know what’s going to happen…Only time will tell.
One thing is clear, though: I will NOT let either cat suffer.
That’s what I would want for myself, too: NO SUFFERING.
But right now I really feel that I will be able to pull both of them out of this dark tunnel and back to their usual selves and routines.
Anyway, that’s the cat update…sorry it’s so loooong!!!
Take care, everyone!!! 🙂

This is a post about our two eldest cats: Puzzola, who is between 16 and 17 years old, and Piccolo, who turned 14 in April. They’re both in the vet hospital right now.
It’s a long story, but essentially they both started doing poorly about two weeks ago. Piccolo slowly began losing his phenomenal appetite and spending way too much time motionless on his cat bed (on the guest room bed).
I took him to the clinic as soon as I realized that something was very wrong. The vets found that he has a problem with his spinal column (I forget the name of this condition, but it has to do with calcifications of the vertebrae), which makes it very painful for him to move around, poor dear. Also, about five years ago, Piccolo had a terrible bout of pancreatitis that almost killed him, and we were told that he would always have issues in that area. Now, in fact, thanks to an ultrasound, the vets have spotted some sort of lesion on his pancreas and a nodule on his liver. His liver is also not doing very well. In short, he’s a bit of a mess…
And Puzzola, who has been suffering from hyperthyroidism since 2013, recently began eating less and less, no matter what delectable foods I cooked/offered to her.

This morning I decided to take her to the vet hospital, too.
She is now in a cage next to Piccolo, so at least our two kitties are together.
We’ll know more tomorrow, after more tests are done on both of them. Puzzola is going to have a heart ultrasound tomorrow morning, and Piccolo is going to have a biopsy of that lesion…Yikes.
Heartbreaking for us. Our cats mean the world to us, but all we can do now is wait and hope that they will both pull through and be well again.
Fingers crossed…!!!

Because of a recent problem with my blog, which has now been fixed, fingers crossed, I had to change my blog’s theme. I will be fooling around with a bunch of different themes in the next few days, weeks, centuries, but I’d appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

I just finished reading a fascinating article about a very promising new discovery, which may be able to actually eliminate metastasis, that is, the spread of cancer from its primary site to new areas of the body.

And I quote: “Typically, cancer research and treatment has focused on shrinking the primary tumor through chemotherapy or other methods. But, the team said, by attacking the deadly process of metastasis, more patients could survive.” Aha. Interesting, very interesting…

The article is really easy to read, so, without further ado, here’s the link: goo.gl/ibM91B

By the way, the article mentions two pesky Interleukin proteins, IL-6 and IL-8, which are involved in myeloma, too…and NOT in a good way, either, as we should all know by now. But the good news is that curcumin inhibits both of these proteins. Good news, indeed…

Food for thought!!!