Salamander
Fire Walking

The Christmas trees are still up, though the outside lights are now down (albeit still draped on the dining room table.) Yesterday’s plans are today’s failures. I’ll get the decorations down next week for sure, though. Either that or I’ll buy some heart ornaments and start redecorating for the next big Hallmark holiday.

Satan’s Little Fart Cloud’s first culture results are back and they’re negative for ringworm. She now (prematurely) has full run of the house without having to wear her sweater. We’ve done a second culture on her, and I should have the results back in three more weeks. That’s later than we anticipated, but I was originally told that her cultures would only take two weeks to return (I shouldn’t have listened; I know better). In celebration, we’ve increased her budesonide, a steroid reputed to act locally in the GI tract, up to its full effective level, up from her half-dose of the past few months.

Warning: Boring veterinary stuff ahead

Steroids have been problematic during SLFC’s treatment for ringworm. While they are essential for keeping her triaditis controlled, they suppress the body’s immune system, making it more difficult for her to fight off infections. We’ve been trading off between minimizing the inflammation in her bowels with maximizing her immune system’s ability to fight off the fungus. It’s been an uneasy balance at best, and somewhat accounts for why she spent over half a year in quarantine.

Further complicating things is the fact that her fungus medication can do damage to her liver, which already shows some signs of damage from the triaditis. The fact SLFC has come through this as well as she has is a testament to the team of veterinarians who have been working on her case. We still aren’t completely out of the woods – her appetite is down, the second culture could come back positive, and her diabetes (which developed during this whole ringworm catastrophe but is unrelated to her having caught ringworm) is still not as tightly controlled as we need it to be. We need to eventually increase her steroids up to the pre-fungal infection levels SLFC had been receiving, but there’s an excellent chance this will worsen her diabetes. With insulin over $100/bottle, I can only hope that this chance isn’t played out.

Boring veterinary stuff over

I’ve lost nearly two pounds on my first week back to WW. Only ## more to go. My visit with my family physician last week confirmed that I have got a hernia at the right side of my transplant incision scar. I have my annual visit with the transplant team on February first, and I’ll bring it up then. I strongly suspect that 1) they are going to want to surgically repair it and 2) they won’t want to touch it until I get more weight off. I’m also supposed to talk with the about the neuropathy I’ve developed in my feet and hands, to make sure that it isn’t a side effect from my medication. (Before anybody jumps in with the “have you been checked for diabetes” shtick: I have and I’m not.)