I woke up at 1:55 am on Monday morning, certain that the day was going to hold bad news.  His condition didn’t change over the weekend, by which I mean that it didn’t get worse, but it certainly didn’t get better.  When I went to bed Sunday night, his head was still tilted to the side.  He would eat if we put the food to his mouth and drink if I gave him water in a syringe.  But he could barely walk.  He hadn’t made a sound in almost a week.  He couldn’t bite into his alfalfa cookies.

I spent the morning before we left for the vet with my stomach in knots.

I’m glad we waited.  I am clearly saying that in retrospect because we got to see our normal vet instead of a stranger, and I’m sure I would be saying otherwise if he hadn’t made it through the weekend.  But our vet has a basis of comparison for his normal self vs. his last week self vs. his current self.  Plus she is so compassionate and patient: With me and with him.

She thinks the infection has spread to his brain or inner ear.  She switched the antibiotic to one that gets into the central nervous system — though not one the other vet was suggesting — and put him on a food supplement to keep him from losing more weight.  She wants me to keep giving him water from a syringe.  And she warned that if he starts rolling over, he is having seizures and needs to be euthanized quickly.

She also said that she has never seen a guinea pig this sick rally so hard.  That guinea pigs are usually poor patients that give up fairly easily in the face of infection.  But she said that it was a good sign that he was fighting this hard to get through this.  I am going to cling to that thought because my brain cannot go to the otherwise without melting down.  He has to get better.

My poor sweet boy is resting a lot.  I’ll post another update this week when things get better.  Thank you for abiding with me though this.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I read about the Urban Confessional project on Mental Floss; a sort of face-to-face PostSecret, where people can run up to other people and spill their inner monologue.  Mental Floss explains, “The organization recruits volunteers to stand in public spaces and offer to lend an ear to anyone who wants to unload something, whether it’s happy news or a heartbreaking tale.”

Which sounds great except… isn’t this sort of dangerous, too?  I mean, therapists have training.  They know how to guide someone.  These are just volunteers who are offering to listen.  I think most people will use it in the way they use PostSecret, to unburden their heart to someone.  But what about the people who use the Urban Confessional project to unload something important, and once the words are out of their mouth, realize the person holding their words doesn’t know what to do with them?

Would we applaud untrained surgeons performing simple operations as art or expression?  Sometimes I think stunts like this are wonderful and other times I think they’re dangerous.  I’m on the fence about this one.

What do you think?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Truman got worse after the trip to the vet.  The slight head tilt that had been present at the doctor was now an exaggerated head tilt, and he dragged his right ear on the ground as he stumbled in circles.  It reminded me of Cozy’s last day.

Our vet went out of town after the appointment, and she left me with the phone number of an emergency backup vet.  We called her animal hospital, but she was also unfortunately out of town.  We tried the place they offered as their backup, but that doctor was out at that hospital, too.  We kept getting passed along from animal hospital to animal hospital in search of a veterinarian that specialized in rodents.  I ended up speaking to five different doctors along the way.

Each one gave different advice.

All said that the most likely scenario was that the upper respiratory infection spread to his inner ear or brain.  One said they would have never treated the infection as aggressively as our vet, and another said they would have treated the infection more aggressively than our vet.  One thought that we should add ear drops, and another said that ear drops could be toxic.  They each had different opinions on how long we should give the current antibiotic before switching it.

I added in the opinions of every commenter on every guinea pig website that listed a similar situation, making lists of possible solutions as well as lists of dangerous solutions.  The two lists often overlapped, with one site stating it was the only way to cure wry neck and the other stating it was a surefire way to kill your guinea pig.

I spent most of Friday a complete wreck.

I didn’t know if I should stick with my vet’s advice, especially since I hadn’t seen her since he took a turn for the worse, or if I should take the advice of a different vet who could only see us early Saturday morning.  He wanted to switch the antibiotic to something much more aggressive.  It felt like there was no good solution.  Either I would have regrets that I didn’t follow my vet’s advice, or I would have regrets that I stupidly waited and wasn’t aggressive enough.

It made me wonder the intelligence of internet research and second opinions.  These things that were supposed to be empowering me were only making me feel like shit as I doubted myself.

We couldn’t make a decision, so our lack of decision became our decision.  We hand-fed him yesterday, and used a syringe to give him water every few hours.  We let him have as many alfalfa cookies as he wanted.  He mostly didn’t move, but would lift his head from time to time to eat.  We have another appointment set up with our normal veterinarian on Monday morning.  All we can do for the next day is give him love and beg him to get better.

He’s my baby; my furry companion.  My office mate and daytime friend.  He’s my banana-sharer and alfalfa cookie begger.  I need him to be well.

Thank you for the birthday wishes.  My birthday, for the most part, was wonderful.  I got woken up with cards, cashed in a massage gift card I’ve held onto for 10 years, and picked up my free Starbucks drink.

And then Truman started acting weird.

He had actually been acting weird for about two days.  He was very quiet.  He would eat if I brought him food, but he wouldn’t wheek for food when I opened the refrigerator.  He wasn’t responding to his name.  He wasn’t greeting me with squeaks in the morning.

In the afternoon, he started to wheeze, so we called the vet.  She was heading out of town and trying to finish up appointments, but she told me to bring him over immediately.  He has an upper respiratory infection that we caught early, and I think he also has an ear infection.  We currently have him on antibiotics, so he’ll hopefully be better soon.

But I’m really scared this time.  I don’t like the way he is tilting his head and hobbling around.  This is what Cozy did right before he died.  Granted, Truman clearly has an infection and mucous in his nose and ears, and Cozy had a brain tumour and his eyes were popping out.  But it’s hard to watch him stumbling as he walks and trust that all will be fine in a few weeks.

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Life from Scratch has been chosen for an Amazon promotion.  It’s currently only 99 cents — a fraction of a cup of coffee.  So… pick up a copy for yourself or gift to a friend and get your beach reading set?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “This Dream Stands Before Me” (Inconceivable!)
• “Seeds” (A+ Effort)
• “Mind Your Own Womb” (Nadirah Angail)
• “Truth, Death, and Mother’s Day” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “Politics, Babies, and My Body” (The Barreness)
• “I Want to See My Story” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Empty Cookie has a fantastic post about the recent Captain America controversy.  Not exactly infertility-related, but I loved this post because she sums up so well the problem with dismissing history (or, really, pretending that origin stories aren’t important in the present time period).  Captain America, like many comic superheroes, was created by Jewish writers using art to respond to anti-Semitism.  Comic books have always been a home for power fantasies, where the disenfranchised could fight back.  To make Captain America part of Hydra shows a lack of understanding on the part of current writers as well as a complete insensitivity to the current rise in anti-Semitism.  She writes, “It’s piss poor writing from someone who obviously needs to check his privilege. It’s gross and dishonoring to the people who created him and the millions of people murdered by Nazis.”  It’s something we talk about often in this community — do you always keep the origin story front and center in your mind, or do you rewrite family building history and pretend the current situation is the only situation?  And what do we lose when we sweep history under the rug, and how does it affect the people around us?

A Half Baked Life also has a non-infertility-related post that I think has a powerful message that also ties into our community and the greater world.  She writes about the shooting at UCLA, both as a former UCLA student and as a current administrator on a college campus.  She asks such an important question: “With all of our social media voyeurism and instantaneous sharing of news, why do we do so much ‘looking out,’ instead of looking out for each other, from the moment we understand what empathy means?”

Lastly, Bent Not Broken has a post about the move and her new home, and I love the idea of fresh starts.  She writes, “This house will be a house for healing.  This house will be a house for us to grow, not in number, but in love.  This will be the house where we put infertility behind us.”  I love that so much.

The roundup to the Roundup: Truman is sick again.  Life from Scratch is on sale.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 27th and June 3rd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I have been waiting to turn 42 since I was in middle school and read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Deep Thought, the computer in the book, works on the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, and after many millions of years returns the answer: 42.  The problem is that we don’t know the question.

Get it?

It’s impossible to know the question AND the answer.  We don’t get our cake AND get to eat it, too.  We don’t get to have all mysteries solved and know how to steer our lives toward fulfillment.  We just get this one chance, here on earth, to not muck up things too badly, enjoy our experience, and be okay with the fact that all will not be revealed while simultaneously still trying to reveal it.

And one time — one time only — we (hopefully) get a chance to actually be 42 for 365 days.  I’m about to start that journey.

It’s the first time in a long time that I don’t mind aging a year.  I’m not really great about my birthday and turning older, and I generally get melancholy before, during, and after.  But I’m really looking forward to being 42*.

This past weekend, we celebrated my birthday early at the beach with ski ball and amusement park rides.  I read 9 comic books while sitting on the sand, listening to the waves.  We ate French fries and Nic-o-bolis.  A birthday well-marked.

The day itself will be a chance to just step back and marvel at the fact that I am here at all.  That 42 years ago, anything could have happened.  But I did.  Isn’t that so weird?

*Luckily, I am also looking forward to being 44 for the symmetry of that number, so it’s not as if it’s all downhill from here.