So as promised or warned, a pet health update. The news is grim but not the worst it could be, today.
She's dying.
Her diseased heart has enlarged to the point it's restricting her trachea. It's started causing her trouble breathing. Right now, she's in very good spirits, eating heartily and drinking a lot and moving around as well as she has since her youth. But the vet advised ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger that we need to be ready to make an end-of-life decision. And that we should not be surprised if we wake one morning to find her dead.
This began a couple weeks ago when her eating was off. All rabbits have periods where their eating is off, and it's always alarming because a small interruption of their diet can cause their gut bacteria to get out of whack, becoming a major health crisis. But her eating went wrong in a weird way: not eating pellets, or any but the freshest greens, and she kept eating hay with joy. Normally hay's the first to go. She stopped moving around so much either, a thing we blamed on the gabapentin for her arthritis (it induces sleepiness, at least in people), and we cut that down until she started moving again. And got the earliest vet appointment we could, which was still a couple weeks off..
Meanwhile, though, she kept plugging along. We took to giving her critical care, a goop of reconstituted nutrient powder, and she was fine with that. And she got back to eating more and more, finally coming to take her food and her medicines with anticipation again. She even started grabbing the syringes from our hands, a good sign. Still we kept the appointment.
Lucky we did. A couple days before the appointment her breathing got loud. not just grunty, a common fate, but noisy too. Clicking, like a clockwork toy that's over-wound. It didn't affect her appetite, though, or even her energy level; if anything, she's been getting more and more energetic even as her breathing's gotten worse.
bunnyhugger took her to the vet; I had work, and even though it was work-from-home they expect me to be able to respond quickly to stuff, and I don't feel like I've been there long enough to take off for urgent-but-not-emergency pet matters. And she came back with the grim news. Sunshine's trachea is a thin reed anymore, pressed between her heart and her lungs, and there's nothing to be done about that. Other matters --- this bloating we'd observed --- we can deal with by diuretics, but the verdict is that her heart will continue to grow larger, and her air space will shrink, and there'll come a time she dies, either by suffocation or because we chose to stop her suffocation.
The vet did say she's survived with heart disease longer than any rabbit she's known, or had thought they could. But that we need to be ready: she expect Sunshine to die within a month.
The recommendation is we think very hard about it if Sunshine has another stretch like she did a few weeks ago, where she's not interested in eating and not moving and just ... holding on, trying to breathe.
It's been only a day and a half and we're already looking over every few minutes, listening for the reassuring sound that she's rolling her food ball around, or snagging newspaper from the kindling pile to eat, or trying to teach the clutter in her pen a lesson. Every day she spends doing that is a day we don't have to decide she's suffered enough.
Let's get through the rest of the train ride, now, at Crossroads Village and then get to some spectacle.
There, now I'm on the right settings! Here's another train illumination, this one with a watering station ready for it.
The exposure was right but the window was fogging over right over top of the Christmas Dragon. We had a washcloth to wipe the fog off the window, and did several times over, but it's somehow never enough.
And the train ride's done! Here's some light fixtures around the village, such as a Conestoga wagon.
Different angle on the same illumination so that you get more of the reflections on the muddy snow and ice.
And ooh, what's this? The Vejur probe expanding in a sphere of light energy as it merges with Decker and the Robot Ilia to transcend our dimension?
So this is the most attention-getting new display: a great ornament illumination, big enough that you can walk inside it. The curves on either side that look vaguely like a mouth are the open 'doors', big enough for a person to walk through. You can maybe see someone behind the ornament taking a picture and they're not so far behind as to make perspective that fibs to you.
Trivia: High seas the night before the final launch of the space shuttle Challenger forced the ships which would have recovered the Solid Rocket Boosters away from the recovery zone, risking the loss of the boosters. Source: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan.
Currently Reading: A History of The World's Airlines, R E G Davies.
