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I mentioned yesterday how Sunshine was having a great day. She had another good one today. We have to act on that. I'm putting the rest behind a cut because it is about pet health and while the news is very good, we are still dealing with serious problems that haven't gone away.
We were looking seriously at her end-of-life because her breathing had gotten not just labored but loud. Like, sounding like a percolator, or maybe a car with a bum alternator. We had one last medicine to try and it didn't seem to make any difference so on Monday morning we decided there wasn't any kinder choice.
But since then her breathing has cleared up amazingly. We can still hear it a bit, but if we put our heads down beside her, not if we're just in the room with her. She sneezes sometimes, but not relentlessly or with such a terrible wet noise. If she had been breathing like this on Monday we'd never have considered euthanasia. Add to that her appetite being good again, and her energy being fantastic, and it would be only stubbornness to keep that appointment.
So I called the vet and we changed the appointment. It's to be now just a check and, we hope, get confirmation from an independent source that her lungs sound enormously better. Also another week's supply of the new medication, while we decide whether a bigger quantity is worthwhile.
I know people may suspect we're just fooling ourselves. Even as an animal approaches the end they have good days; the day before Stephen's last, he seemed to have overcome a GI stasis episode and be tolerable. For this, though ... well, just the sound alone is compelling: she's almost as silent as a rabbit should be now, in a way she hasn't been in almost three weeks. Add to that her appetite and her energy and she obviously doesn't have enough misery to justify putting her out of it. (I write, admitting that this is before the vet examines her to learn what a trained ear will hear.)
It won't last, of course. Her heart is still diseased, and still growing too large, and some day it will squeeze her trachea so tight she can't breathe. We hope to be able to euthanize her before it is miserable. But --- right now, at least --- it looks like this week is not that miserable.
Let's get back to the State Pinball Championships and see if we can spot a champion about to be made:
Gulfstream is a fun though not deep electromechanical game (like, not deep even for electromechanical games). At one point two other folks and I started taking turns to see if one of us could roll the game before JRA finished his game of Led Zeppelin. We could not, but not for want of trying; this was one of my good scores.
ACE playing Deadpool, which you can see twice: look in the lower left and you see him at the machine, just like you see on the monitor.
Another of the not-for-competition games was Break Shot, which was crashing almost every game anyway, This glitched-out display looked enough like Morse Code I wondered if it might actually be an error code, but that doesn't make sense; this would parse as either 'E S E G A S' or 'E S P A S' or, conceivably, 'E S P A K'. While it wouldn't be absurd to have an error code be cryptic --- letters could stand for elements diagnosed as faulty --- there's no good reason they wouldn't just show the letters for something complicated. (Williams games of this era will put a dot after the credits count --- like, show 'CREDITS 0.' rather than 'CREDITS 0' --- if they detect something serious enough wrong, but there's so many things on a table there'll always be something somewhere, so it's not a useful dot.)
Another double view of the same player, here on The Munsters, a bad game to take JRA to. (They're all bad.)
Oh yeah, and I stopped in to get a snap of the 'Special Preview Models - Video Clips Pending Licensor Approval' warning on the venue's 007.
A sports story in one photo, here.
Trivia: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, before the 1951 nationalization of Iranian oil, was required to pay only 16 percent of the money the monopoly earned from extracting, refining, and selling oil. In all likelihood it paid less; no outsider was ever allowed to audit the books. (It made more profit in 1950 than it had paid in royalties since its start in 1901.) Source: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawai'i to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer. (Wikipedia says 17.5 percent. Could be a difference in rounding from statistics. )
Currently Reading: Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: A History of the Johnson Space Center, Henry C Dethloff. NASA SP-4307.
