Triple elbuorT

UNO
As I mentioned the other day, my father is still planning to have an angiogram done next week, and possibly an angioplasty. I expressed my concerns toward having doctors poke around inside his arteries so soon after surgery, but he's not satisfied. Yes, he still gets angina, but it subsides quicker, and his medication is more effective now that he only has one or two partially blocked arteries. “That's no way to live!” he snapped, when I asked him how hard it is to take one little pill any time he has the discomfort. Ironically, on Wednesday morning, one of our neighbors stopped by to see how my dad was doing, and share his own health problems. While at his son's baseball game a few days ago, he had some chest pains, and went to the hospital. Despite being a relatively young guy, I believe in his late 40s, he had a heart attack. In his situation, they were able to put stents in to hold open the blockage, and avoid invasive surgery. He did note that the medication alleviated his symptoms. “You got to take it easy,” advised my dad, “Don't do any heavy lifting.” Meanwhile, my dad had been lugging up lumber and building something, and most of the morning had an electric saw going before he was interrupted by our friend from next door. He didn't even see the irony of giving advice he himself keeps ignoring.

DOS
I don't have much to report on the kitten front, other than there's still no sign of them. I asked a woman who works in the building if she heard anything, but she knew little more than I did, that one day they were there, and the next gone. She agreed that they were too small to go off on their own but too big for the mother to carry them, and wondered if any of the groundskeepers doing landscaping work last week had removed them. She did note that one of the girls from the photo studio had taken a lot of cute photos, so they'll live on in digital immortality, something some of us try to achieve through blogging. I regret not taking photos of them myself, or checking on them sooner after that storm. My mom insists that she doesn't want any more cats, that it's too hard to get over them when they pass away and she's getting too old for that sort of emotional ordeal. We don't regret the time we have with our pets, but it's so hard to say goodbye that we fear forming new attachments that will also inevitably end.

TRES
As for our own cats, on that front at least I have some news. Chirp seems to be responding to his antibiotics, which are a surprising chore to administer. Though the most docile cat we've ever owned, he squirms and wriggles out of my grasp whenever my mom comes at him with the eyedropper full of the sweet-smelling medicine. Still, we've been getting most of it into him, and his tongue is less swollen and has more of a pinkish-red hue instead of sickly white. He's barely drooling, which means we don't have to follow him around with tissues and keep towels on all the furniture. For a few days, I understood on a much smaller scale what life is like for some friends with a certain large breed of dog with droopy jowls. Thursday morning, I couldn't find him, and my dad, who hadn't started his Tim Taylor” routine yet, casually noted that he was in the big bedroom, where our other cat Cubby stays. I quickly retrieved him from a cozy spot at the foot of my parents' bed. We've been intentionally keeping the bedrooms closed, not just to contain his excess saliva, but to quarantine him from the other cat. “Oh, I thought he was over it....” said the old man, before meandering outside to play with power tools.

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July has always been a crazy month for me, but as July is just starting now, I have to wonder what the rest of the Summer holds in store for me....is this real life? Is this going to be...forever?