The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘aging’ Category

Hey hey. Its the mid­dle of the night and I am at work. Where you at?

Its a heavy week for me, I am doing many nights in a row then I have over a week off. I can’t wait!

My birth­day has mer­ci­fully passed unevent­fully except for the weird virus I had for over a week. I hate being sick.

In gen­eral I feel crap most days; the thy­roid thing I have remains a real drag.

I got one very cool gift from my brother, the nearly com­plete box set of the re-imagined Bat­tlestar Galac­tica. I watched it all in less than a week, which either makes me an über cool geek or a very sad mid­dle aged man. I’ll leave it to you to decide which.

The final ten episodes of BSG are run­ning now, in the states and here in the UK on SKY. I’m all caught up which is cool too.

BSG is very classy and engag­ing, my brother has been singing its praises for years. He’s right, it rocks!

I think I’ve wasted enough of your time, but sadly not enough of my own. Catch ya next time.

(Blogged from my mutha­fuckin’ iPhone)

On Christ­mas Eve, I found out my mother passed away. She would have been 79 next month.

She died the night of the 22nd, the cause of death was pneu­mo­nia. I’m told she died peace­fully, what­ever that means.

Long time read­ers of my site will prob­a­bly remem­ber that my mother had a severe stroke nearly seven years ago and never recov­ered from it. She was pretty much bed-bound, unable to walk or speak clearly. She could just about feed her­self and she needed help get­ting to the toilet.

More detail than you prob­a­bly need to know.

She went into the hos­pi­tal the pre­vi­ous week, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Short of her dying, my state­side rel­a­tives had never got in touch before. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone into hos­pi­tal in the last few years and I wasn’t told.

The way I found out was less than ideal.

When I woke up at 8pm on Tues night, I had an email from a cousin I haven’t seen or spo­ken to in over 20 years, plus I’d had a cou­ple of inter­na­tional hang-ups on my landline.

I didn’t have to be a genius to work out the most likely rea­son behind this sud­den contact.

I also didn’t know what to do.

My cousin wanted me to phone him back because he had “some­thing impor­tant” to tell me. Instead, I spent the 45 min­utes before my depar­ture for work, doing what I always do, hav­ing a cof­fee, a cig­a­rette and a shower, before dress­ing and leaving.

I decided to email him back, let­ting him know I was work­ing and not in a posi­tion to phone him. Of course, I could have phoned if I wanted to, but I didn’t. I also told him to feel free to share the news via email and that I was braced for the worst.

Around seven hours later, I received his reply con­firm­ing my sus­pi­cions, that my mother was dead.

She’s not hav­ing a view­ing or a funeral, just a quick cre­ma­tion. It’s the same thing my father did. We’re not big on funer­als in my imme­di­ate fam­ily, but it means I don’t have to go rush­ing off to the states.

I don’t need to go at all.

I was sup­posed to work on xmas eve and xmas, but as you might expect I didn’t. I’m going back on Sun­day, though. What else would I do?

I loved my mother very much, but I let her down badly in the last few years of her life. When she had her stroke, I was in the states for a cou­ple of months, help­ing her and help­ing my father.

And then I came back to north Lon­don and broke apart into tiny lit­tle bits. For around 6 months, I cul­ti­vated a fairly impres­sive cocaine and cognac habit, with some E’s mixed in occa­sion­ally for good mea­sure. Not long after that, I fucked up my pre­vi­ous job.

It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do any­thing mean­ing­ful to help my par­ents in their old age.

And then my father got sick.

He spent the first year after my mother came home from the hos­pi­tal and rehab wor­ry­ing about what would hap­pen to my mother if he got sick. All the worry got him sick and less than a year after that, he passed away from cancer.

I didn’t go to visit.

I couldn’t risk it.

I’m a pussy.

I had planned to visit my mother after my father died, but she gave up her home and moved into a nurs­ing home, near one of her sis­ters. The one that was always the most evil aun­tie imaginable.

I warned my mother that it would all end in tears. It did, when my aunt decided it was all too much for her and she washed her hands of my mother and her finan­cial affairs about 6 months ago. A dis­tant rel­a­tive of my father’s stepped in to take care of things, but it left my mother in an area of the world where she had no one else.

Had my mother stayed put in her home, or chose a nurs­ing home near there, she would have had a con­stant stream of vis­i­tors as she had many friends who lived locally, but instead she gave all that up on my evil auntie’s insistence.

For the few years my mother lived in the nurs­ing home, she would com­plain about my aunt, even telling us that my aunt wouldn’t let her see cur­rent bank state­ments. I can’t prove any­thing, but my mother said she was nick­ing dosh.

Nice.

Just about every rel­a­tive I have, stole some­thing from my mother. One of my half-brother’s took money from her account and never returned it, other’s took keep­sakes and any­thing of value.

My younger brother went to see my mother, once, while she was in the nurs­ing home and my evil aun­tie made cer­tain his trip was mis­er­able. She treated him badly, but worse, treated my mother badly and dis­re­spect­fully in front of him.

Old evil aun­tie made a point of telling my mother, in front of my brother, that she threw away every pho­to­graph she found in my mother’s house when she was clear­ing it out in prepa­ra­tion for the move to the nurs­ing home. Every photo from my child­hood, plus 8mm home movies from the 60’s and 70’s was casu­ally tossed into a skip.

Imag­ine if some­one did that to your child­hood. What would you do?

What could I do?

This evil fuck­ing cunt took over my mother’s life and made her mis­er­able, though the last time my brother spoke to my mother, she said my aunt had vis­ited and tried to make peace. How nice for evil cunt auntie.

I know I’m not the only one with a trag­i­cally fucked up fam­ily, but now that my mother is gone, so is my very last con­nec­tion to them. Its just my brother and I, a cou­ple of middle-aged orphans from a deeply dys­func­tional family.

The other bless­ing to come out of all this is my mother is now no longer a pris­oner of her dam­aged and with­ered body. For nearly 7 years she’s been trapped inside a phys­i­cal form that wouldn’t and couldn’t bend to her will.

The night after my mother had her mas­sive stroke, the hos­pi­tal phoned my father and told him my mother was in a coma and couldn’t breathe on her own. They needed to put her on life-support or she would die.

My mother had an up-to-date liv­ing will, that clearly stated in such cir­cum­stances, no heroic efforts should be made to sus­tain her life, if her prospects for a full recov­ery were nil.

My father, des­per­ately afraid and ill-prepared to live life with­out my mother, took the chicken-shit option and told them to go ahead and put tubes down her throat, for breath­ing and feed­ing. He went com­pletely against her wishes.

My father was in denial; at the point, he wouldn’t and couldn’t accept that my mother wasn’t going to recover. Instead his fear and inabil­ity to deal with the truth of the sit­u­a­tion, con­demned my mother to an exis­tence I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

He thought he was doing the right thing and for months, he con­tin­ued to insist that my mother walked into the hos­pi­tal on her own and dammit, she would walk back out.

She never took another unaided step in her life.

When I read my cousin’s first email, I’d been awake around 30 sec­onds. It was deliv­ered to my iPhone and I saw it just after I turned the alarm on it off. In my bleary-eyed first read­ing of it, an image imme­di­ately flashed into my head.

It was both of my par­ents, together. And they were smiling.

I don’t believe in the after­life, but I knew in that instant that my mother really had finally joined my father and if I could build a heaven for the two of them, I surely would.

Rest in sweet peace, Mom.

Since receiv­ing my diag­no­sis of Hashmimoto’s Dis­ease and writ­ing about it here, the word “Hashimoto” is appear­ing with greater and greater fre­quency, in var­i­ous forms in the list of search terms plugged into Google that get you to my site.

Don’t worry, “northlon­don­hippy” remains the num­ber one search term that finds me. I’m a proper online destination.

But very high up on the list, sits Dr. Hashimoto. Con­sid­er­ing the first time I ever heard of it was as it passed over my doctor’s lips pre­ceded by the words “you have…”, I’m some­what sur­prised at how com­mon it is.

It seems quite a few of you out there in inter­net­land have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease too, or at least you think you do.

Peo­ple search for symp­toms, search for cures, search for clues on how to live with this auto-immune disease.

I’m far from an expert, hav­ing only known of my own con­di­tion for sev­eral months, but I have been dis­cov­er­ing loads of peo­ple I know who have thy­roid problems.

Every­one wants to know what “your dose” is.

“What’s your dose?”, they all say to me, look­ing vis­i­bly dis­ap­pointed when I tell them I am cur­rently on a pal­try 50 micro­grams of levothy­rox­ine, com­pared to their 150–200 micro­gram dose.

Its true my dose is cur­rently low, but that is about to change, again. My GP is mon­i­tor­ing my thy­roid lev­els at reg­u­lar inter­vals and increas­ing my dose grad­u­ally. The key, he says, is to find the low­est ther­a­peu­tic dose, because too much can cause dif­fer­ent prob­lems. I’m due for another blood test next week and I would expect my dose to go up again as soon as I receive the results.

With me, I didn’t know I had a prob­lem for quite a while, I ignored or dis­missed all the symp­toms I now know I had. It wasn’t until my back seized up and my legs gave out that it dawned on me I might have a health problem.

Clever, eh? I had heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, nau­sea, dizzi­ness, no appetite, no energy, aching joints and a slow heart beat and I just thought it was just the nor­mal age­ing process catch­ing up to me.

My doc­tor assures me that all of this is very treat­able and once my dosage is cor­rect, I will feel like my old self again. I’ve felt crappy for so long, I’m not sure what that really means.

So if you’re already diag­nosed, just be patient. Give the med­ica­tion time to even you out, just like I am.

And if you think you have Hashimoto’s, just go see a doc­tor and you are a sim­ple blood test away from diag­no­sis and treatment.

And if it turns out you don’t have Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, per­haps this arti­cle in today’s New York Times, might give you pause for thought.

Well I’m four years from fifty,
How’d I get to be…
Four years from fifty,
It’s a ter­ri­ble age to be.

And the title up there, star­ing you in the face like a mis­er­able old man is refers to where I’m at right now.

I’m feel­ing full of regrets and seek­ing redemption.

Does any­one know where they hid the redemption?

What would it mean to be redeemed? Would I need a spe­cial coupon for that?

The thing is, I don’t have any spe­cific regrets, like I wish I did this, or I should have done that. My regrets are more general.

Like I wish I spent more time with my parents.

Or I wish I wasn’t my own best and most suc­cess­ful enemy.

Those sorts of things.

Things you can’t change.

But what about the things you can change.

Like your socks.

Besides your socks.

What if you could change things?

Is that what redemp­tion is?

If it is, then I’m fairly cer­tain I’m screwed on the redemp­tion front. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

As much as I like to pre­tend I am per­fec­tion per­son­i­fied, the truth is I am a deeply flawed individual.

My life is lit­er­ally lit­tered with bad deci­sions and unfor­tu­nate choices, the results of which con­tinue to dog my days on a daily basis.

It’s fine to reflect upon ones mis­takes, as long as one is not mis­taken into think­ing that some­thing can be done to rec­tify them. The choices you make can’t usu­ally be undone and the con­se­quences will be with you until the day you die and may even con­tinue to effect oth­ers after you’re gone.

I’ve got no par­tic­u­lar deci­sions in mind, this has more to do with a gen­eral overview than any­thing specific.

I don’t want you to think every choice I’ve made in my life has been wrong, I’ve made some good choices too, but lately I’ve been think­ing about some of those moments in my life, where I zigged when per­haps I should have zagged.

It’s easy to sec­ond guess your own deci­sions after the fact, when the full­ness of time and expe­ri­ence yield the miss­ing pieces of the puz­zle that weren’t avail­able at the time of tak­ing the deci­sion. It’s also an exer­cise in futility.

Much of life is futile and point­less, so its not really enough of a rea­son not to think about these things.

There’s a the­ory that states every time a deci­sion is made, the uni­verse is split and alter­na­tive real­i­ties fol­low both paths and that all of exis­tence con­sists of a “multi-verse” of infi­nite exis­tence. Every­thing that can hap­pen, does hap­pen, just not in your reality.

Some­where in the multi-verse, there’s a ver­sion of me that suc­cess­ful, happy and fully ful­filled. No doubt taller, too.

How’d I get stuck in this real­ity? If there really is a multi-verse, then in at least one of them (and pos­si­bly many more), I’m king of the planet and in charge of you all. Don’t worry, if there are infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, then you get to be king or queen of the world your­self, and I get to be your slave.

Not all of the real­i­ties in the multi-verse would be sunny, as I expect there are plenty that don’t turn out as well. Think about it, how many real­i­ties exist with­out me? Per­haps in some, I was still born and never even got to take my first breath.

I know that even when my deci­sions have been wrong, they’ve been right for me at the time. I have to believe that, because I can’t travel back in time and change them. At least not yet, any­way, but give me another six months and my time machine will be up and run­ning and I’ll be charg­ing loads of dosh for rides to the past and future. Think you can afford it?

My many per­son­al­ity flaws, at least as I see them, colour my every move. I’m cer­tainly my own worst enemy and I’m more respon­si­ble for hold­ing myself back than any­one else.

I used to gen­uinely believe that any­thing is pos­si­ble, but as I get older, I’m less con­vinced. As you get older, the cor­ri­dor of options nar­rows and while you may still cre­ate the illu­sion of choice, your choices become more and more lim­ited with each pass­ing day.

I can’t remem­ber where I heard this one, but it made a lot of sense: “You spend the first half of your life acquir­ing things and the sec­ond half hav­ing them all taken away from you.”

I’m unde­ni­ably in the 2nd half of my life. It’s not too much of a stretch to see where things are going for me. Its all down­hill from here.

Can you tell that my birth­day is approach­ing? It’s about 2 months away. Hey ho.

If I had the chance to do it all again, would I do things dif­fer­ently? Of course I would, what hon­est per­son wouldn’t?

That doesn’t mean I would do every­thing dif­fer­ently, but there are a few wrongs I would cer­tainly put right.

It doesn’t mat­ter because no one gets a sec­ond chance, except in the multi-verse real­ity where rein­car­na­tion hap­pens and it was just my luck not to end up in that one either.

Socrates said “the unex­am­ined life is not worth liv­ing”. If that is really true, then I have the most wor­thy life known to man.

Either that or my nar­cis­sis­tic ten­den­cies are start­ing to over­whelm being an obsessive-compulsive sociopath with manic-depressive tendencies.

You have a nice day, too.

This is turn­ing into the diary of the infirm.

Sorry, I know this used to be the cap­i­tal of online fun. Maybe I should bring back the vir­tual black­jack tables? At least the house would always win.

I’m still feel­ing crap. The med­ica­tion I’m tak­ing is pro­vid­ing me with a host of side effects, all of them seri­ously dull and no fun.

I saw my GP again last week, he changed the brand of the meds I’m tak­ing, which has sub­tracted a lot of the nau­sea, but not all of it and I still have the other side effects. Like breath­less­ness, heart pal­pi­ta­tions, dizzi­ness, headaches, tired­ness, con­fu­sion and forgetfulness…need I go on?

My GP ordered more tests, which he says is to rule out some other things, rather than con­firm any­thing he sus­pects. I think that’s sup­posed to be comforting.

My back seems to be hold­ing its own. I still have pain, but I can cope with it. I’m still see­ing the chi­ro­prac­tor, twice a week down from three vis­its and its always bet­ter after an adjust­ment. It tends to slide back a bit in between though, which I think is down to the fact that my thy­roid lev­els aren’t right yet. The inflam­ma­tion is being held at bay, but it’s not dis­ap­pear­ing com­pletely because what­ever orig­i­nally caused it, is still caus­ing it.

My thy­roid lev­els won’t be right for a while, as my GP says the dose I am on now, that is giv­ing me all these fun side effects, will most likely needed to be increased after my next blood test. Dou­bled, actu­ally. I can’t wait.

I haven’t felt like post­ing much lately, which is annoy­ing because there’s loads I’d like to write about, I just don’t have the atten­tion span to focus very long.

For all the jokes and ref­er­ences I’ve made about being mid­dle aged, I’ve never really felt it in my bones. These days, not only do I feel it, I think I look the part too. It’s all dread­fully tedious and I’m bored of it all already.

I liked it bet­ter when I thought I was healthy. Clearly, I wasn’t really healthy, but I thought I was and isn’t that what really matter?

My doc­tor says that once my med­ica­tion is sorted out, I’ll feel bet­ter than ever. Right now, I find that really hard to believe. When you feel shitty every day, its hard to be even a lit­tle bit pos­i­tive about anything.

The fol­low­ing is a hippy health update:

I haven’t men­tioned how I’ve been feel­ing for a bit, because I’ve pretty much been feel­ing the same. There’re two pieces of good news, though…I’ve got a defin­i­tive diag­no­sis. I have some­thing called Hashimoto’s Dis­ease.

Hashimoto’s Dis­ease is an auto-immune dis­or­der, prob­a­bly genetic in ori­gin and it causes my bod­ies T-cells to attack my Thy­roid Gland, result­ing in Hypothy­roidism, which is an under-active Thy­roid and causes all sorts of metab­o­lism problems.

And Dr. Hashimoto is the guy that dis­cov­ered it and it is the first recog­nised auto-immune disorder.

This diag­no­sis ties together all sorts of symp­toms I’ve had over the last 6 months to a year that I hadn’t really put together or even thought were symp­toms of any­thing. I just thought I was get­ting old!

Mainly, it explains the acute inflam­ma­tion in my back, which con­tin­ues to cause me pain, though not nearly as bad as it was when it started. I never thought my back prob­lems would be caused by some­thing big­ger and scarier!

My other symp­toms included loss of energy, appetite and con­cen­tra­tion, poor sleep, a lump in my throat and flut­ters in my chest. I’ve had all of those things to one degree or another and I sim­ply attrib­uted them to mid­dle age and my erratic work and sleep pat­terns. Silly me. I didn’t put any of this together.

When the back trou­ble started, I began treat­ment with a chi­ro­prac­tor, who I credit with help­ing a lot, but I still couldn’t com­pletely shake the pain. After three weeks I saw my GP, because I thought I might have Shin­gles — I had a minor rash on my side. It turned out I didn’t have Shin­gles, but my GP ordered an x-ray (which was neg­a­tive) and a bat­tery of blood tests, which included a test for Thy­roid function.

The test came back and con­firmed my diag­no­sis. My GP also prod­ded my throat and said he could feel my swollen Thy­roid Gland. I had noticed a slight sen­sa­tion when swal­low­ing for a while, but didn’t think any­thing of it. It wasn’t painful, or even uncom­fort­able, it was just different.

I’ve learned a valu­able les­son and that’s to lis­ten more closely to what my body is telling me and to do some­thing about it!

Thank­fully, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease is very treat­able and I will be on a med­ica­tion called Levathy­rox­ine for the rest of my life. It replaces the Thy­roid Hor­mone my body no longer pro­duces and once they get my dosage to the cor­rect level, my body will go back to nor­mal, what­ever nor­mal is…

I’m hav­ing side effects from this med­ica­tion, nau­sea, sweats, and pal­pi­ta­tions mainly, but these should pass soon. I hope.

Left untreated, it could even­tu­ally cause heart fail­ure and death, so its a very good thing my doc­tor caught this. I’m lucky I have a good GP too.

Oh and the other good news is thanks to Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my cool new daily med­ica­tion, I now get free NHS pre­scrip­tions for life. Now all I need them to do is approve cannabis pre­scrip­tions on the NHS and this dis­ease stops being a curse and it becomes a real blessing!

Any­way kids, your Uncle Hippy is on the mend and it won’t be long before I’m back to my old self and try­ing to touch you all up again!

Greet­ings and salu­ta­tions. Hello. Wel­come. Yes, I am still alive.

Well, I’m as alive as I can be, fol­low­ing my recent health troubles.

For the last 15 days I’ve been suf­fer­ing with seri­ous back trou­ble. I could barely walk for the first week or so, every step was pure agony. Sit­ting was agony too and lay­ing down was impos­si­ble. I was well and truly fucked.

I’ve been see­ing a chi­ro­prac­tor and I think he’s helped a lot. I’ve had count­less adjust­ments, start­ing with a home visit because I couldn’t get to his office. I’m walk­ing well now and have much less pain, I’m hop­ing to return to work later in the week.

This episode really freaked me out, I was prac­ti­cally crip­pled. I couldn’t even make it to the loo with­out assis­tance from Mrs. H, I couldn’t get dressed, pre­pare a meal, do any house­hold chores. I couldn’t even sit at my desk and use my iMac, I couldn’t use my lap­top for the first week or so. If it wasn’t for my iPhone, I would have been com­pletely cut off from the world.

There’s a sense of panic and des­per­a­tion that one is over­come with in these sit­u­a­tions and I was no excep­tion. As I sat upright on my sofa, for the fifth or sixth night, des­per­ately try­ing to snatch an hour or two of light, unsat­is­fy­ing sleep, dark and dan­ger­ous thoughts would bub­ble to the sur­face of my brain.

What if this is permanent?

What if this is the begin­ning of my slow, grad­ual health decline lead­ing to my pre­ma­ture death.

What if I don’t get better?

What if the excru­ci­at­ing pain never ends?

What if.…

I found myself hav­ing mini-panic attacks, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing slightly and relief not com­ing through the codeine or spliffs.

Though my back may be improv­ing, I find myself filled with a lin­ger­ing, nag­ging depres­sion over my future.

Is this the begin­ning of the end?

They say that every sec­ond after your born, you are one sec­ond closer to death, so in the more gen­eral sense, the end has no begin­ning; or rather the begin­ning of the end, begins at the very beginning.

But that’s not what I mean. I just have this hor­ri­ble, deep feel­ing that my best years are well and truly behind me. It’s prob­a­bly true, as its undoubt­edly true that I’ve lived more than half my life already as the chances of me even com­ing close to 90 are slim to none.

I’m feel­ing my mor­tal­ity and I don’t like it. I feel like I’ve aged in the last fort­night, like my years have finally caught up with me. I don’t feel youth­ful, as I always have, instead I’ve felt like a decrepit old man.

The thought of a slow, painful slide towards death fills me with dread. I don’t want to suf­fer through a litany of minor and major health prob­lems until one of them finally snuffs me out. That just sounds horrible!

I sup­pose death is very much on my mind because of the death of my cat a few weeks ago, which I wit­nessed first­hand in all its mis­er­able, tor­tur­ous glory. While her death was mer­ci­fully quick, she didn’t go gen­tly into that goodnight.

Watch­ing her con­tort and strug­gle against the hand of the grim reaper has had a pro­found effect on me, though I am still try­ing to deci­pher what exactly what effect it has had. I’d never actu­ally been with any liv­ing crea­ture, human or ani­mal, at the point of death until her pass­ing three weeks ago.

My younger brother, who is far more spir­i­tual than I could ever hope to be, says I absorbed some­thing from this expe­ri­ence, which man­i­fested itself with my back trou­ble, or per­haps was this was the trig­ger for it. I can’t say I am convinced.

When the chi­ro­prac­tor was tak­ing my back­ground and his­tory, one of his first ques­tions was if I suf­fered any trau­mas recently; my cat died about a week before the real pain started, though I had sore­ness in my back a few days before it really hit me.

The chi­ro­prac­tor said that my back trou­ble was build­ing up over time, that the inflam­ma­tion had wors­ened to the point of spasms in my back mus­cles, caus­ing acute pain.

Is this a coin­ci­dence of tim­ing or defin­i­tive cause and effect? I couldn’t really say. You could con­vinc­ingly put across either side of this argu­ment and I just don’t know.

All of this has left me hat­ing aging and mor­tal­ity even more than before and I didn’t think that was pos­si­ble. What’s a self-confessed sociopath and ama­teur nar­cis­sist to do?

Keep hop­ing that some­one works out a way to down­load my brain into a com­puter after the death of my body, so I can con­tinue to exist, in dig­i­tal form. How else can I hope to keep post­ing dri­vel here through­out eternity?

I am in severe pain and have been for 5 days. I did some­thing to my back.

I have no idea what I’ve done, but I do know it hurts like a motherfucker.

It started on Mon­day morn­ing, when I woke up. My back was sore and stiff and I wasn’t mov­ing well. By Tues­day, I could hardly walk and by Weds I was glued to my sofa. Get­ting up is a strug­gle, walk­ing is nearly impos­si­ble. I’ve tried to get out to a chi­ro­prac­tor twice, but couldn’t man­age it. I’m get­ting a home visit tomor­row, he thinks he can help me.

I’m miss­ing out on loads of work, I’m not sleep­ing well or eat­ing. A trip to the loo takes 10 min­utes. This is seri­ously no fuck­ing fun.

Thank­fully, Mrs. H has been around to take care of me, or I would be roy­ally screwed.

It’s a strug­gle to even type this on my lap­top, and sit­ting at my iMac is not an option. I’ve been surf­ing lots on my iPhone though. I’m really glad I’ve got it.

I’m heav­ily dosed up on codeine and weed, which is keep­ing me chilled, but not touch­ing the pain. Please send me all your cool and groovy heal­ing vibes, because this hippy needs to get bet­ter and quick!

My cat died sud­denly yes­ter­day. She was old and in decline for the last few months and I did know the end was near­ing, but it was still a shock to have it hap­pen like this.

One minute before she died, she was eat­ing. I’d helped her to her dish in the kitchen and left her there, hap­pily munch­ing away and returned to the liv­ing room. All of the sud­den, one of my other cats leapt with a start and I heard the sound of some­thing falling over in the hall­way. I thought it was just some post com­ing through the let­ter slot in the front door. I was wrong.

It was my cat, she’d fallen over with what I am fairly sure was a stroke. She was gone in about 2 min­utes, but I was there with her.

She was around 16 years old, but its pos­si­ble she could have been older. Mrs. H got her in 1994 as a fully grown cat, I knew her for over 11 years.

Before Mrs. H got her from the local shel­ter, she had been liv­ing in the local mar­ket, exist­ing on scraps and hand-outs from the traders. She loved peo­ple food and if it was good enough to be on your plate, it was good enough for her — she’s eat any­thing, fruit, veg, meat, cheese, bread, you name it, though of course we mainly fed her cat food.

On Mon­day night, she had cheese from a pizza and licked the rem­nants of a bowl of choco­late ice cream, which was her absolute favourite.

I appre­ci­ate if you’re not a pet lover that this post is prob­a­bly tedious read­ing for you. I am a pet lover, I’ve had dogs and cats my entire life. The rela­tion­ships you have with your pets are some of the most hon­est rela­tion­ships you can have.

My cat hadn’t been well for the last few months. She gone mostly blind, her appetite was decreas­ing and her back legs were get­ting weaker. I would be lying if I said I didn’t con­sider putting her down and my one real regret is that I didn’t trust my instincts. The day before she died I thought about it and even yes­ter­day it crossed my mind more than once. I could have spared her a brief, yet hor­ri­ble death.

Dying is hor­ri­ble and wit­ness­ing my cat’s pass­ing was dis­tress­ing. While it was mer­ci­fully brief, my cat fought and strug­gled to her very last breath, but that’s what she was like. She was a fighter and didn’t take shit from any­one, not even Death, though in the end, Death always wins.

I spent the last cou­ple of days talk­ing to my cat, telling her how much I would miss her when she was gone. I really did sense that the end was extremely near. My other three cats were all dis­tressed as well when she died and could sense some­thing was very wrong. And even though I cleaned up the spot in the hall­way where she passed, they are still sniff­ing around it. They know, even if they don’t understand.

Pets are part of your fam­ily, they have per­son­al­i­ties and strong char­ac­ters and are loyal and faith­ful com­pan­ions, dogs and cats alike. When you lose one, it hurts and hurts deeply.

I can remem­ber when I was a child and we lost a pet, my mother being so very dis­traught that she would always announce with great author­ity and final­ity, that this was the end and she would have no more pets, ever, because los­ing them is so painful. It’s not fair that they have such brief life spans!

I’ve lost 2 cats in the last year and it doesn’t get any eas­ier. I’m lucky now, the three I have are all quite young and I hope it will be a good long time before I have to face los­ing any more.

I’m going to miss my sweet lit­tle girl so much, I already do now and she hasn’t even been gone 24 hours.

In truth, she was partly gone already, as I watched her health decline, espe­cially over the last week or so. I know its a cliché, but she is at peace now. Every day was increas­ingly becom­ing a strug­gle for her. She doesn’t have to strug­gle any more.

I hate death. It sucks, but I think the dying part is the worst of all.