January 10, 2009: Oreo Is Much Improved

I went to bed around seven last night and was asleep before seven thirty.  Oreo came in and slept with me for a little while at the foot of the bed.

Dominica woke me up at ten because Oreo was laying in the middle of the upstairs hallway and was not willing to move.  He had not eaten his dinner and was very obviously extremely ill.  I tried taking him for a walk and he tried but was having a really hard time getting around.  So we decided that he needed to go to the emergency room at the hospital in Bedford Hills.

We were out the door before ten thirty having already called and prepped the hospital that we were coming.  It takes roughly half an hour to get out to Bedford Hills from Peekskill.  We arrived just before eleven.  Only Oreo and I went to the hospital as Dominica needed to stay home and take care of Liesl as well as to cook Oreo’s stew so that he would have good food again as soon as we needed it.

Oreo’s stay at the hospital ended up taking a pretty long time.  We didn’t get to leave the hospital until one thirty in the morning and boy were we tired.  Only a little less than three hours of sleep for me in two days and he has not had much sleep either.

The final verdict, after more blood work, was that Oreo is dehydrated now and has developed pancreatitis which is causing additional problems.  They have him a fluid treatment to help “jump start” his system but he is off food until tomorrow and then only light and bland food for several days.  He is not going to like this.  But, most importantly, they think that he is going to be okay.  He needs time to rest and to work the food out of his system.

So we got home around two in the morning.  Oreo seemed a little better even by the time that we got home.  The extra fluids must be helping already.

Oreo and I went straight to bed.  Dominica was up for a while longer taking care of Liesl and cooking for Oreo.  I have to be up before eight tomorrow morning which is going to be exceptionally painful.

I got up at a quarter till eight this morning.  I felt awful.  I didn’t fall asleep for a long time last night and my night was very restless.  I figure that I got a total of less than five hours if even more than four plus the slightly less than three that I got earlier.  So in two night’s I have gotten about seven to seven and a half hours of sleep.  Enough to function but not enough to feel good at all.

I got right to work by eight.  I ended up not getting the files from the team that I was supporting and was unable to do any work for a while.  Oreo got up just minutes after me and followed me down to the basement so that he could sleep on his Star Wars pillow by my side.  That is a good sign.  Previously he felt that he was unable to go up and down the stairs on his own.  A partial night’s sleep and the fluids must be helping.  I brought down a water dish for him so that he would have one down stairs too.  He has one on the main floor and in our bedroom but I wanted to make sure that he was encouraged to drink as much water as possible.

My morning work ended up being a much larger project than I had anticipated. I was working for about fifty minutes when my virtual desktop as well as my primary desktop got cut off from me due to a massive network outage on Wall Street.  So very quickly my morning turned from a small installation process and some routine patching into a pretty major endeavor just to be able to work let alone to do the scheduled work let alone to deal with the major outage.  Not that I deal directly with network outages but they do impact me and I need to be available when they happen.

I ended up working an entire day today making it a full six day week.  I can’t complain as we really need the money with Oreo’s surprise six hundred dollar day at the vet’s yesterday.  We really appreciate that I am able to get overtime.  It really makes a difference for us.

The new television set arrived mid-afternoon.  It was delivered via a minivan and it took two movers to bring it in to the house.  This thing is huge.  I didn’t get a chance to hook it up until pretty late in the evening.

The first thing that we popped in to test on the new 52″ Samsung LCD was Fable II on the XBOX 360.  We set the 360 to 1080p and were completely wowed by Fable II.  Having completed the game already going back and seeing it on this monitor at full resolution was really something.  It looked like a completely different game!  There is so much detail that we hadn’t seen before.  Very impressive both for the TV and for the game.  Now I am sorry that I played it before getting the new set.  The game is so much more gorgeous than I had realized.  At least when the Knothole Island downloadable content arrives in a week or two I will have this to play it on.

For the time being we have moved the Samsung on the floor in front of the fireplace below the Westinghouse 32″ that is mounted on the wall.  The Samsung is going to take its place at some point but I am not able to wall mount it by myself so we just have to wait until someone is here who can help me.  The TV is just too large for me to be able to lift like that all alone.

Oreo improved throughout the day.  He is definitely feeling much better today.  He is not happy at all about his bland food diet.  He can’t wait to be back on real food again later in the week.

I have a bunch of work that needed my attention today so I spent a lot of time in the basement catching up on Active Directory management issues and other problems.  My plan had been to go to bed quite early, maybe as early as seven, but that didn’t happen at all and I did not even quite make it by eleven.

Katie is coming up to Peekskill sometime tomorrow morning.  She has not had a chance to meet Liesl yet.  Katie has seen the new house but not since we moved any of our furniture in.  She came up to see the house during the time when we had first gotten it but had not moved in yet.

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