I feel bad and beautiful

Long time, no see.

So . . . I've been diagnosed with essential tremors in my hands. They won't get better and there is no cure. Ass a matter of fact, they will most likely get worse over the next six months to two years. Eventually they may progress to the point where they impact my fine motor skills for things like writing with a pen, knitting, eating with a fork.

So that's depressing.

In other news I started rewriting "Walls of Jericho" (a Snape/Hermione fic) in the hopes of eventually finishing it after more than a decade.

My dad's dad is the last of my four original grandparents living. He's ninety something years old, has a second wife ten years his junior (go Grandpa!), and his doctor told his wife and my parents yesterday that grandpa only has two to six weeks left to live.

Grandpa fell in Memorial Day. I imagine he was in his VFW approved uniform at a Memorial service at the cemetery even though he's too frail to participate in the honor guard anymore (not that you can day that where he can hear you because Grandpa will hear none of that horseshit, thank you very much). He broke his femur near his hip and had to be hospitalized. They found bleeding on his brain and at first we all hoped it was from the fall.

Grandpa has stage IV cancer in his brain.

He's been sick for years. Colon cancer nearly a decade ago, melanoma two years ago. We've treated every Christmas and visit with Grandpa as if it was the last.

And this time it may very well be.

Getting ready to pack for a last minute trip home. We'll drive nine hours across Colorado and Kansas tomorrow and visit my Grandfather at his new nursing home, check in with Grandma and my parents, then turn around and drive home on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The next time I go home will most likely he for the funeral.

I've been ready for this and yet I'm not.

I've managed to lose two betas for my Sherlolly Big Bang fic, which is sort of a blow to the self esteem. They didn't even tell me why, just never got back to me after I sent the first few chapters. One said she hadn't found much wrong and told me she'd send the suggested corrections soon and that was in September. I've sent reminders several times and there is always an excuse and a promise. The second beta was the husband of one of my cousins. Two chapters and then nothing. I'm getting paranoid that my fic sucks.

Demon Spawn's usual speech therapist brought in another therapist for a second opinion because Demon Spawn hasn't been progressing as well as we'd hoped. He's actually regressed a bit. For every new thing he learns, he stops doing something else.

The second therapist used the words brain damage as a possible explanation once she heard about the circumstances around his birth.

My baby is a smart boy. He's just got a speech delay.

And my heart is breaking because I can't help think that it's my fault. If I'd pushed harder for a Cesarian instead of letting the doctor's force me to labor down for so long, if I'd pushed for the doctor to listen to me at his first appointment when I had concerns about his jaundice instead of being put off for another day, if I'd switched to formula faster instead of listening to the lactation consultant who kept insisting I needed to keep trying to breast feed even though my milk hadn't come in.

There are so many things I should have done and now I can't help but feel that I've failed him. I should have been able to protect him better.

He leaves for two months on Sunday, early enough that we've decided it would be best not to wake the Demon Spawn before he goes. I am not handling it well. This will be the first time Captain had left us since Demon Spawn was born and I have no idea how he will deal with the separation.

I did the treadmill stress test and echocardiogram thing for my heart yesterday. Although I only managed six minutes on the treadmill at a whopping max speed of 2.7 mph, I did not die so I consider that an over all win. I also got to see the live feed of the ultrasounds they did of my heart, which was kind of creepy cool.

The down side was they spent nearly an hour trying to get an IV in so they could inject me with some dye to make the heart images better and never managed to actually get the IV going. They brought in the "vein expert" and he stabbed me twice, the second time resulting in my legs flailing around like I was being electrocuted because OMG someone trying to put in an IV in the back of your hand without deadening it first HURTS LIKE A SON OF A FISH. But I did not move my arm and I only screamed a tiny bit and I did not curse anyone's parents for bringing their horrible spawn into the world to mutilate my arm, so... win again?

Anywho, they were able to do the ultrasounds without the dye, and they called me yesterday afternoon to tell me my heart looked normal so I didn't need to panic about that.

And I'm wearing a heart monitor for a month, which is already irritating the heck out of my skin where the electrodes are attached, because of course it is. And I discovered last night that wearing a sports bra to sleep is not terribly comfortable, but I can tuck the monitor sensor into the cleavage without worrying that it's going to unplug during the night. Unfortunatly, it appears that the cleavage also provides just enough insulation that the sensor doesn't adequately broadcast to the receiver on my nightstand if I'm facing away from it. So, you know, I'm going to count that one as a win for my ample bosom and call it good because I'm looking for the bright side of things right now.

In other news, the Captain was supposed to have today off but a few of his soldiers needed to report on base at five to do a thing they've put off until the last minute so he had to text them to remind them this afternoon. Then at five thirty he received a text from his boss saying some of his soldiers did not report so Captain needed to round them up and go to base himself to deal with that, which was annoying because it's a day off, but it's his job so you can't very well tell them no. However, he was so annoyed he decided to take the Demon Spawn and one of Demon Spawn's very loud electronic toys with him because if he had to suffer, everyone else was going to suffer by golly! So we're apparently using the child for revenge now. I'm surprisingly okay with it.

I've knit my first mitten, which I'm proud of. It's a convertible mitten so you can flip the top part backwards to expose the fingers for phone texting and whatnot. It has a thumb, even. But now I have to knit a second one and I'm a little concerned they won't match, that I'll end up adding or deleting a row somewhere or something.

I'm also hoping to get some writing done this year, but I said that last year and only managed maybe ten thousand words of fic, and now I'm playing WoW again so I doubt I'll even get that much done.

It's been a few days since Captain took Loki to the vet for the last time.

I didn't think I'd be as upset as I was.

I definitely was not kidding when I said I hated that cat. I did. I hated him.

But I also loved him in my own way.

I miss the way he used to sleep on my husband's pillow at night, just above Captain's head like some sort of freakish snoring wig.

I miss the way he would head butt me in the face when he thought I was sad, even though it always left his eye cooties all over my nose.

I will not miss the peeing on things, the stains from his constantly running eyes (allergies), or the way he'd pick fights with the two girl cats in a sad bid to be the Alpha (it never worked).

I know my husband misses Loki. He was understandably upset and crying when he came home from that last vet visit. He held Loki through the final moments.

I wish I knew how to make things better for him, but he says it will just take time.

After more than ten years of the Demon Cat leaking eye gunk on me, peeing on my things, peeing ON ME, and generally being a jealous cow about our dog, me, and the baby... Captain has finally decided that perhaps it is time to put Loki to sleep.

Both of us are understandably upset at the thought of putting him down, and even though there are days when I hate that cat so much, we are both heartbroken.

Two months ago when he literally walked up to me, turned around and peed in my face, I was pretty much ready to call it right then, but Captain gave me the sad puppy eyes and I agreed to spend $200 on a comprehensive vet exam to make sure there wasn't a physical issue like a UTI or some sort of bladder thing causing him to do the peeing thing.

There wasn't.

The cat is one of the healthiest eleven year old cats the vet had ever seen. She also didn't understand how I managed to put up with being peed on for a decade, which... THANK YOU. At least someone appreciated my pain and restraint.

However, that meant that Loki's renewed determination to pee on all of -my- things and a new found aggression with the Demon Spawn was a behavioural thing. AND, since my husband has still not managed to fulfill his daily responsibility to drug the Demon Cat to try to chill the little shit out...

We're giving up. We're horrible furparents. We've considered rehoming him but 1) who is going to want to adopt a cat that sprays on all the things and 2) Loki has been Captain's cat for eleven years and is very very attachhed, and I honestly think separating them at this point would do a lot of harm to Loki's psyche. It's about quality of life, and we just don't think Loki would be happy somewhere else. And we're not happy with him here.

People are going to say we should have tried harder (TEN YEARS OF BEING PEED ON, I TRIED A LOT OK) blah blah biscuit cakes. Yet none of those people have ever offered a solution that doesn't involve me sucking it up and washing cat spray off my stuff for another decade.

Plus, I'm pretty sure Captain is going to change his mind and talk me out of it anyway. he always does.

Putting this behind a cut just in case someone is silly enough to be reading this on a work computer, even though it's mostly innocent. Ish?

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Also, because I forgot to mention it in the last post, I managed to tear/damage/bork my right rotator cuff some weeks ago, which was as unfun as you can imagine. I have no clue how I managed to mess it up, but the doctor confirmed it was borked and I'll be visiting a physical therapist at the end of the week who will probably be able to get my full range of motion back eventually, but there's a pretty good chance I'll never regain full strength in that arm without surgery and that's not going to happen anytime soon.

So.

OH, and then I fell down the stairs again after I hurt the arm, and rather stupidly reached out to try to stop the fall with the bad arm and yanked it backwards and that was a HUGE MISTAKE.

So, funtimes at the Miss Miah household.

In actually yay news, I've got nearly 11k words of fic done for a story that was supposed to be PWP. Ask me if there's been anything close to sexytimes in it yet? No, there hasn't, because it is apparently impossible for me to write PWP fics. Sadly, the 11k is not from the fic I have owed someone for about a bajillion years, that fic is only at about 3.5k, but at least Hermione and Severus have actually come face to face in that one now (as of the last three hundred words).

Time to feed the Demon Spawn. My life is so glamorous.