The Mother of Cats and I are staying inside because of the smoky air.
The Mother of Cats has been a little grumpy lately because she is between projects, whatever that means. She has been reading books and just neglecting me something terrible. Yellow Boy has been sick, so he get special food, and do I get any of that? NO!!! She is just cruel to me. Why does she play favorites like this?
Oh. Look at this. She made me a yarn bed!
I was so happy when she finally got up and put all of these yarns out for me on the table. I tried to sleep on this cushy new bed, but she kept chasing me off. Why does she act this way? She played with the red yarns and put them into some order of light to dark; the brightest yarn is now labeled #1, and the darkest one is #4. The Mother of Cats is really strange, don’t you think? She should probably chill out and eat more cookies…
Then I helped her wind all of the yarns into cakes. Why does she do these things? The yarns were perfect the way they were as my bed, but nope! She was compelled to put my yarns onto this contraption that kept hitting my ears. The Mother of Cats can be so thoughtless!
Finally the yarn was all wound and I helped myself to some chomps while she was putting the yarn onto her needles. I really had to assert myself to get the quality attention that I deserve, but she did give me the petting breaks and cookies that I’m entitled to. Because she was acceptably attentive I only chomped a little bit on the yarn and we spent the afternoon knitting on the new sweater.
See what a good helper I am?By this morning you could start to see the pattern emerging. Good job, Mother of Cats!!
Today the smoke was really thick so we battened down the hatches (the Mother of Cats has been reading all of this books about sailing…) and spent the afternoon knitting away. This evening I wolfed down Yellow Boy’s special food (Hey… she had neglected to give me my cookies! What am I supposed to do?), went upstairs to sleep it off, and the Mother of Cats got a lot more knitting done.
Look at how far she’s gotten!! Not bad, but she should have left the yarn in my new bed…
Now I’m up from my nap and the Mother of Cats and I are going to cuddle and read a book. It is good to be a cat. I’m so glad that the Mother of Cats is finally paying enough attention to me.
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
Today the smoke was pretty bad in Denver; we have an air quality action alert until tomorrow evening. Good thing I have great knitting projects going.
Yellow Boy is losing weight and off his feed; we suspect diabetes. Right now he is on a special formula for diabetic cats, and we’ll see how he does. Sad days.
This sweater is Sipila from Caitlin Hunter. My project notes are here.
I’m knitting the orchid yarns as a gradient with the brightest skein at the top of the sweater in the colorwork and the darker skeins at the bottom; I numbered the cakes to keep it organized.
The Mother of Cats has been knitting like crazy on her new Tegna sweater.
I’ve been really helping the Mother of Cats out with her knitting. It’s a lot of work, but someone (ahem… me!) needs to keep their eye on things while she’s working. MacKenzie told me to chomp her yarn to keep her on her toes, but I’m a good boy. I like to be right in the action without actually sitting on the yarn.
See what I mean?
It’s important that I take a good look at her work from time to time to make sure she’s staying on task. I figure that if I check things over every half hour that’s good enough.
The rest of the time I nap!
The Mother of Cats made really good progress on the sweater and got it finished this morning. It is so cute! She took it right outside and grabbed some pictures of it before the afternoon thunderstorms started.
It looks pretty darn good, doesn’t it? This is what you get when you have quality cat support for your work.The lace detail is my favorite!
Before the Mother of Cats had finished this sweater she had already started fussing over the yarn for the next one. “So many sweaters, so many choices”, she keeps mumbling as she digs around in the yarns. I think that she has finally made up her mind and has settled on some blue yarn for the next sweater. But first, she is going to make some socks this weekend. Oh. Socks. I don’t do socks. MacKenzie kind of specializes in socks. I like the sweaters. And bugs. I’m a pretty big fan of chasing garter snakes, too. Why can’t the Mother of Cats let me chase garter snakes in the house?
Sigh. Guess I’ll have to make due with my toy mice.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The sweater is Tegna by Caitlin Hunter. This is my second Tegna sweater, this time in cotton/linen blend yarn. Here are the project notes for this one. I was so proud of my work that wore it this afternoon to go grocery shopping; there was a horrible accident at the check out lane that involved a dropped bottle of soy sauce and a carton of fresh strawberries: my beautiful Tegna is now soaking in the sink… Such is life.
Chasing a moth while I was reading in bed. This was truly a duck and cover moment for me…
Yellow Boy is the indoor bug hunter extraordinaire… anything that moves in the house gets caught and eaten. When he is short of entertaining wildlife he pulls out his toys which usually get abandoned at his food bowl. On the morning of the picture he had pulled out all three of his toy mice.
The Mother of Cats and I are still staying inside every day because of the heat. You’d think that she would devote herself to helping me cope with the unacceptable weather, wouldn’t you? I mean, look at this fur! Nope. She just turned on a ceiling fan for me and went about her business. I’m not sure she really loves me… She spends more time babying her plants outside then she does me. How could I come in second to a rose? Ridiculous!!
She has managed to get one of her tea roses to bloom.Her hydrangea that she bought this spring really got cooked by the heat (check out those crispy leaves…), but it has put out some new blooms too. Yep, you guessed it. She fusses over this plant more than me too!
When she isn’t outside ignoring me and feeding her plants she spends her time downstairs knitting away on new projects. She started two new ones this week, and would you believe that she started another Tegna sweater?
She even made a swatch this time. This yarn is cotton and linen and she wasn’t sure about the gauge (whatever that is… Yellow Boy wants to know if it is a kind of bug…), so she had to try out different needle sizes.I helped her with that!I closely supervised her work, and after a week look at what we have accomplished!Ta-da! Looking good, huh.
She took a break from the sweater over the weekend and made a sock. So cool. So perfect to sleep in my bed with me. Did she put cat nip into it and let me have it? Nope! I’ve discussed this before, but with the Mother of Cats it is always NOPE!!
This is the yarn that she started with……and here is her sock. She plans to make the second one this coming weekend.
So that was the whole week. She did go off and leave us from time to time, and there was some reading, but whatever. What is important is that she spends her time with me.
Tonight we are back to knitting the sweater. Finally I am getting the attention that I deserve: grooming, petting, cookies. Lots of cookies!
I’m such a good boy. Do you see how much I am helping the Mother of Cats?
Can I have some cooking now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
I bought this cotton/linen yarn to make a cute lacy summer top but I was not able to get the gauge that I needed, and because of the lace it was going to be hard to adapt the pattern, and knitting tightly on small needles hurt my hands. Total fail. The solution? Another Tegna! I am so happy with the first one I knit and I think that this one will be a nice layering piece as fall arrives with the longer sleeves I’m going to put on it. My Ravelry notes are here.
Poor garden. Even though the heat goes on it is more humid now and plants are doing better. I feed everything in the hopes that roses will bloom again; so far only the tea roses in pots are responding well. That hydrangea is in a pot as I can’t decide where to plant it. I think that it is going to need shade at least part of the day. Poor thing; it really got fried in the first location I tried out. I’m wondering if it can winter indoors in the pot with a grow light on it. Hmmm…
The socks are another of the vanilla sock pattern Dave. I’m having fun playing with the colors. My Ravelry project notes are here.
Once again the Mother of Cats has been disappointing in her priorities…
It has been horrible here for days and days. The days have been dark, there are huge booms, and so much water has fallen out of the sky it makes my tail curl. Seriously, Yellow Boy has been hiding in the closet for days, and I have to admit that I’ve been going to ground there myself.
Does the Mother of Cats come to comfort me the way she should? Does she double up the number of cookies to help me deal with all of this stress? No, she does not. She has been a big disappointment for days!
She found all of this yarn in the yarn playground (she calls it a stash…) that she decided to make into a sweater.She has been knitting away on the sweater for days and days…
Normally I would love to hang out with the Mother of Cats while she is knitting, but this yarn is made of cotton and tencel. It is boring. It tastes terrible when I chomp it. The Mother of Cats did give me some pieces to play with, but why bother? Now if she would just take a few minutes to knit me a cute little mouse stuffed with catnip out of this yarn… I would even share it with Yellow Boy. Really, the Mother of Cats needs to be more caring of others, don’t you think?
Just as the sweater was getting to an interesting length she became bored with it……and pulled out these sock kits that she bought one day when she left me alone to go play with sheep and other funny smelling things up in the mountains.
She struggled with her decision, but finally she picked the yarns in the middle of the picture and I helped her get them all wound up into cat toy cakes. What would the Mother of Cats do without my help?
Before you knew it she was making a sock!
That sock yarn is superwash wool, but did she let me chomp it? No, she did not! It thundered and rained again this weekend so I hid out with Yellow Boy in our safe zone in the closet for just hours and hours, and when we came out…
The first sock was done!
Yay! I think that the sock would be fun to play with too; a little catnip seasoning would make it perfect! Did she give it to me? Nope! Always, with the Mother of Cats, it is nope, nope, nope. I even ask nicely, too!
Tonight it is nice and calm outside and it is even cool.
This evening the thunder has stopped and it is nice outside. The birds are singing like crazy and Yellow Boy has come out of the closet and is standing by the back door hoping to see a bug. Not me. I’m just exhausted by all the thunder excitement and the knitting. I’m taking advantage of the break in the weather to catch a little cat nap.
Maybe when I wake up the Mother of Cats will give me some cookies.
I’m such a good boy!
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The sweater is the Throwback Tee on Ravelry, and my project notes are here.
That wonderful sock yarn is from Western Sky Knits, and I bought it all when I lost control in her booth at the Estes Park Wool Market.
The sock pattern is a vanilla sock called Dave from Rachel Coopey. I am going with a really simple sock to show off the yarn, because, hello! It is so gorgeous!
Today should be the last day in a cycle of thunderstorms and rain. Starting tomorrow the sun will be back out and the heat machine is back on! Welcome to summer, kitties.
I’ve been working really hard helping the Mother of Cats with her new summer sweater.
It has been a busy few weeks as I worked almost every night helping with this sweater. Would you believe that the Mother of Cats did not sufficiently appreciate my efforts? She kept pushing me off, and even CUT MY CLAWS short. She is always over-reacting to the smallest things. I stuck it out, we worked really hard, and yesterday she finished the knitting.
Would you believe that she then attacked our beautiful sweater with the steam iron? Yellow Boy became frightened and hid in the closet because he was worried that she might be getting ready to trim off some matted fur, but nope!, she just hovered the steam iron all over our sweater to make it even out. Don’t you think that the lace looks nice now?
One thing about the Mother of Cats; she loves to knit (and give me cookies), but she is just terrible at weaving in all of her ends. Hey, I like playing with the ends. Maybe she is just trying to be nice to me. No. She is just lazy.
She ran out side and took this picture of her sweater without me to help. I kept requesting nicely to be let out, but she just wasn’t having it. I even yowled and that didn’t work. What is up with the Mother of Cats?
Do you see the unwoven ends? I asked to be let out to play with them, but nope: she just ignored me.
She really likes this lace detail!She is not, however, completely happy with the neck edge. She plans to ask her knitting group if this might look a little better with an i-cord BO. Sweet. Frogging. I love frogging!
The Mother of Cats is now knitting on some little projects to get them out of the way so that she can cast on another sweater. She hopes to get going on it in another week or so.
Do you think that is enough time for me to grow out my claws?
Meanwhile I think that I will catch up on my rest to get ready for the next big knitting project!
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
This sweater is Tegna by Caitlin Hunter. My Ravelry project notes are here.
I’m knitting like crazy on a Closer to You shawl that will go with the Tegna. I’m also hoping to finish up some arm warmers that have been luring in my knitting bag for several weeks sniffing pitifully at their abandonment. Buck up, arm warmers, your time is coming!
I wound the yarn for a Summer Sky sweater last night and printed out the pattern. I will resist casting on. I will. I am strong…
I’m hanging out with the Mother of Cats while she types on her computer.
The weather is really changing around here. It rained (and thundered!) all week, but then suddenly the sun came back out and things began hopping around here. The birds are singing like crazy, the squirrels are running through the trees, and there are flowers and leaves on the trees again. It is like magic. Let me show you what has been going on.
The tree has flowers!This crazy squirrel was eating the flowers on the tree by the Mother of Cat’s son’s apartment. I guess no one gives him kitty cookies……and when the Mother of Cats and her son went to the movies they found a goose who had set up shop by the stairs. The mate of this goose is sitting on a nest in a nearby flower bed. Crazy goose. He should have gone in to see the Avengers movie with the Mother of Cats! I bet that the Hulk could give him some good tips on how to handle the movie crowds.
It’s like the world has come back to life after a long cold and snowy winter. The Mother of Cats never lets us go outside in the winter, and this year she is still making us stay indoors even though I’m pretty sure that the garter snakes and bugs are waking up and waiting for me to come chase them.
Nope. We are still trapped indoors.
MacKenzie is helping the Mother of Cats with her knitting. Doesn’t he look good? NOT!! The reason he is eye balling that ball of yarn is because he is getting ready to chomp on it!When he is not chomping yarn he is trying to put his claws into the knitting. She has gotten pretty cranky with him, but one thing about MacKenzie , he just keeps attacking the knitting in the hopes that she will become exhausted and give up. My money is on MacKenzie!
Friday the Mother of Cats packed up all of the knitting and worked around the house. MacKenzie and I spent the morning snoozing at the foot of her bed.
Don’t we look innocent? Check out how long the fur is on the back of my legs. The Mother of Cats calls this fur my butt feathers. I love my butt feathers. They are almost as long as the fur on my chest. Don’t you think that I am a handsome boy?
Well, I was just innocently sleeping along when the Mother of Cats scooped me up and carried me off to the craft room where she had the clippers all plugged in and ready to go. SHE SHAVED ALL OF MY BUTT FEATHERS OFF!! And my fur matts, too. I was too stunned to wail, but I’m pretty sure I got a few squeaks off. MacKenzie didn’t even come to check on me. How could she do this to me?
See. No more butt feathers.
Oh, right. This happens every spring, now that I think about it. I shed like crazy, I get a lots of matted fur, and she cuts all of it off with the clippers. She also tried to shave the fur off of my tummy, but after a brief discussion that involved some claw and teeth demonstrations she gave up. She told me that we would get back to this latter, but I don’t think so. Good luck with that, Mother of Cats!
So, this is spring. The outside comes back to life with lots of singing birds and crazy squirrels, but some clean-up operations start happening around the house that I could definitely do without. I wonder when she is going to let me start going outside again. I wonder why she said we were going to have a bath next week?
Never mind that. MacKenzie says it is time for cookies now. He’s such a good brother.
The Mother of Cats has been very unfair to me lately…
To be frank, the Mother of Cats has been out of control for days. She has been working on this shawl that is using a stitch that she calls “brioche”. Lots of brioche. Brioche in color after color.
All of these colors to be exact. Why does she have to use sooo many colors. Okay, I did help her wind these yarns, which was a lot of fun, but now she won’t let me touch them. She keeps them in a plastic container with a LOCKING LID! What is up with that?The second I get a paw into the brioche she goes all crazy on me and makes me stop. She even YELLED at me!
I cannot believe that she is acting this way. This brioche is the yummiest knitting that she has done in quite a while. So squishy. So wonderful under my paws. So perfect for a new cat blanket…
See what I mean? There is an ocean of this brioche so far, and if she would just give it to me I would certainly put it to good use.
Nope. She is refusing to let me take a nice nap on this blanket. She let the smelly starfish touch the blanket, but me, her most devoted kitty, not a chance! I am concerned about her priorities. I’m not sure that she still loves me the way that she used to.
Okay. Maybe she does love me a little bit.
Last night she finally finished the brioche portion of the shawl and started on the garter stitch section. Garter stitch! I like garter stitch too. The way this shawl is growing there is no way she will be able to keep me off of it. Ha! Take that Mother of Cats!
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats: This shawl is the What the Fade?! shawl by Andrea Mowry. My project notes are here on Ravelry. I am proud to announce that I found every single one of these yarns in the stash (with my sidekick MacKenzie helping me dig through bins…) and didn’t have to resort to any shopping to close color gaps in the fade. Yay, stash!!
A couple of weeks ago I had trouble breathing, called my doctor’s office, and the nurse there called 911 for me. Wow. What an experience that was. Okay, it was a little surreal to be frank. One of the things that happened was the paramedic, after he had placed a needle in my arm vein, attached me to heart monitors and then placed me on oxygen, told me how much he liked my watercolor paintings of cats. What? This is really happening? Panting for air, I struggled for a moment to think of what he was talking about.
Oh. These cat pictures.
Those aren’t really watercolor paintings, but they sure do look like it, I suppose. They are actually art quilts made with handpainted fabrics that give them their “watercolor” look.
Here’s a close-up of one of the quilts. You can see that the picture is made by fusing down lots of painted and stenciled fabric pieces that were then sewn and quilted.
The patterns for the quilts came from McKenna Ryan and I bought them at a local quilt store years ago. Over months I slowly assembled the fabric stash to get the colors that I wanted, and then I created the quilts in my own colors to make them show cats that I have known and loved over my life. These three cats are Morgan (the yellow sunflower cat), Zach (the tuxedo cat) and Teak (my beloved Siamese cat). I love these quilts, especially because of the quality of the dyes on the fabric and the way the colors work together.
So, do you think that I am a sucker for handpainted yarn? Oh, my lord, that would be a huge YES!
The week after the exciting and exhausting ambulance ride my BKB (best knitting bud) Deb and I went up to the Interweave Yarn Fest to do some quality shopping.
The first booth in the door was this one by Western Sky Knits. Look at those yarns!! Look at those handpainted yarns in amazing colors! Look! Look!
Don’t those yarns look a lot like the colors that are in the quilts?
Take a closer look. See what I’m talking about?
I saw these yarns and I was gone. I didn’t even do my usual pass through the entire yarn show before buying anything. I just started piling up the yarn that I wanted and that was that. I bought 11 skeins of fabulous, water-colorish yarns and wanted more. Let me show you what I got.
I am a complete sucker for a good gold yarn. That was the first skein to jump into my arms. I love this gold. I bought two speckles to go with the first gold skein, and then had to get another skein of gold just in case. You know. Who can tell what I’ll need in the future? The stash cries for gold yarn. I’m on the hunt for the right shawl pattern now, but I’m also dreaming of socks and arm warmers.Then there was this. I needed these colors in my stash. These yarns are the missing pieces that I needed to make some shawls that I’ve been organizing from the stash. Just like I did with the quilts, I have been assembling colors for projects that I dream of from a number of sources and putting them into my stash. These yarns, and these colors, filled the final gaps and made my vision come together.
Here’s the thing. Looking at these yarns, I realized that they are the colors of the quilts. Watercolors. Colors that make me smile inside. The colors of sunshine, flowers in the garden, cats, and summer days. I look at these yarns, I imagine the projects that they will make shine, and I begin plotting the knitting. And the flowers that I will plant in the garden next month. And the people that I will gift the knitting to. Some projects that will last as long and give me (and hopefully others) as much joy as the watercolor quilts that I have on the wall.
The Mother of Cats finally finished her Mixology Shawl last week. I was so happy! She has been knitting and knitting on this for weeks and weeks, and it is so big that half of the time it was piled on top of me while she was working on it.
See what I’m talking about?
So, of course, as soon as she finished it I was thrilled. Another blanket for me!! The second she had that Mixology off of the needles and folded on the chair I jumped right up there. A blankie! My blankie! I don’t need it blocked at all and I love all of the strings hanging off of it. Thanks, Mother of Cats!! You’re much nicer than Yellow Boy says.
What? This isn’t for me?
The Mother of Cats is so mean spirited. She took my blankie away and dumped it into the sink to soak. In water!
Look at how huge this is.
Then she stretched it out on the floor to dry with towels under and over it. How can she be so mean to me? She knows how much I like to sleep on wet wool. Wet towels, not so much. Sheesh…
Today I helped her take off all of the little strings from the shawl and she gave me the pile of scraps to play with. Nice. I like scraps, but I want the whole blankie. I’m such a good boy. I helped her the whole time she was making this thing!
It is done. She says it is not a blankie for me at all, but a new shawl for her to wear to her knitting group tomorrow. It is exactly the right colors to go nicely with my fur, but no, she hasn’t put it back onto the bed for me to sleep on.
Tonight she started another big shawl with lots of colors of yarn. We wound all of the balls this afternoon (cat party time!) and I helped her with the brioche stitches tonight. I’m sure that she couldn’t do this work without me. She is so lucky to have my help.
I’m such a good boy!
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The shawl is Mixology by Casapinka. My project notes are here.
I have been working on this shawl for quite a while. I had some adventures settling on the colors for the shawl, which I shared in this post.
I do need to make the cats another knitted blanket. They actually fight over the one little one that I made for MacKenzie earlier. It is such a struggle to keep them off my knitted goods that I decided to just give them small blankets of their own that can be easily washed.
Tonight MacKenzie and I cast on a What The Fade?! shawl. Hopefully it will soon be big enough to cover him again while I’m knitting.
Today it was horribly windy here, so I stayed indoors. Here are some videos from the day; my favorite is the porta-potty blowing down the street…
These scary firemen came to the house and took mom away.
It has been kind of a hard six months. I’ve been dealing with a serious flare of my Sjogren’s Syndrome: dry mouth, eye problems (retinal detachments in BOTH eyes), brain fog, and horrible fatigue. Seriously, off the chart fatigue. Bad Sjogren’s, bad!!
But I think that my systemic sclerosis (scleroderma) has been chugging along as well. My chest feels tight, and when I do anything at all I start to breath hard as I catch my breath. Okay, there might be some panting… Sometimes I get dizzy and I have to put my head down. Vacuuming is suddenly a horrific task, but just coming up the stairs or washing out a pan at the sink can also set me off. Sometimes my lips are blue…
Check out my edema: Can you see the details of the quilt that my arm was resting on?
One of the problems with being chronically ill is that you just keep taking things in stride. After all, it isn’t like this is the first time I’ve seen edema like this, or noticed that my lips were blue. I get out of breath all of the time, and I’ve been telling my doctors about all of this for the last 18 months. But somehow, things seem a little worse now. I have heart palpitations and there is a constant pressure in the middle of my chest. I have developed a headache that just refuses to go away, and my muscles and joints are behaving even worse than ever.
So, Friday while I was resting up in bed after the ordeal of making my morning coffee (yep. I go back to bed to recover from getting out of bed…) I decided that I would call the pulmonologist’s office to ask for an appointment. As usual, thinking that I would be on my feet for only a limited amount of time, I planned several little chores to do while I was going to be up.
I took this picture of my incredibly cute new arm warmers. This is the Armelitas pattern by knitcats Design, and here are my Ravelry project notes.
Aren’t those the cutest armwarmers? I put them on, and then started the dishwasher, got a load of laundry going, and then pulled on some more warm clothes (ahem… my Cactus Flower socks and Marfa is a Black Elephant shawl over some fleece pants and a denim shirt) so I could sit at the computer downstairs to make the phone calls.
So, I was out of breath when I made the call. I got ahold of the nurse at my pulmonologist’s office to ask her if I should came in for testing right away or if it would be best to make an appointment. As I talked to her my breathing got worse… I just couldn’t catch my breath and I was now outright panting. I began to feel faint.
The nurse called 911.
I ended up sitting on the floor by the front door with the phone on speaker in front of me waiting for the paramedics to arrive. In just a few minutes they had bundled me up and were whisking me out the door leaving a visibly upset MacKenzie watching from the top of the stairs. It was snowing outside; I didn’t have a coat, but I had managed to hang onto all of my knitted items. The paramedics attached me to all of their sensors and then rebundled me in blankets and knitted items afterwards (okay, my hands turned blue. They hadn’t ever heard of Raynaud’s, but they becaume instant fans of wooly warmth when presented with fingers that matched my denim shirt…) My armwarmers were popped back on over the IV line and the oxygen sensor on my finger. They used the shawl as an additional blanket. I never got my breathing back under control, and was still panting up a storm when I got to the hospital, but I was better equipped than most to cope with the cold. I like to think that I was pretty darn fashionable, too.
Into the MRI machine I went, rocking my armwarmers, as once again the doctors went on a blood clot hunt. Every one of my health emergencies has involved blood clot hunts; it’s a scleroderma thing. No blood clot. No pneumonia. No heart attack. After 2 hours sitting on the gurney in the ER my breathing was under control again and my O2 was fine. My best friend Deb arrived with knitting in hand to sit with me. My son arrived in time to take me home again with instructions to not let me drive or stay home alone.
“This is something that needs to be treated by a specialist”, the ER doc tells me. “You need to call your pulmonologist’s office first thing in the morning to get in to see her. You need additional tests that can’t be done here in the ER”.
You think?
It’s hard to not be stuck by the irony of this. I’m back right to where I started. It is kind of known in the scleroderma community that going to the ER is mostly useless because they don’t have the knowledge and experience to treat your condition. I’ll be calling my pulmonologist first thing Monday morning, but this time I will be calling from bed in a well rested condition.
with my latte and the cats!
For those of you who don’t know all of the details of my autoimmune bad-boys, here’s what is going on:
I have the limited form of systemic sclerosis, which is a subset condition of scleroderma. I have thick skin on my lower arms, legs, face and neck mostly, but the damage is also affecting several of my organ systems. I am considered a classic case with all of the CREST components.
I also have Sjogren’s Syndrome, which is fairly common as about 15% of systemic sclerosis patients also acquire this sidekick condition along with the scleroderma. It’s serious in its own right, but not usually life threatening.
Systemic sclerosis has a whole basketful of complications: Raynaud’s Disease, interstitial lung disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and kidney disease along with the almost universal digestive tract complications. I have all of these, but in my case the words that are used to describe how I’m doing are “mild, early, and moderate”, which are nice descriptors to have if they are being used in the context of lung, heart, and kidney disease. I’m kind of guessing that one of the heart/lung conditions has taken it up a notch.
Today I’m camped out with my son waiting for Monday to arrive. I’m knitting.
Do you know the great Elizabeth Zimmerman? Her famous quote, one that I bear close to my heart on days like this, is: “Knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crisis.”
Yarn, Books & Roses 