Richard,

You are most welcome, and I thank you for your sympathy regarding the loss of our cat Sam, who was unlike any other cat in many good ways.

I just now remembered one other suggestion - don't just take photos of Anabel in the coming years - make plenty of videos of her too. I took hundreds of photos of Sam, but only made 3 or 4 videos, and that is my second greatest regret.

Dean

Richard,

Looks like you certainly have a wonderful best buddy alright!

I noticed you mentioned she is 9 years old, which raised a red flag due to my losing my best buddy Sam at age 10 a little over a year ago. So I have some advice for you:

1. Have blood work done every 6 months to early detect the beginning stages of kidney failure. Do not wait a full year between blood tests/veterinary checkups.

2. Be vigalent as far as any loss of appetite that lasts more than 3 or 4 days, as this can be a sign of major kidney disfunction.

3. If - God forbid - she is ever diagnosed with early to mid-stage kidney failure, you should have your vet prescribe her Royal Canin Renal Support in cans (not dry). Sam's 17 year old "step-sister" Clementine was diagnosed with substantial kidney disfunction shortly after Sam passed on and has been treated by a different vet who not only prescribed the RC Renal Support, but also gives her subcutaneous IV fluids every 2 - 4 weeks and is doing unbelievably well. We suspect the special dry cat food made by Science Diet we were feeding Sam may not have helped him.

This is just my 50 cents worth that I sincerely hope will help your Anabel Lee live much longer should her kidneys start failing.

Regards,
Dean

Hello,

I am going to have new shingles put on my house plus have the eaves, soffits, and fascia covered in vinyl coated steel. But I am very unsure of the colors to select. I know a small number of roofing and siding manufacturers have apps that will allow you to upload a photo of your house and then electronically put THEIR product in place of the old roof, trim, etc.

I would rather use one that will let me take a photo of ANY brand & color of trim covering and any brand & color of shingle and electronically "paint" them over my old trim & old shingles. (Let me take a guess - the only ones that can do this are not free?)

I do not have Photoshop, nor could I afford it - especially for what little I would ever use it after my house is redone.

If anyone has any ideas I would sure appreciate reading about them.

Thank you in advance.

Dean

My wife & I wished we could give 2017 the finger as we watched the ball being dropped because 2017 was such an unbelievably bad year for us due to:

Friday January 13 - she fell down an escalator at the airport and injured her already severely bad back even more, plus broke several ribs that still bother her after almost a year.

Feb. 23 I had a near head on collision at almost 75 MPH when an uninsured Jack-A ran a stop sign and turned right in front of me. Thankfully my Honda Ridgeline's original airbags worked perfectly. A few weeks later I get an airbag recall notice.

The following Wednesday a tree in our alley swaying in very high winds sparked the power lines above our back fence and set our backyard, back fence, and 3 neighbor's backyards and fences on fire.

3 days after that I get an antibiotic injection and a steroid injection at my doctor's office and then go into shock and take my very first ride in an ambulance to the ER.

Then on April 2nd I lose my best buddy Sam, our 10 year old, adorable tomcat to kidney failure after spending nearly $2K to try & save him.

I spent many dollars and hours preparing to photo the Great American Eclipse - and it was too cloudy that day to see it at all.

And finally in October, my wife''s most beloved cat of all time, Annabelle, gets sick and dies despite my spending almost $2K and many trips to the vet.

Oh I almost forgot. After making many trips to the weight loss center we finally meet my wife's surgeon on Dec. 13 and he says everything is a go for surgery on the 15th. We then spend 3 hours preregistering at the hospital (which just killed her bad back) - and the next morning the surgeon's partner calls and says she is on too much medication to risk having surgery. We had brought her long list of medications every time we visited the center and insisted that the doctor take a look at it, but his PA apparently had just been humoring us for the 2 months leading up to her surgery date.

Winter normally aggravates my wife's severe depression, but the major letdown by this particular weight loss center has made her even more depressed.

SO GOOD RIDDANCE 2017!!!!

Well we apparently can't rely on USPS 2nd Day "Delivery" for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th day delivery either. I paid about $25 for 2nd Day delivery on Thursday of last week for an order shipping from New York. This Monday, the 11th, when I tracked it it on USPS.com it said it had left New York and was on its way to me in Borger, TX, with an expected delivery of the 11th. Since it was a no-show , on Tuesday I tracked it again and USPS said it was in freakin Oakland, CA, overshooting the correct Texas destination by 1500 freaking miles. Then on Wednesday USPS website said it was "delayed" at Oakland. I guess it took them more than a full day to figure out that Borger, TX is not a suburb of Oakland, CA.
My wife needed the special bariatric food supplements by today (Friday), so I called the vendor and they reshipped the order at no charge by Fedex 2nd Day. They also refunded the USPS 2 Day shipping charges.
Well BOTH packages showed up today (it figures) !

Sorry, I have a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering and it's only the Rangers for me. Although, being a lifelong Texan, it won't bother me if the Astros win it all this season!

This was posted at just the right time to remind me to send in my $50 Discount Tire credit card rebate that had to be postmarked by the end of this month.

I went online this afternoon but couldn't find the rebate form on the Discount Tire Direct website, so I emailed the sales agent that sold me 4 tires in early May. He quickly replied with an attached pdf Yokahama Rebate form, but I told him thanks, but I already sent that one in and was needing the one for the $50 DT rebate.

In his next reply he stated he had found the form and filled it out and sent it in for me!!!!

So all I can say is WOW! - talk about going the extra mile. So it would seem this company is the equivalent of B&H Photo when it comes to tires.

After clicking on the first link of this post, a favorite phrase used by NBC's great hockey announcer "Doc Emrick" comes to mind: "MYYYYY GOODNESS!!!!!

Does this squirrel happen to live near The First Self-Righteous Church?

Amtrain I am very sorry to hear about one of your cats dieing so tragically. My first cat Smokie was a female and when I would occasionally let her outside I would try my best to keep a close watch on her, being afraid she might go over our 6' picket fence. Sometimes I would get distracted and lose track of her for several minutes, but I always found her and brought her back in for the rest of the day.
I hope and pray you never lose another one in a tragic fashion.

I never thought about spider bites being another lethal danger to cats. We have Brown Recluses and Black Widow spiders here. But now our 2 remaining cats are indoor only, so I hope this never becomes a problem with them. I will need to see about spraying for insects and spiders in our yard and in our house.

Regarding being with your cat when it passes on, this is what my wife and I wanted - especially after a very sad experience with my first cat Smokie, who died at one of the local veterinarian clinic overnight over a year ago. We (I) just couldn't give her full time care with me having a very stressful full time job back then and my wife being partially disabled. So we left her at our regular vet for better care, but we suspect she didn't actually get better care there and died the first night at their clinic. This decision still haunts us. But with Sam we thought he would receive much better medical care at the Pet ER 50 miles from our home.

I have no doubt my judgement was clouded (except for opting for the DNR option) because of all my wife and I have been through. I could simplify this reply by saying you should search for my previous post about a month ago to see the extraordinarily bad events that have happened to us. But briefly, my wife fell down the escalator at the Amarillo Airport on Friday January 13th, 5 weeks ago I had a near head on collision at almost 75 mph when a driver turned in from of me after running a stop sign, the following Tuesday a fire started by a tree sparking the power lines over our back fence nearly set our house on fire, and then at the end of that week I wound up in the ER after having a bad reaction to my doctor giving me an antibiotic shot and a steroid shot for an upper respiratory infection.

The other untold part of our sad story is at the same time I was trying to get Sam well, I was also fighting to keep one of my wife's two cats that has chronic kidney disease and a "mega-colon" from being put down. When I wasn't shuttling Sam to the Vet or the ER, I was taking Clementine to or back to the Vet. Plus I have to do all the cooking and cleaning since my wife's bad back keeps her from doing any kind of work.

Clementine hasn't used the litter box in several years and goes on pet pads I put down in our Sitting Room next to our front door, so I had a real incentive to have her put down. My wife told me a few years back that it would be OK to have her put down - but I knew better, so I began the vigil of changing out pads twice every day. Then when she had a problem with her mega-colon at the same time Sam became ill, I was determined to try and save her too. Well it looks like Clementine will be doing well, but every now and then I wonder if using the time I had to devote to her for Sam would have made a difference with Sam.

However, I learned 2 things from the last vet to treat Sam (at the ER Saturday night). First, kidney failure causes a cat to lose its normal sense of taste and no food tastes good to them. Second: major kidney disease causes the bone marrow to shut down, making the cat very anemic. But even after hearing all this I thought there might be one last chance for Sam to pull through.
My thinking was that even if Sam's life had an unhappy ending, I never wanted to ask myself over and over again in the future,"What if I had gone ahead and spent just a few hundred dollars more on additional treatment - would we still have our "Sam-Sam"?" All in all I have spent nearly $2000 on Sam which hurts my now limited pocketbook because I reluctantly took early retirement a year ago. However I feel I will never kick myself while asking myself did I try to save money and deprive Sam of a longer life. We were aware that at best Sam wouldn't have much longer to live and we desperately wanted him to stay around for just a few more weeks or hopefully a few months longer. Our experience with Clementine having been diagnosed with kidney disease and still doing relatively well many months later definitely clouded our judgement with Sam. We just couldn't comprehend that Sam would be a far worse victim of kidney failure than Clementine has been. He was gone in only a little less than 3 weeks after our noticing him not eating properly.

As I'm writing this, my wife's other cat, Annabelle, is doing her once a week routine of vomiting because of her extra sensitive stomach, and I'll be cleaning up her messes most of today. All 3 cats had to have special prescription food and trying to keep them from eating the wrong food has been physically and mentally draining.

10-1/2 years ago I had only one cat (Smokie), my soon to be wife had two (Clementine and Annabelle) so we had plenty of cats. However this underweight half grown brown cat with white feet and white patches underneath his neck and belly walked into my back yard while I was out on the patio. My future wife said: "If you feed it, then you'll own it" so as to advise me that maybe I should let this stray move on. I just couldn't let him move on, and after 10 years of marveling at his ways of expressing very obvious gratitude for saving him, by acting just like a little boy - like "my little son that I never had", I have no regrets. So despite this incredibly heartbreaking ordeal my wife and I have gone through, I will always thank God for allowing us to have such an extra-extra-extraordinary cat for a little over 10 years. I think back on what a terrible mistake it would have been to have such an extra-special cat move on to someone else or most likely get run over by a car trying to find someone else, or attacked by coyotes, etc.

We had counted on at least another 4 or 5 years with him, after which we could have accepted him passing on as we know the average lifespan of most cats is 15 - 17 years. He simply left us far too soon and we are wondering why, even though deep down we know that's the way life goes sometimes.

My thanks to all who responded and offered your condolences and admiration for such a fine creature as Sam was. Another nickname we sometimes used for him was "Handsome Sam". He was buried today next to my first cat Smokie at Adobe Pet Cemetery between Amarillo and Canyon. It was hard to come home this evening and not see him making a mad dash out of the house to go outside on his usual evening patrol.

I will always thank God for seeing that he never wound up on the street dead with a badly mangled body caused by an automobile, like what I saw on the shoulder of the highway going into Borger this morning. That poor cat was also brown with a white patch underneath it just like Sam. I do not want to imagine the agony the family of that poor cat will be going through once they find him.

I think an alternate title of this post could be: "Don't just take lots of still photos of your beloved pet - be sure to make plenty of videos."

For the past 11 years I had taken lots of photos of our 4 cats including my best buddy Sam, who just passed away at 11 years of age after being diagnosed with almost complete kidney failure only 2 weeks ago. It had only been 7 months since he had been checked by our Vet, and just suddenly stopped eating. We had 3 cats altogether after losing my first cat Smokie over a year ago (again with almost no videos of her either); and it must have been about 3 days before I realized Sam no longer had a normal appetite.

The very first day (Friday, March 24th ) our vet said he had badly infected gums and gave me pills to give him as they were out of the 2 week long acting antibiotic shot, and said I should call at 8 AM Monday to schedule additional tests. Then on Sunday he vomited a greenish vomit and so I drove him to the pet ER about 50 miles away in Amarillo. They gave him the 2 week antibiotic shot and then gave me the bad news. Their blood tests showed almost complete kidney failure and to not call my regular vet at 8 AM the next day, but to BE THERE WITH SAM at 8 AM when they opened up. They put him on IV fluids and he stayed there all week until around noon Saturday. He seemed a little better then, but at home he started to decline again so I took him to a different Vet last Thursday, who did more blood work which showed the same bad results as the original tests. He said he had a low chance of living much longer, which was no surprise. (Sidebar - it was frightening to see a once very powerful 27 lb. cat that could jump off a 6 foot fence, try to jump off a chair or our bed and see his front legs buckle and his chest and chin hit the floor instead.) The new vet put him on subcutaneous fluids for the rest of that day. The next day he seemed a little better, but yesterday he sounded like a pigeon cooing with every breathe he took and when I tried to give him water with a small syringe, he coughed out some very thick mucus. So I took him on another 50 mile journey to the ER. The Vet on duty said it would be a very slim possibility that he would get better, but that they could put him back on IV fluids and give him other medications until Monday where he could then be transferred to a non ER pet hospital for treatment through the regular week.

My wife was at a concert 120 miles away Saturday evening and I was to pick her up when her daughter brought her to Amarillo. She had manned up to attend the concert with her daughter despite having almost excruciating chronic back pain, but when we both arrived back at the ER, we were told we would have a 90 minute wait to see Sam. We sadly decided she must get home and rest her badly hurting back.

Later we didn't realize my phone had rang at 3 AM with a call from the ER notifying us that Sam had passed until we woke up this morning. Now my wife regrets not toughing it out for another 2-1/2 to 3 hours to see Sam for a few minutes and then take the long ride home. She takes lots of medications and didn't have them with her so staying at a hotel in Amarillo wasn't an option Saturday.

Now to the main point. Yes everyone thinks their pet is the best in the world and I won't disagree. But our Sam was a man's dream in that he behaved more like a dog than a cat and would usually come to me if I called his name. After being beaten as a 1 or 2 year old cat by various neighborhood cats that would invade our yard, he bulked up and became the alpha cat of our block (in his early days he once he lost a fight so badly he was meowing and wallowing in his own feces on our front porch, according to my step-daughter who had called me at work to report the incident). So after bulking up he could not only drive off all other cats from our property, mainly using this incredibly loud "howl", but large dogs as well. He jumped on the back of my stepson's 75 lb. dog and made it pee on our kitchen floor, which I missed because I was at work. Just like a dog, he loved to roll around in the dirt when we would let him outside. He would remain just a few feet away as I ground and then welded various steel parts in my garage, and I would be so amazed that the sparks and noise didn't scare him off that I would call him "Ironworker Sam", and "Welder's Helper Sam", or "Supervisor Sam".

Last summer he brought me a live baby rattlesnake while I was in my garage (Thanks Sam - just what I needed), and then a few weeks later he had what sounded like a very large rattlesnake cornered in our back yard and I quickly got him inside because it sounded very pissed off. But a few days later when I had my telescope set up in my backyard I had this uneasy feeling about that rattlesnake possibly sneaking up on me while stargazing and when Sam finally came around I felt a whole lot safer.

Sam would also lay flat on his back on our carpet to sleep, and would also lie on his back between my right arm and my torso when I was in my recliner with his hind legs stretched out next to mine like a little boy, instead of curling up in my lap like all other cats. So this is regret number 1 - I thought many times about setting my Nikon D70 up on a tripod aimed at my recliner and using the remote to photo us reclining together. "Yeah Someday I'll do that".

Regret number 2 - my biggest regret - many times when I'd look for him outside at bedtime to bring him in for the night, he would do this resisting routine that I know would have been so hilarious it would have won $110,000 on Americas Funniest Home Videos. I kept thinking I need to get some kind of wearable night vision camera like I've seen on those Ghost hunter, Bigfoot hunter "Reality" Shows on satellite TV, video his cute stubborn routine, and send it in to AFV. "Yeah someday I'll do it" I thought for so many times in the past.

So my advice to all of you pet-owning Hoggers who have been putting off videoing your pet's unique/most memorable behaviors, to paraphrase R. Lee Ermy: "GET THAT BLANKING VIDEO CAMERA ON TOP OF THAT BLANKING TRIPOD NOW PRIVATE PYLE !!! DO IT NOW SWEETCHEEKS BEFORE WE ALL BLANKING DIE OF OLD AGE!!!! IF GOD HAD WANTED THAT CAMERA ON TOP OF THAT TRIPOD HE WOULD HAVE MIRACLED IT UP THERE WOULDN'T HE PRIVATE PYLE!!!

In closing, we never truly own our beloved pets, they are only loaned to us by Almighty God - and much sooner than later he's going to want them back.

Farewell Dear Sam. Your journey to Heaven makes me want to be a better man.

I've tried searching all of the medical websites and I can't find anyone who had the same reaction to simultaneously receiving a Kenalog 40 and a Rocephin shot, so I thought I'd run this by any UHH members that may have seen my symptoms described below.

Last Friday I walked in to my doctor's office, to be treated for the upper respiratory infection that's been going around, and I didn't walk out. About 5 minutes after receiving both shots I had a tingling sensation in both sides of my head plus a strange taste in my mouth. So as soon as the doctor returned I told him I was feeling funny and thought while I still could I had better tell him every strange feeling I was experiencing.

I started to get weak and nauseous and he started checking my BP and O2 level. When my BP fell to 73 over 50 something and O2 fell to 83% had his staff call for an ambulance. Then I started sweating big time, but never fully passed out, or if I did it was very briefly.

So at age 58 I took my first ambulance ride. They did not treat me with Epinephrine, just a liter of whatever typical IV is routinely given to patients in distress - as best I can recall. At the hospital they took a chest x-ray and blood-work and everything looked normal. One of the medical staff asked me a strange question (for me anyway) - did I have Glaucoma? - which I told him No.

When my wife arrived she said my face and chest looked like I had severe sunburn and both eyes were extremely bloodshot. After a couple of hours I had recovered enough for them to discharge me and I was fine afterwards except for the upper respiratory infection.

I was not amused in reading the ER diagnosis as "FAINTING''. When I followed up with my doctor he said what had happened was called "Vasodilation", where major veins and arteries suddenly enlarge, which causes BP to drop big time. The most puzzling thing of all is he has given me both injections at the same time almost every year for probably 10 years give or take a couple of years. My doctor said sometimes when the body is under stress, vasodilation can occur. Just so happens I crashed into a car at 75 mph that illegally pulled out in front of me 8 days earlier - and then 3 days earlier a tree grown up into the powerline over my back fence sparked during high winds and set my fence and back yard on fire, which almost reached my house. Stress? - why would I be stressed around that time? BTW - that crash was the second time Honda Ridgeline Airbags worked perfectly in saving me from a major crash. Someone pulled out in front of me in my '06 model at 40 mph, totaling it, and I was so impressed I bought a 2013 model, not knowing it would eventually have a crash at nearly double the speed of the '06 crash.

Back to the original topic, now I'm wondering if maybe I received a tainted Kenalog or Rocephin shot? Since I didn't receive epinephrine, then technically I didn't have an allergic reaction. Anyone have any other possibilities as to what caused this?

I just jokingly remarked to my wife a few days ago that I'd might be apprehensive to actually meet Bill Paxton, as his career has mostly been about disasters or other bad things about to happen (i.e. Tombstone, Aliens, Terminator, Titanic, Twister, Apollo 13, etc).
I just read on msn.com that he died from complications during surgery. I would gladly breath a sigh of relief and not get angry if someone were to tell me this was just a sick joke.
This news just devastates me as I always knew whenever a movie came on TV that I hadn't seen before and Bill Paxton was one of the stars, that this would be a film well worth watching. Also it was clear to me from "day 1" that he had a fine personal life and great personal character - a truly great human being.
So Sad, so very, very sad.