Hearing Aids, Allergies, and Our Cat Heads to the Rainbow Bridge

It’s been an interesting month or so. In late May, we received a mailer offering free hearing testing and an offer to test hearing aids free for thirty days. I’ve been having trouble with my hearing, especially where my wife is concerned, and was tested a few years ago. I was tested mainly because my tinnitus was suddenly different so I went to an ENT who sent me for a hearing test. I was told that since only about 60% a people with my type of hearing loss benefit from a hearing aid they would not recommend I get one.

So I checked out the offer and found the people there to be quite surprised that the previous place didn’t even want me to try a hearing aid. Needless to say, an offer to try it free for thirty days was quite appealing. The hearing aids were ordered, and wow, I can hear much better!! Don’t know why I waited so long. The cool part is they’re rechargeable.

In June I had my annual visit to the VA. Had blood work done and was found to have high triglycerides. Three days later I found a bottle of pills in the mail from the VA pharmacy. My doctor never said anything about giving me a prescription, but I was a good boy and took them. Last Tuesday I found red itchy spots on my arm between my right wrist halfway to my elbow. I emailed my health team and was told to stop taking the meds. I started putting some cortisone ten cream on the area for the itching and woke up on the fourth of July with blisters, and more spots on the top side of my arm from halfway up my arm to the elbow. Not putting anything on those. I thought the reaction would’ve shown up right away, but since the stuff takes up to three months for the full effect, it makes some sort of sense that it would take a couple of weeks for it to manifest itself. Still haven’t heard anything new from the doctor.

Finally, we said goodbye to our cat Hokey. He was twenty years old and really started to fade after his birthday. He was generally a pretty good cat and seemed to be pretty happy being able to eat and sleep and do whatever lazy housecats do. He was named Hokey because the day we brought him and the rest of that litter in, his brother Pokey was lagging behind. No sooner did I say “Let’s not be pokey” Ginger said well if he’s Pokey this one is Hokey. I used to refer to them as the “Hokey Pokey Boys” named loosely after the “Hotsie Totsie Boys” from the Lawrence Welk TV Show. We used to have it on when Ginger’s mom lived with us. Later, we just called him Mr. Hokey to differentiate between him and his brother.

Monday night after we went to bed we heard him meowing and found him sitting on the floor in front of the couch with this front paws attached to the afghan we have on it. (We have all of our furniture covered). When I lifted him on to the couch he immediately got down. He was fine on Tuesday when I left for work and when Ginger got home she found him sitting in front of the couch with his right paw attached to it. When she freed him she noticed he wasn’t walking well at all. That paw wasn’t landing properly and he couldn’t walk very far without stopping to lay down. And he had trouble getting back up. So it was off to the Pet Emergency Clinic. They said there was really nothing they could do for him, because of his age and other underlying conditions. We have three left, Lady Jane Grey, his sister who is also twenty, Nefertiti who is 18, and Brutus Buckeye who is seven. The dynamic changes and the food bill decreases.