Lice, Mice and Elderly Animals

Four students in the Next Generation All Star building have lice. This is a big thing, apparently. Lots of parents with the willies over the bugs in the hair. Lots of crossed fingers hoping to avoid the medicated shampoo and combing involved by not only parents, but the teachers who are checking hair every day, particularly for one of X-man's teachers who had lice once -- when there was a breakout at school. And she got it from checking heads. :-)

Other annoyances that we're currently keeping an eye out at our house also include: mice. The temperature dropped to single digits, so we've found mice in the house. We back into a field of soon to be empty housing lots that backs into a corn field. Once they start building the neighborhood behind us, this issue should go away (it happened in our last house, too). But until then, I have Maya and Luke going after the suckers. Whenever we get a live one, it goes into the blue garbage bin. It'll either live off our garbage and find it's way to the landfill OR it'll freeze to death. I try not to think too much about the life/death situation and which would be less painful -- being toyed with by a cat until death or freezing in a garbage can. Personally, neither seem very exciting to me. But it also means, that I'm constantly washing out things that they figure out ways to crawl into -- like the drawer under the stove that is empty. 

Yesterday, I took Riley in for his first doggie dental. He'll turn 10 in April, so it was time. His teeth are now as white as when he was 4. And his breath has improved considerably. His gums are still a little tender (but he had no extractions), so I bought one of those fancy slice off a hunk of meat foods to spoil him with for the next couple of days. He has a heart murmur, and the x-ray they took of him shows no enlargement of the heart, which is good. But it could also limit his ability to "go under" for treatment in the future.

Clawdio also made the trip to Dr. Mary's yesterday. He also has a heart murmur, but murmurs with cats are very different than murmurs with dogs. With dogs there are all kinds of treatments available. With cats, not so much. On the scale of cardiac crappiness, Clawdio is a 2/6. He's had the murmur for a year now and has advanced one number. His x-rays also show no enlargement, which is good. He's 13 years old. The trick is that his creatinine level is now abnormal. He's got kidney disease. We're starting him on Pepsid long-term. But it looks like he's going to go down the same elderly cat road as Looseyfur. Now the question is: will his heart fail him before his kidneys do? Clawdio takes his nine live seriously -- I've almost lost him twice before. So, I'm not counting him out. But he is spending more and more time in his cat bed up on top of the cupboards in the kitchen these days.