History

Goodbye, Tabitha

Tabitha, the cat I’ve had since 2003, passed away yesterday. It’s obviously still fresh and doesn’t quite feel real. She’s been having health problems for a few years now, but everything accelerated starting on Friday, and on Saturday I had to make the decision to let her go.

Tabitha briefly explored the idea of being a software engineer but ultimately decided to stick with her passion of doing absolutely nothing.

A few weeks ago, Tabitha developed an ear infection. I noticed that she was having more trouble hearing me and she had started scratching at her ears, along with a bit of discharge. I took her to the vet, and they prescribed an antibiotic.

Giving her the medication was complicated. It had to go deep into her ears, and cats as a rule don’t like it when you hold them down and put medication there. I had to wrap Tabitha up in a blanket so she couldn’t move, put the medication in, and then hold her in place for several seconds. Then I’d let her go, she’d shake her head to try and get the medication out, and perhaps occasionally she’d give me a glare.

The third time I did this, I let her go and she started stumbling around like she was drunk. She stumbled into my office and just plopped on the floor because she was so dizzy. She was better after about five minutes, but this was obviously a concerning reaction. I called the vet, and they advised me to stop giving her the meds. When I asked about what to do about the infection, they essentially kind of shrugged.

I didn’t like that response, so I made an appointment with another vet for this past Friday. Tabitha had briefly gotten better while on the medication, and I didn’t want the infection to come back because she stopped treatment too soon. If the first medication caused issues, perhaps another one would work better.

She also had a few other things going on. Her stools were pretty loose, and her front paws had swollen up. Combine all of that with a ravenous appetite and it adds up to a picture of a sick kitty.

Tabitha has had some issues with her vestibular system for a while. Her sense of balance had been deteriorating for a couple of years, and while it didn’t prevent her from jumping on things, she wasn’t as sure of herself as she used to be. One way this manifested is that she started throwing up on car rides of longer than 20 minutes. In order to reduce the odds of her throwing up, I decided to withhold food around 12pm. Her appointment was at 4:30, so that would give her four hours to digest her food before getting into the car.

However, this plan didn’t really work. Tabitha is used to me giving her food on demand, and when I suddenly ignored her, it confused her. She hopped on my lap. She hopped on my computer desk. She tried being super cute, which is her go-to strategy for getting food. She also sat on the ground and just stared at me. Ultimately it worked, and I gave her more food around 1:30.

I was able to resist her other attempts at manipulation, and we left for the vet at 4pm. She did wind up throwing up on the way there, but it was a pretty small amount.

Once we got there and the vet had had a chance to conduct an initial assessment, she was concerned about Tab’s overall health and wanted to take a chest x-ray. I approved it, and the news was not good; Tabitha had heart failure. On top of that, the medication used to treat the heart failure is hard on the kidneys. Considering that Tabitha was already in stage II of kidney failure, it meant that we had reached the end of the road for what we could do for Tabitha. The options were walking a tightrope of ever-expanding medications that would lower her quality of life…or let her go.

While it was surprising, it wasn’t that unexpected. I’ve known that Tabitha has been on the downswing for a while now and that it was only a matter of time before we’d get to this point.

It was sad news, but now that I knew the time was here, I knew I could take some time to say goodbye. I’d spoil her rotten and give her as much food as she wanted. Then I’d make an appointment for someone to come to the apartment and administer the drugs that would send Tabitha on. She would be comfortable, and I’d make her final moments as good as I possibly could.

Unfortunately, that isn’t how things panned out.

The X-ray showed that Tabitha had a lot of fluid in her chest cavity from her heart failing. She had so much liquid there that it was becoming difficult for her to breathe. We had to remove the liquid so she could go home. I asked about the risks of the procedure. The vet told me that there was a risk of Tabitha suddenly crashing. The liquid caused a lot of internal pressure, and there are times where the sudden change in pressure can cause the body to fail. However, she couldn’t ethically release Tabitha to me without removing the liquid. I didn’t want Tabitha to be in pain, so I approved the procedure.

I did take a few minutes with her prior to starting the procedure. Since there was a chance she wouldn’t survive the procedure I wanted her to be able to at least see me before it happened.

I’m wearing a mask because, contrary to public opinion, COVID is still a very real threat.

They brought her into the room I was in, and we spent some time together. She was very inquisitive. She got on my lap. She hopped on a couch in the room. She crawled under things. She explored. I pet her, and she soaked up the attention.

An action photo of Tabitha exploring

It took them an hour or so to perform the procedure and then another 30 minutes to get all of Tabitha’s new medications. We wound up getting home around 10pm. I let Tabitha out of her cat carrier and she was kind of woozy from the meds they had given her. I offered her food. She sniffed it, but wasn’t really interested in eating.

Little did I know that it was a lot more serious than disinterest. At the time, I assumed it was just the drugs and that in the morning she would have her appetite back.

During the night I left my bedroom door open so Tabitha could come into the bedroom if she wanted. She stayed away, which means she was probably not feeling very great.

When I woke up in the morning, I walked into my office to find Tabitha. She’s been hiding behind a whiteboard I have on the floor, but she wasn’t there. I heard a “mrreow” coming from the closet, and Tabitha walked out to say good morning. She followed me into the kitchen and I got her breakfast ready.

I set it down and she started to sniff it. Then she went back to her water dish…but she wasn’t drinking the water. She was putting her nose in the water, but wasn’t licking any water up. She would lean against the water fountain, and the water wound up soaking into her fur. The entire front of her chest was soaked, which was very unlike her. As is the case with most cats, Tabitha really hated getting wet. For her to willingly get herself wet was concerning.

She eventually went back to her food dish, and sniffed the food again. One of her quirks is that she licks up her wet cat food instead of biting it. She wasn’t licking the food up. She’d do the same thing as she was doing with her water; she put her nose very near it and sniff, but didn’t lick the food up. It was obvious that she was trying to eat and that she was trying to drink water, but somehow wasn’t able to.

Tabitha was going in a circuit from her water fountain to the food dish and then back again. She kept trying, over and over and over and over. This was extremely concerning. A cat having no interest in food usually means that they’re about to die. I had never heard of a cat wanting to eat/drink but being unable to.

I tried several things to get her to eat and drink. I removed the water fountain and gave her a bowl to drink water out of. That didn’t help; she just dunked her whole snout in there while managing to not lick anything. She then started dipping her paws in the water, like she was trying to work out how to get the water from the bowl into her mouth. I was afraid that she would spill the water bowl, so I switched back to the water fountain. She followed me into the bathroom, so I ran the shower for a minute so she could go into the showed and lick the water up; it’s kind of gross but it’s one of her favorite things.

Well, that and drinking Christmas tree water

I even mimed licking in the hopes that she’d realize what she was doing wrong. No change. I got out a treat and tried to feed it to her by hand. She would smear the treat on her nose, but never licked it off.

This was abnormal behavior for Tabitha and extremely concerning.

The vet I had taken her to the previous night is closed on weekends. I eventually decided to go to the emergency vet to have her evaluated. I initially was going to wait and see if things resolved for Tabitha on their own, but after it became clear that she was unable to eat or drink, I realized it wasn’t something to wait on. I put her in the cat carrier and we drove over to the emergency vet.

The vet assessed her, and the news wasn’t good. She didn’t know what was wrong with Tabitha. There wasn’t anything they could do there. My options were to take her to another emergency vet with better facilities and hope that they could figure out the cause…or euthanize her.

There were no other choices.

Tabitha had already had a traumatic 24 hours. The previous night she had been poked, prodded, x-rayed, sedated, and had a lot of fluid removed from her chest. Now she was desperately hungry and thirsty but unable to eat or drink. Taking her to the other facility meant that she’d be subjected to even more tests, traumatized further, and the entire time unable to have any food or water. There was no guarantee that the tests at the other facility would even be able to figure out the issue, so there was a very real possibility that she’d have to endure all this testing for no real benefit.

I just…couldn’t do that to her.

My priority has always been Tabitha’s quality of life. Subjecting her to further testing at that point would have crossed that line. The only choice left was euthanizing her.

They asked where I wanted to have it done, and I asked if they had any rooms with windows we could open. With a breeze, I’d feel safe enough to take off my mask. Unfortunately, none of their procedure rooms have windows. They offered to do it in my car, and I countered by suggesting outside.

The emergency vet had a little outdoor area with a pond and some trees. They brought out a chair for me to sit in, and a few minutes later they brought Tabitha out. I sat in the chair with Tab and took a few pictures. I even shot some video so I could better remember her final moments. I then put my phone down so I could give Tabitha my undivided attention.

She was looking around with interest at the surroundings, and started moving around like she wanted to go for a walk. That wasn’t really an option because she had an IV in one of her arms, so I held her close and started walking around the pond. Her hearing was messed up, but I still talked to her and let her know how much she meant to me. I told her that she was a good girl and that it was time for her to move on. I told her it was okay to let go, and that I would miss her.

Typically when I pick Tabitha up, she wants no part of it. She tries to push me away and tries to hop on the ground. This time she let me hold her. She leaned against my shoulder and was staring, wide-eyed, at everything.

After a little while the veterinarian came out, and I took Tabitha over. We got settled in the chair, and the vet started administering the drugs. Tabitha looked up at me, and I pet her and reassured her that everything was okay. I stroked her as the drugs kicked in. After a minute or two, it was over. She was gone.

The vet walked inside to give me some privacy, and I started to sob. Tabitha had crossed the rainbow bridge.

A life well lived

I’m still coming to terms with the rapidity of her decline, but there’s no denying that Tabitha lived a long time and had a really good life. 20 years is the upper bound for a cat’s life expectancy, and Tabitha nearly made it. She would have been 20 years old in July.

We had a lot of adventures together. I always did my best to ensure she had what she needed to be happy. I think that overall, I succeeded.

Pets are with us for such a short amount of time compared to our own lifespans. We know when we select a pet that we’ll likely have to say goodbye a lot sooner than we’d like. There’s no good time, and while Tabitha’s ending was not what I would have preferred, it came at the end of a very long life.

The veterinarian on Friday evening told me that Tabitha was so loving and trusting that it was clear that she lived in a loving environment.

And now for some cat pictures.

Goodbye, Tabitha. I miss you.

One of Tabitha’s quirks was finding a singular piece of paper on the ground and then sitting on it.
Or sleeping on it.

Because she was a cat, one of her favorite past times was taking naps, and giving it her all.

This box is an Amazon box that she claimed as her own more than a year ago. It was in Jodi’s office, and after she and I separated, I made sure to bring the box with me.
Tabitha took her naps seriously.
For the record, this is a second Amazon box; not the one that was in the closet!

A literal queen

She was always switching up her behavior. At some point within the last year or two, she realized that if she tapped my face that she would always get my attention. She tended to do this to let me know she was hungry.

She wasn’t always demanding. Sometimes she was content just to hang out.

In the background you can see her blanket fort, where she sometimes liked to sleep.

Goodbye, my sweet girl. Goodbye.

Get Stoned

For most of the week of July 4th, I was on vacation. I didn’t do much of anything, I just relaxed and took it easy. I’ve recently been dating someone new (more to come on that soon), and we were able to spend a lot of quality time together. I went to bed on Sunday night relatively early; I wanted to get up bright and early on Monday so I could roll into work and spend a little time catching up.

Things didn’t quite pan out like that.

I woke up at 2am with indigestion. I had some pain in my GI tract, and needed to use the restroom. I got up, did my business, but felt like I wasn’t finished. Then I started burping. I wasn’t really worried until after thirty minutes had gone by and the burping didn’t show any signs of letting up. And I still felt like I had to use the bathroom.

My girlfriend, Jodi, is a nurse, so one of the perks with that relationship is free medical advice. I sent her a text message explaining my predicament and asking her to give me a call if she happened to wake up and see my text.

I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what the issue was. I doubted it was food poisoning, because I wasn’t vomiting. I also hadn’t eaten anything that would easily lend itself to food poisoning.

My diet for the previous day:

Breakfast
Doughnuts are not really known for their ability to cause food poisoning, and neither is coffee.
Odds of food poisoning – really low

Lunch
My salad might have had a chance of making me sick. I used a salad in a bag and simply added chicken that I cooked separately, sous-vide style. Pre-made salads have been in the news recently for making people sick, but the main culprit has been Romaine lettuce, which wasn’t in my salad. The other culprit might have been the chicken, but I cooked it long enough to know it was done.
Odds of food poisoning – low-to-medium

Dinner
The meal replacement shake arrives in powder form and is shelf stable for months. You just add water and drink it.
Odds of food poisoning – low

However my symptoms were completely inconsistent with food poisoning. With food poisoning, you vomit and have diarrhea in an attempt to rid your body of some type of toxin. They were more consistent with indigestion…with my body not liking what I ate.

Over the past few months I’ve been working hard to change my eating habits. I’ve been replacing one meal a day most days with a meal replacement shake. The shake I’m using, from Ample, is filled with a lot of really healthy ingredients, while having the benefit of filling me up and only being 600 calories. I noticed after drinking Ample consistently that my tastes began to change. Soda would taste different. Random foods (typically unhealthy foods) wouldn’t be as satisfying. When I’ve been tempted to stray from my diet and actually do get something unhealthy, I would often find it unsatisfying.

This was the case with the doughnuts I had for breakfast. I knew I shouldn’t have them, but if I had two (and a coffee) I could still fit everything into my caloric goals for the day. So I bought them and didn’t feel guilty. What I did feel after eating them, though, was a bunch of queasiness. I had basically eaten a sugar bomb, and what wasn’t already sugar was easily converted to sugar. I could feel my stomach complain after I ate it, but 30 minutes later I had forgotten about it and moved on with my day.

So, at 3am on Monday morning I was grasping at straws, trying to figure out what was going on. Out of everything I had had that day, the doughnuts at breakfast seemed like they might be the thing most likely to make my body complain.

So the burping continued, on and on, for hours. Around 5am, Jodi woke up and gave me a call. We theorized about what could be happening and I told her about my doughnut theory. Since the symptoms pointed to indigestion, I decided to drive to a drugstore and buy something to get rid of the gas. Once the gas was eliminated I could go to sleep.

I drove to a drugstore, bought some pills, and drove back. The directions said to take one or two, so I took one to see what effect it would have. Forty-five minutes later the gas had only decreased slightly, so I took another pill. 30 minutes after that, my stomach had calmed down enough for me to feel okay with going back to bed.

I realized that I needed to urinate, so I went into the bathroom. I was in for a surprise. My urine was super dark.

Well, super dark for me. I snapped this picture and sent it to Jodi. She was skeptical; she said it was dark but it was within the range of normal. My urine is typically an extremely light yellow, or clear. This was out of the ordinary for me. I was concerned, but not super concerned. I know that during times of distress, the body can produce a lot of waste products and sometimes your urine can be darker than normal. It had been a while since I had urinated, maybe something had happened in the interim.

Jodi advised me to drink some water and then urinate again in a half hour. It was sensible advice, so I followed it. Thirty minutes later, my urine was even darker. While trying very hard not to freak out, I had one more bottle of water, with the intention of trying to urinate again in another 30 minutes. If it was still dark, I was going to make an appointment to visit my doctor.

Then the pain started.

Now, this entire time I had been awake, I had had some pain off and on. There was pain in my abdomen and in my back. A little Google-fu revealed that it’s common for indigestion to cause this sort of pain. This pain, however, was new. It was primarily located in my back, and it was sharp.

Whenever you report your pain to a medical professional, they ask you what your pain level is on a scale from 1 – 10, with 10 being the maximum…the worst you’ve ever felt. My pain with the burping and abdominal/back pain had been about a 3 or a 4; annoying but not much more than that. This new pain in my back was about a 5 or a 6; definitely enough to get your attention and tell you that something was wrong.

So I fought through the pain for another half hour until my doctor’s office opened. I called them and told them I was in urgent pain and needed to be seen immediately. They looked at their schedule and promptly offered me a 1:45pm appointment.

As a result, I decided to go to Urgent Care. I got dressed and hopped in my car. It was around 7:45am by then, and a ton of people were trying to get to work, so the roads were crowded.

And EVERYONE was moving SUPER SLOW.

And with every minute my pain level was increasing. What had been a 5 was rapidly increasing to a 7. About five minutes into my drive to Urgent Care, I changed my mind and decided to visit the Emergency Room.

Ten misery-filled minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of the ER and rushed inside, bracing myself for the inevitable wait. To my great surprise, no one else was in there. I went to the admissions desk, they took my info, and after a moment called me back.

After a quick initial screening, I was taken back to a room. I texted Jodi to let her know what was going on and tried to get comfortable. I was still feeling pain, so I was short on patience. I felt a bit better when I paced around the room, so I paced while I answered the nurse’s initial questions.

Not too long after that, another nurse came in with a bag of saline and I wound up having to get into the bed so she could insert an IV. By this point I think they had decided that I had a kidney stone and were determined to treat me as though I had one. They told me that they wanted to give me Fentanyl.

America is currently in the midst of a huge opioid addiction epidemic, and powerful drugs like Fentanyl are leading the charge. Fentanyl is extremely powerful; it’s between 50 and 100 times more powerful than morphine. When they mentioned the Fentanyl I knew that they were taking this pretty seriously. It shocked me, to be honest. They clearly knew (or suspected) more than I did. You don’t just break out the Fentanyl for no reason.

The doctor came in a few minutes and said he thought I had a kidney stone. I was surprised; I’ve never had kidney stones. While I was growing up, my dad had a large number of them and I’ve tried to structure my diet in such a way that I am not at risk for them.

The next few hours were miserable. I had some imaging done, and gave a urine sample. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. The pain was excruciating. There were times where I was writhing on the bed in pain because I couldn’t just lay still. Another time the pain was so bad that I felt as though it was going to make me vomit.

Eventually, with the addition of some Valium I was able to fall asleep. I woke up when the doctor came back into the room and informed me that the imaging showed I had a kidney stone in my left kidney.

They discharged me, gave me several prescription meds, and sent me on my merry way with strict instructions not to drive. It was a larger stone, but it would probably pass on its own with no problem.

Over the next couple of days, it became clear that this was not correct. The ER referred me to a urologist, who wanted to see me the next day. I arrived at my appointment and immediately the doctor began trying to convince me to have surgery. He said that if I wanted to try to pass the stone, I could, but he felt like surgery was the best option.

I asked several questions and eventually decided to take the doctor’s advice and get the surgery.

The surgery is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, July 19th. I’m a little worried about the process of using anesthesia, but I’m overall a fairly healthy person and I should be fine.

There’s a 15% chance they won’t be able to perform the surgery, and I’ll have to live with a stent inside my urinary tract for two weeks before they try again. I’m really hoping that things go well.

Goodbye, Cybersalt

It was November 1st, 1997. I was working at a Southern Gospel radio station. I had several hours to myself every time I worked, and I had recently taken to lugging my desktop computer with me so I could use the Internet during my shift.

Over the past couple of years, I had fallen in love with the Internet and all the possibilities it offered. I had learned to make web pages, but I was limited by the fact that I didn’t have a space of my own online. Sure, there were free web page hosting services, but you had to put your web pages on their domain. My very first web site was on geocities, with a url like geocities.com/enchantedForest/~myUsername/whatever.html. It was hard to remember and I couldn’t give it to people to check out unless I had written it down for them.

What I needed was a domain name of my own. I had just turned 18 in September. I had a brand new bank account and money in said account. Now was my chance to purchase a domain name. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out what to call it.

Scratch that. I could think of many things to call it, but everything I thought of was taken by other people. It was getting to be pretty frustrating. I wanted more than just a name that ended in .com. I wanted something that communicated this new electronic era we found ourself in but also communicated my very strong Christian faith.

I have no idea at this point what I tried. I was searching for hours. What I finally came across, though, was CyberSalt. Cyber- was for cyberspace, and salt was a reference to Jesus calling his followers the salt of the earth. It was memorable. It would work.

So I entered in my credit card information and forked over $39.95 (or was it $49.95?) to Network Solutions.

Moments later, the domain was mine. What I didn’t have was a clue of what to do with it.

At first I tried to make the domain a place for people to sign up for me to design web pages for them. I scrapped that idea eventually and just used the domain was a way to have my own custom e-mail addresses. I wasn’t like the hordes that used @hotmail or @aol. My e-mail addresses ended in @cybersalt.com.

Several times I tried to relaunch the site as a web hosting provider. I can see now that the problem was that I was attempting to enter a very crowded space (the web hosting industry) without anything to really differentiate my business from competitors. Back in 2012 I had an epiphany that the web was moving toward a more media-centric experience, and that I could reflect that by re-branding as Cybersalt Media Group.

In 2015, I commissioned a new logo:

 

cybersaltmediagroup

Over the summer this year while I was looking for work, I put some time into relaunching the site one more time. The idea was to look for web design work while I was looking for a job in order to supplement my income. I couldn’t really commit to the idea, though, because it was such a large priority to find a job. The time I spent trying to land web hosting clients was time I wasn’t spending looking for work.

Every year in October I’ve receive the notice that Cybersalt.com is expiring, and do I want to renew? Each year, regardless of my financial circumstance, I’ve found a reason to say yes. This year is different. I received the notice via e-mail and realized that I have absolutely no desire to keep trying to make Cybersalt work in some capacity or another.

One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that it doesn’t do any good to sink time and resources into a losing idea. While Cybersalt does have some sentimental value for me, that isn’t enough of a reason to keep paying money to hold on to the domain.

Rather than let it expire, I reached out to the person that owns Cybersalt.org to see if he was interested in purchasing the domain from me. Every now and then some of his web visitors would e-mail me. They were usually confused about why cybersalt.com was not the Christian humor site they were expecting. They tended to be older people and didn’t know the difference between .com and .org domain names.

I should be transferring the domain next week. In a way it’s sad. It’s the end of an era in a very literal sense for me. I’m okay with it, though. Things come to an end. Things change. Part of the trick of life is adapting to that change and moving forward.

Return of the Blog

It has been several years since I last maintained a blog. Life got in the way. Where to begin?

After a series of stressful retail jobs, I bit the bullet in 2008 and enrolled in the Computer Science program at UNC Charlotte. In 2009, I dropped out so that I could move to California and get involved in the film industry.

That plan didn’t exactly pan out. I eventually decided to go back to school in 2010 and chose to transfer to UNC Wilmington to study film. The idea was that I would prepare myself for a job in the film industry by learning as much as possible about the process of filmmaking. I gained a ton of theoretical knowledge but sadly was not able to get as much hands-on training as I was hoping.

I graduated in May of 2012 but was unable to land a job in the Wilmington film industry. Most of the reason for this boils down to the fact that I didn’t have any transportation and this hindered my ability to network while in school. I missed out on the chance to get involved with some really cool projects filming in the area like Iron Man 3 and the TV show Revolution. It’s impossible to know how things would have turned out had I had my own transportation, but I do know that it was a major problem for me during my two years in Wilmington.

After graduation, I was able to land a job as a PHP programmer with a company in Wilmington called The Gig Bureau. A few months later I received a pretty lucrative offer from a company in Charlotte and accepted a position with them, also as a PHP programmer.

I’ve been back in the Charlotte area since the end of August, and my life is radically different than it was six months ago. I have my own apartment. I have a car. My social life is looking up.

I have been in survival mode for such a long time; able to focus only on getting what I need in order to get by. Now, for the first time in quite a long time, I can dedicate some thought toward the future.

There are some exciting things on the horizon, and I’ll be talking about them here within the next few days.

Stay tuned…