the mellow tigger's musings

Early this morning, Hope spent a long while peeing in the cat box, hanging out afterward, then marching through the house meowing and vomiting and straining to poop. I immediately got up from my work desk, mixed the usual dose of Miralax into her watered down food, and went about my day waiting for her to lap it up.

That moment never came. She spent an hour or two roaming around the house vomiting, then she holed up in the closet in my bedroom. She doesn't even go in there during thunderstorms. She only goes there when I have to let a worker into the house, once a year or so.

Here, I managed to coax her head out of the darkness for a brief pet. She didn't feel like she had any fever. She's not panting or showing other obvious signs of distress. But she's not budging from her hiding spot.

She's been there about 10 hours now. It's starting to worry me as much the howling she did last time before I took her to the vet hospital. Total silence and isolation this time. I don't like it. I emptied her food bowl and mixed more watered down canned food with a full dose of Miralax from the vet recommendations last time. I'm hoping that sometime tonight she takes the water from the food bowl so she gets her medication.

Hope spent much of today in severe constipation. She was vomiting all over the house. She was straining to poop everywhere. She kept returning to the desk where I was working at my job to strain near my keyboard. I had conflicting wishes about whether she would finally succeed or not. When I took her to the animal hospital back in July, the vet there just used her hands at Hope's haunches to push the poop out directly. I wish I had that skill, but I'm just afraid to hurt her. I tried using a paper towel to gently press around her anus. Hope growled her displeasure at me but held her position bravely. It didn't help, though. The vomiting and straining continued for several more hours.

Finally, I found a very large poop behind my chair in the living room, and she was acting much more normal again. It's weird to be so glad about a bowel movement. I was so thankful that another crisis was averted that I wanted to share a photo.

Click to see the large poop from the old, frail cat...

In less literal but more figurative poop news, I'd like to say that most of the information on the internet these days about the highly unusual 3I/ATLAS object is just... well... poop. I recommend not trusting any search engine or social platform to give you any good information at all. This search link, however, will give you actual published scientific papers on the topic.

https://arxiv.org/search/?query=3I+Atlas&searchtype=all&source=header

There seems to be a lack of recent official observations published. I found a video that explained the very limited field of view of our space-based telescopes. It described how they must always point away from the sun to escape damage to sensitive detectors, so there's really only about a 90-degree arc in which they are allowed to point at any given time. They have about a 270-degree arc that is forbidden, because it is too sunward-facing. As they travel with us around the sun, these space-based telescopes can eventually watch all of the sky. At any given time, however, there is a very large exclusion arc. 3I/ATLAS has traveled far enough into our solar system that it is now out of arc-range for those instruments. Instead, ground-based observatories are trying to collect data.

Or so I'm told by the internet. I wish I could source those details for confirmation, but I haven't been able to do so yet. So maybe that's all poop too. I wish I had more official training in astronomy. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to know more about.

This YouTube video reveals a very interesting discovery about our population living near the southeastern (and northeastern) coastlines of the USA. In maps of the USA, the southeastern states almost always feature heavily in the least-well-off areas of the nation. There were (and still are) good reasons to blame their socioeconomic policies for that big discrepancy. Researchers, however, have found a climate connection that was on nobody's radar as a possibility.

These researchers from University of California, Berkeley, tried for 5 years to find a flaw in their research, because the results were so surprising. After each and every hurricane that reaches these areas, there is a persisting health deficit that lingers in the area, even amongst people who were not born at the time of the hurricane. This deficit persists years afterward, peaking about 6 years (68.6 months) after the initial landfall event. It is cumulative with additional hurricanes that may arrive later, so more hurricanes means even more excess total deaths later. These less-visible indirect deaths eventually affect 300X more people than the direct deaths caused by the hurricane itself. The reasons for these excess deaths? State and local governments have reduced capacities after each storm, individuals have less spare money after repurchasing and rebuilding after each storm, and stress is always bad for health, regardless of circumstance.

It's a fascinating 14 minutes, if you can spare the time to watch the whole video. Here's the Nature article, if you prefer text and graphs.