Hello, friends. Wanted to put a note up on the site as an explanation of where we’re at right now, since we’ve gone fairly quiet aside from Joe posting (mostly losing) bets and Stuart’s account of his own possible dissociation yesterday and Monday.
We’re fine, everything’s fine, Fargo’s a bit sick but overall she’s fine. As some of you have followed, she’s been dealing with progressively worse gastrointestinal symptoms that peaked around New Year’s and have stayed at that peak through January. As a real fucker of a side effect of these (they think), she developed pneumonia, which we noticed on Thursday morning when she couldn’t stop coughing and managed to hack up an undigested pill that had been in her stomach for two and a half weeks. After a lot of vet visits and two hospital stints, she’s been diagnosed with what’s probably Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), which is kind of a catch-all for food sensitivity and some auto-immune stuff but basically means her intestines are prone to getting all out of whack, which can get her stomach all out of whack, which can…well, thankfully we seem to have gotten pretty lucky with the pneumonia, her symptoms are almost all gone just six days later. They’ve got her on nine pills a day, a new diet (she eats rabbit now, could cycle through kangaroo at some point later in life), and one injection a week that we’re administering ourselves (they’re letting me hold the needle, guys), but she’s in good shape today—losing her mind as we speak at a neighbor dog for having the audacity to walk down the sidewalk in front of the duplex—and she had a good day yesterday, which feels encouraging. String together a couple more of those and we should be down to seven pills a day, or even five. But let’s not get our hopes up too high.
As Stuart’s post indicated, we’re pretty gassed here in the Austin office right now, and with the NIT a month and a half away (Joe got a good whisper from the other prominent NIT Bracketologist earlier today), we want to—when we resume content—resume with the pedal to the floor, carrying you, the faithful, through the NIT with the appropriate fervor, fanaticism, and I don’t know I can’t think of a third f-word here. Realistically, though, we may have to press pause again here and there once we do resume, or figure out how to work around the daily possibility of unplanned all-afternoon trips to various veterinarians. Either way, we’re taking at least one more day today to try to rest the noggins and get a few lingering important matters in other areas of life tidied up (we ordered Thai food and watched tennis last night and evidently that can help with dissociation, at least in our case, so make a note of that). Our hope is to be back with more normal content tomorrow, but if we aren’t, this is where we are: We’re fine, everyone’s fine, we’re just exhausted and a little unwell, both physically (Fargo) and mentally (the humans). We are awed at folks who do this chronic illness thing with human children—it’s one of those things we knew is hard, but could never fathom the true difficulty of, and are probably still underestimating. God bless them, God bless you, and if God’s got a blessing to spare, God bless us, especially in the arena that is Fargo’s belly.
See you soon.
Bark.
