Life Update
My life has been filled with change these last couple of weeks. Most people have gotten only bits and pieces and very few people have heard all of what has been going on with me. But I'm told that those bits and pieces have seemed, to many, cryptic or even out of character, and upsetting. So I'm going to elaborate on one of the more disturbing bits I've tweeted about, because people are worried and even more people have completely the wrong idea about what happened.
A few months ago, my landlord decided to sell the house and, thanks to an irritating bit of law, left me with very little time to find alternate housing. So a friend took me in under extremely charitable conditions, only to very quickly make that situation intolerable to me, so I had to move again a few months later. Here is my perspective of the worst of what happened.
I have a terminally sick cat. She has an illness that leaves her underweight, malnourished, and at risk for dehydration. She is on daily medication to try to control her appetite and water consumption, and her ability to digest it, but the medication will not cure her. She will die of this illness, today, tomorrow, 5 years from now, we don't know. Her medication is merely to improve the quality of her life, thereby prolonging it, for a while. She has been sick for over 2 years now, and this worry has taken a toll on my own quality of life.
Right about the time the owner of the house where I was living, and I seemed to reach the same conclusion that our living arrangement wasn't working out, but before I had secured another place to live (or even told him that I planned to move out), my work picked up. I began working 8-14 hour days in 10-15 day streaks (with at least one day that reached nearly 24 hours at work). Now, at this time, the house-owner appeared to cease direct communication with me, so I can only guess at his motivations based on his behaviour, but he appeared to decide that chasing me out of the house by making me uncomfortable was preferable to actually speaking to me directly and asking me to leave. I make this guess on his motivations because of what happened next.
The house had an air conditioning system that actually assigned certain rooms in the house to zones, which were independently controlled. So the master bedroom, for example, could be maintained at a separate temperature from the living room. The room I was staying in had its own zone. The house-owner first started by turning off the air conditioner entirely to my zone. The first time that happened, I thought maybe there was a glitch or a mistake. So I turned it back on and went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, the room was sweltering. It was so hot that I was actually having trouble waking up and moving, as I do when I get overheated. I had heatstroke several years ago and one of the side effects is being increasingly more prone to heat stroke again with each successive heat attack. So when I overheat, I tend to get sluggish and have trouble with cognitive functions, until I eventually just collapse in a faint. If I overheat while sleeping, I'll just not be able to wake up. That's why I'm always wearing tank tops - I have to have the ability to shed layers at any moment when I start to get too warm. Later, when I did finally get up and moving, as I passed by the A/C control, on a hunch, I checked it and, sure enough, it was turned off again. This happened a couple of times and I noticed that the warming of my room would coincide with his movements downstairs where the A/C control was located.
After a few times of that, the speed at which the room would start to get warm increased while the sound of air coming through the vents was still running. So I checked and discovered that he was no longer just turning off the air, he was turning on the heat. I know this was in February, but this is also Florida. I was leaving for work before he woke up in the morning and not returning until many hours later. He left for work after I did, but he also got home from work after I had gone to bed. So he would turn off the air or turn on the heat after I went to bed and again after I left for the day. The room was also on the second story of the house, with windows facing both the rising and setting sun, so the room baked all day.
This would be merely annoying, even with my own health issues regarding heat, except for my sick cat. You see, I would come home to find the cat's water bowl empty because it had evaporated while I was gone. In the temperature I normally kept the room, the bowl would hold water for more than 2 full days before going empty, but now the bowl was drying out between the time I left for work and the time I got home from work. I would come home to find my cat sitting by her water bowl, meowing in distress. Remember her illness and her dehydration risk? Yeah, she got dehydrated and I had to take her to the vet.
The cat started losing weight again and her diarrhea got worse, and she dehydrated. She had to have a pocket of fluid inserted under her skin, between her shoulder blades, to immediately hydrate her and get her out of danger. The vet was horrified and wanted to call the animal cruelty authorities, except there is no tangible evidence for "he turned off the A/C while I was gone" accusations, and I had finally moved out. Since the cat was already sick, all it would take is a counter-accusation that it was my own care of her that led to her condition, or hell, that it was the condition itself, to result in possibly a lengthy and costly court battle, or more likely, no action taken at all. All my emotional and financial resources are tied up in caring for the cat, so I didn't pursue any probably-futile legal action. Anyway, the room was actually so hot before I found a new place, that I started taking the cats to work with me because it was cooler to leave them in my car in the parking garage than it was in the room, and I could get out to the car every 2 hours (on my breaks) to make sure they had enough water. The thermometer in my room said that my room was reaching triple digits.
So, those of you who read my tweets about "torturing my cat", it wasn't hyperbole. My terminally sick cat was actually being tortured by the deliberate actions of the house-owner. A healthy cat might have been merely discomforted, but a sick cat who is prone to dehydration was actually in a life-threatening situation. Not to mention my own danger with my history of heat stroke. I have trouble reconciling these actions with the self-assigned description of "extremely nice guy" he likes to tell people he is. He also has his own cats, and he's quite emotionally attached to them, so I just can't fathom what could have prompted him to take out his feelings for me on my pets. It doesn't matter how angry I get at someone, or what terrible things someone might have done - I would NEVER do anything to deliberately hurt their animals. The worst I ever do is yell at people on the internet. Hell, I cry at movies where even the "bad" animals get killed, I couldn't do anything that would hurt someone's pet no matter what I felt about that person.
My cat is still not fully recovered, and she may never. And, by that I mean, she may never even recover to the point where she was sick but stable, since I know she'll never actually be healthy again. I have been accused of lying about this whole incident, and of making a big deal out of nothing, since most people would find a Floridian house without the air turned on in February to be quite comfortable. But I have a medical condition where I can't handle extremes of heat (or cold, for that matter, but that's a different story) and I have to look at my cat every day and see her illness in her extremely low weight and the signs of her dehydration in her fur, skin elasticity, and gums. To me and my cat, this was decidedly not much ado about "nothing". This was something very serious, indeed.
The toll of caring for a sick cat these last couple of years has affected me deeply and has changed a lot of my priorities. My ex, who works with the MBTI and other personality systems, has shown me books on how the various personality types react to stress. To people who are not familiar with that specific research - types and stress - many usually think that people under stress behave in unpredictable or contrary ways. The MBTI system actually can predict how each of the types will behave under stress, but the relevant point is that the behaviour is often interpreted as "contrary" or "unusual" or "out of character" to those around them, even though it's not unpredictable at all, if one understands the patterns.
I have been under an awful lot of stress in the last couple of years, with the stress factors piling on in the last couple of months. And I've been handling them pretty much alone. I don't tend to speak out publicly when I'm under stress because I was taught not to "whine" as a kid and not to "air dirty laundry". A neighbor kid once pushed me down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle, and I had to walk on that ankle for a week before anyone took me to a doctor for a cast because I should just "toughen up" and "stop complaining" and don't "make up stories to get out of P.E. class". The only reason I was taken to the doctor at all is because my next door neighbor was a First Aid instructor and, after seeing me limp for a week, asked to see my ankle. He determined I needed medical attention and it was only when he said so, did my parents take my complaints seriously.
So I prefer to handle my stresses privately, and then use the situations to illustrate growth opportunities or lessons after the event has passed. Which is why many people who follow me online may be confused when I explode with something that seems out of context or that didn't appear to have any build-up to it. Things looked pretty fine, until I started tweeting about the house-owner "torturing" my cats. Naturally, several people who knew the house-owner just outright didn't believe it and accused me of lying about it or exaggerating the severity. But it's the nature of Twitter to not have much depth or allow for nuance and detail.
So I'm giving the details here. Things were far worse than just "turning off the air conditioning" in the end of a Floridian winter. The room my sick cat was staying in got so hot that the water in her bowl evaporated, and it was during a time that I was out of the house for many hours at a time and could not refill her bowl regularly. Her condition makes her specifically at risk for dehydration, and the heat and lack of water actually did cause her condition to worsen. She may recover, she may not.
Ever since we moved, she has taken to attaching herself to me the way she did when she first got sick. She was always my little shadow, moving from room to room with me in order to stay near me, but now it's so much more. She doesn't just move from room to room, she actually moves around the room with me. Tonight, I went into the kitchen, drained a bowl of soup in the sink, walked to the trash can to dump out the solid food, and then walked back to the sink to wash it. She actually walked back and forth from the sink to the trash and back again with me. And I don't have a large kitchen - 3 or 4 steps at most between the two stations. She tries to time her litter usage with my own bathroom use, now that the litter box is in the bathroom, presumably because she doesn't want to be separated from me even long enough to use the litter box.
So hopefully that clears up some of the strangeness going on around me lately and hopefully that adds more context to my outraged tweets. If I seem out of sorts, or touchy, these days, perhaps understanding some of the stress I'm going through will help things make more sense. Also, keep in mind that the issue of my sick cat is only one of the major stressors I'm going through and there are several that I'm not speaking about, at least not publicly. Some stressors involve personal, intimate details - some of which are my personal details that I don't particularly want made public and some of which belong to other people and it's not my place to speak of them publicly. If something I say or do seems odd or out of place, chances are that there are other things going on below the surface or other details to the story that you don't know about that would probably explain everything.
A few months ago, my landlord decided to sell the house and, thanks to an irritating bit of law, left me with very little time to find alternate housing. So a friend took me in under extremely charitable conditions, only to very quickly make that situation intolerable to me, so I had to move again a few months later. Here is my perspective of the worst of what happened.
I have a terminally sick cat. She has an illness that leaves her underweight, malnourished, and at risk for dehydration. She is on daily medication to try to control her appetite and water consumption, and her ability to digest it, but the medication will not cure her. She will die of this illness, today, tomorrow, 5 years from now, we don't know. Her medication is merely to improve the quality of her life, thereby prolonging it, for a while. She has been sick for over 2 years now, and this worry has taken a toll on my own quality of life.
Right about the time the owner of the house where I was living, and I seemed to reach the same conclusion that our living arrangement wasn't working out, but before I had secured another place to live (or even told him that I planned to move out), my work picked up. I began working 8-14 hour days in 10-15 day streaks (with at least one day that reached nearly 24 hours at work). Now, at this time, the house-owner appeared to cease direct communication with me, so I can only guess at his motivations based on his behaviour, but he appeared to decide that chasing me out of the house by making me uncomfortable was preferable to actually speaking to me directly and asking me to leave. I make this guess on his motivations because of what happened next.
The house had an air conditioning system that actually assigned certain rooms in the house to zones, which were independently controlled. So the master bedroom, for example, could be maintained at a separate temperature from the living room. The room I was staying in had its own zone. The house-owner first started by turning off the air conditioner entirely to my zone. The first time that happened, I thought maybe there was a glitch or a mistake. So I turned it back on and went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, the room was sweltering. It was so hot that I was actually having trouble waking up and moving, as I do when I get overheated. I had heatstroke several years ago and one of the side effects is being increasingly more prone to heat stroke again with each successive heat attack. So when I overheat, I tend to get sluggish and have trouble with cognitive functions, until I eventually just collapse in a faint. If I overheat while sleeping, I'll just not be able to wake up. That's why I'm always wearing tank tops - I have to have the ability to shed layers at any moment when I start to get too warm. Later, when I did finally get up and moving, as I passed by the A/C control, on a hunch, I checked it and, sure enough, it was turned off again. This happened a couple of times and I noticed that the warming of my room would coincide with his movements downstairs where the A/C control was located.
After a few times of that, the speed at which the room would start to get warm increased while the sound of air coming through the vents was still running. So I checked and discovered that he was no longer just turning off the air, he was turning on the heat. I know this was in February, but this is also Florida. I was leaving for work before he woke up in the morning and not returning until many hours later. He left for work after I did, but he also got home from work after I had gone to bed. So he would turn off the air or turn on the heat after I went to bed and again after I left for the day. The room was also on the second story of the house, with windows facing both the rising and setting sun, so the room baked all day.
This would be merely annoying, even with my own health issues regarding heat, except for my sick cat. You see, I would come home to find the cat's water bowl empty because it had evaporated while I was gone. In the temperature I normally kept the room, the bowl would hold water for more than 2 full days before going empty, but now the bowl was drying out between the time I left for work and the time I got home from work. I would come home to find my cat sitting by her water bowl, meowing in distress. Remember her illness and her dehydration risk? Yeah, she got dehydrated and I had to take her to the vet.
The cat started losing weight again and her diarrhea got worse, and she dehydrated. She had to have a pocket of fluid inserted under her skin, between her shoulder blades, to immediately hydrate her and get her out of danger. The vet was horrified and wanted to call the animal cruelty authorities, except there is no tangible evidence for "he turned off the A/C while I was gone" accusations, and I had finally moved out. Since the cat was already sick, all it would take is a counter-accusation that it was my own care of her that led to her condition, or hell, that it was the condition itself, to result in possibly a lengthy and costly court battle, or more likely, no action taken at all. All my emotional and financial resources are tied up in caring for the cat, so I didn't pursue any probably-futile legal action. Anyway, the room was actually so hot before I found a new place, that I started taking the cats to work with me because it was cooler to leave them in my car in the parking garage than it was in the room, and I could get out to the car every 2 hours (on my breaks) to make sure they had enough water. The thermometer in my room said that my room was reaching triple digits.
So, those of you who read my tweets about "torturing my cat", it wasn't hyperbole. My terminally sick cat was actually being tortured by the deliberate actions of the house-owner. A healthy cat might have been merely discomforted, but a sick cat who is prone to dehydration was actually in a life-threatening situation. Not to mention my own danger with my history of heat stroke. I have trouble reconciling these actions with the self-assigned description of "extremely nice guy" he likes to tell people he is. He also has his own cats, and he's quite emotionally attached to them, so I just can't fathom what could have prompted him to take out his feelings for me on my pets. It doesn't matter how angry I get at someone, or what terrible things someone might have done - I would NEVER do anything to deliberately hurt their animals. The worst I ever do is yell at people on the internet. Hell, I cry at movies where even the "bad" animals get killed, I couldn't do anything that would hurt someone's pet no matter what I felt about that person.
My cat is still not fully recovered, and she may never. And, by that I mean, she may never even recover to the point where she was sick but stable, since I know she'll never actually be healthy again. I have been accused of lying about this whole incident, and of making a big deal out of nothing, since most people would find a Floridian house without the air turned on in February to be quite comfortable. But I have a medical condition where I can't handle extremes of heat (or cold, for that matter, but that's a different story) and I have to look at my cat every day and see her illness in her extremely low weight and the signs of her dehydration in her fur, skin elasticity, and gums. To me and my cat, this was decidedly not much ado about "nothing". This was something very serious, indeed.
The toll of caring for a sick cat these last couple of years has affected me deeply and has changed a lot of my priorities. My ex, who works with the MBTI and other personality systems, has shown me books on how the various personality types react to stress. To people who are not familiar with that specific research - types and stress - many usually think that people under stress behave in unpredictable or contrary ways. The MBTI system actually can predict how each of the types will behave under stress, but the relevant point is that the behaviour is often interpreted as "contrary" or "unusual" or "out of character" to those around them, even though it's not unpredictable at all, if one understands the patterns.
I have been under an awful lot of stress in the last couple of years, with the stress factors piling on in the last couple of months. And I've been handling them pretty much alone. I don't tend to speak out publicly when I'm under stress because I was taught not to "whine" as a kid and not to "air dirty laundry". A neighbor kid once pushed me down a flight of stairs and broke my ankle, and I had to walk on that ankle for a week before anyone took me to a doctor for a cast because I should just "toughen up" and "stop complaining" and don't "make up stories to get out of P.E. class". The only reason I was taken to the doctor at all is because my next door neighbor was a First Aid instructor and, after seeing me limp for a week, asked to see my ankle. He determined I needed medical attention and it was only when he said so, did my parents take my complaints seriously.
So I prefer to handle my stresses privately, and then use the situations to illustrate growth opportunities or lessons after the event has passed. Which is why many people who follow me online may be confused when I explode with something that seems out of context or that didn't appear to have any build-up to it. Things looked pretty fine, until I started tweeting about the house-owner "torturing" my cats. Naturally, several people who knew the house-owner just outright didn't believe it and accused me of lying about it or exaggerating the severity. But it's the nature of Twitter to not have much depth or allow for nuance and detail.
So I'm giving the details here. Things were far worse than just "turning off the air conditioning" in the end of a Floridian winter. The room my sick cat was staying in got so hot that the water in her bowl evaporated, and it was during a time that I was out of the house for many hours at a time and could not refill her bowl regularly. Her condition makes her specifically at risk for dehydration, and the heat and lack of water actually did cause her condition to worsen. She may recover, she may not.
Ever since we moved, she has taken to attaching herself to me the way she did when she first got sick. She was always my little shadow, moving from room to room with me in order to stay near me, but now it's so much more. She doesn't just move from room to room, she actually moves around the room with me. Tonight, I went into the kitchen, drained a bowl of soup in the sink, walked to the trash can to dump out the solid food, and then walked back to the sink to wash it. She actually walked back and forth from the sink to the trash and back again with me. And I don't have a large kitchen - 3 or 4 steps at most between the two stations. She tries to time her litter usage with my own bathroom use, now that the litter box is in the bathroom, presumably because she doesn't want to be separated from me even long enough to use the litter box.
So hopefully that clears up some of the strangeness going on around me lately and hopefully that adds more context to my outraged tweets. If I seem out of sorts, or touchy, these days, perhaps understanding some of the stress I'm going through will help things make more sense. Also, keep in mind that the issue of my sick cat is only one of the major stressors I'm going through and there are several that I'm not speaking about, at least not publicly. Some stressors involve personal, intimate details - some of which are my personal details that I don't particularly want made public and some of which belong to other people and it's not my place to speak of them publicly. If something I say or do seems odd or out of place, chances are that there are other things going on below the surface or other details to the story that you don't know about that would probably explain everything.