M(ike)’s paternal grandmother, Ruth, passed away today. Although we are glad that she is finally free from her sick body, we are sad that the we have lost such a caring and genuine person. We were looking forward to visiting her this year when we visit the Thielman clan for Christmas, so we’re a bit heartbroken that we won’t get to see her and her kind smile. We are so grateful that we were able to see her last year when we visited for Thanksgiving. She will be missed by all of us.

Goodbye, Gamma Ruth – Thank you for your love.

I had originally planned to include what you will soon be reading in my Thanksgiving post, but then I remembered A Charlie Brown Christmas and knew that today, an anniversary that is both sad and happy, would be a better day to post it.

For those of you who do not know, I love watching A Charlie Brown Christmas (and the Grinch, too, of course!); it’s one of the highlights of the year for me. I don’t even own a personal copy of it just so that I have an excuse to watch it on television. This little holiday ritual is so important to me that I have only ever missed it once. Can you guess when that was?

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This past year has been both difficult and wonderful. The first half was mostly difficult: lots of sleepless nights, lots of visits to the vet, and lots of soul-crushing homework; the second half, in contrast, has been all kinds of awesome. I’m grateful for the whole year.

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Things definitely weren’t looking good for poor Scuttlebutt, but then another miracle happened: he stopped throwing up. We were reluctant to get our hopes up at first, but we grew optimistic as a few days turned into a week and and then into several weeks. Before we knew it, Scuttlebutt had lasted an entire month without throwing up. By the time April rolled around, he was back to a healthy weight, his lymph node swellings had disappeared, and his blood protein and B12 levels were almost back to normal. As an added bonus, his improvement effectively ruled out FIP!

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So, where did we leave off? Right…

Once we received the news that Scuttles was negative for both lymphoma and IBD, we thought that we were in the clear and that he would begin to get better. Unfortunately for all of us, that did not happen. At first, the prescribed combination of prednisone (to bring down the inflammation in his intestines), clavamox (to help with the infection), metronidazole (to help with the infection and reduce the inflammation), and ondansetron (to reduce the vomiting) seemed to help; by the end of January, the size of Scuttles’ lymph node swellings had decreased by half and he had gained back a few pounds. His blood protein levels were a little high, but it was assumed that was because of the infection. Halfway through February, however, Scuttlebutt took a turn for the worse. He stopped responding to the ondansetron, which in turn caused him to start throwing up again. The constant vomiting prevented him from absorbing the nutrients in his food, which stressed his body further, causing his infection to get worse and his lymph nodes to become enlarged again. In matter of a week, he lost all the weight he had gained back and became lethargic again.

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Lordy loo, our poor little blog has been grossly neglected since the wedding! Guess it’s about time we got to ‘splainin’ why. Be warned… This is going to be a very long post.

The explanation (in super fun list format!)
June, 2009

• We get married and go on an amazing honeymoon (pictures available here and here)


• We begin revamping the original M&T website (which was solely devoted to the wedding) to make it serve as sort of a portal for all of our different sites (i.e., this blog, our recipes site, our photo gallery, etc.). We compile all of the wedding information into a separate site and begin updating it with pictures from the wedding and vendor reviews.

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