I’ve been desperately needing some existentially good news lately, something that tells me it’ll be alright or we have a safe path forward. That hasn’t come yet. But today we got some decent news that was a pretty major relief at least. Olive is healthy! We had plenty of reason to suspect he wasn’t..

As mentioned in bits and bobs, Olive had a “collapse event” the vets keep calling it, where he completely lost control of his back legs.

They think it was either a blood clot event (hence the ekg) or some kinda vasovagal nerve event. The latter may just simply be a one off and nothing to worry about.

Today was his echocardiogram (which I’ve always known by the acronym EKG, kardio, probably of german origin, but is now called ECG everywhere?) and he was given a clean bill of health for his heart! The cardiologist even said “this cat rocks!” which was.. well yeah, everyone adores Olive, he’s one of the best cats ever. So it’s likely to be a tussive syncope [sin-ko-pee] he said, which is basically a fainting or partial fainting event caused by coughing, and he had been coughing just before the event. I was told it doesn’t matter how hard he was coughing either, which I guess fits because this particular cough incident was really light and short. This is a relief in many ways: his senior heart is healthy and he can undergo anesthesia for his dental work which should relieve a lot of pain in his mouth, which should make him a lot less clingy and needy and he should also eat more readily now. Also, a few weeks ago he had some bloodwork and urinalysis done and the results came back perfectly fine. Well, one level was raised, but the vet said that’s normal in cats who need dental work.

So.. he’s doing great, and this is at least some kind of good news. It doesn’t mean the threat to my and my wife’s (and also my family and community) lives is over, but at least it’s one less daily stressor. And that’s something. A saying that I’ve been using a lot lately applies here: “some is better than none.”