So just as we were about to arrange putting Banjo to sleep the vet told us that she was looking perkier and eating. We asked for another blood test. The results were good. The level of leukocytes and neutrophils were substantially higher. So we decided to wait on putting her to sleep. It looks like she might have turned a corner. This is the first time her neutrophils have done anything other than get lower. Additionally, her fever is down, which suggests that she is not heading toward septic shock. The vet tells us that her body is damaged enough that she could suddenly take a turn for the worse, but her odds of survival just went up to about 50%.
In the best case, she has four more days in the hospital before she can come home.
The last few days have been craziness. We have been swinging between deciding that she'll probably die and deciding she'll probably live. Weirdly, it is easier to think she is likely to die than to swing back and forth. Now that she is much likelier to live you'd think I'd be full of relief, but, at this point, two things make it hard to feel very much of anything: (i) I am exhausted; and (ii) an emotion is a way of picturing the future and I have insufficient epistemic confidence in any of Banjo's possible futures to picture her future in an emotion-constituting way. Weird.
Also, I have, for the first time, begun to agree with William James that stability of belief is among the chief epistemic virtues. James appears to think it is the sine qua non of a belief-state that it is stable. That is probably going too far, but I can testify that much of what we've been doing over the last days could be understood as trying to reach a stable view of Banjo's future. But circumstances keep requiring a change in belief and so our attempts to form a view have all been failures; and upsetting because of this. When I began to think Banjo might make it, I felt like I was about to freak out. I didn't feel relieved, but rather just very strange. I thought to myself, "obviously I have no idea what the future holds," and this thought came with a kind of vertigo.
Maybe it was the lack of food. We haven't been eating very much or well since Banjo got sick.
-Alex
3 comments:
If you need more in the way of donations, just let me know.
Thanks for taking of Lennon during all this insanity. I didn't realize what you were getting yourself into.
Rob
Bobcat,
Don't sweat it. It ain't no thang to feed Lennon.
that's it. i'm signing you up for Meals on Wheels.
Post a Comment