LJ_Reloaded
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- Joined
- Apr 3, 2010
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..but can cause someone you love to die instead.
Back when Chimp was invading Iraq and we had practically the square root (or less) of the money we have now, we learned how to be downright hyper frugal. Poverty, in fact, imparts to the wise some serious lessons about frugality. A few of those habits you acquire will cling to you as you rise up the economic ranks, and only gradually go away when you realize it's junk and you need to get rid of it to make room for newer, shinier or higher-quality things. In retrospect our fear of overspending ourselves back into poverty like so many others tend to do, left us shackled to these junk habits when they were no longer necessary.
I can't help but wonder if the frenetic speed of our rise into affluence was part of the problem. When I moved into my first house-I-owned I brought along a lot of junk from the previous place. It took me a while to get to sorting it out and getting rid of stuff, particularly computers and electronics that were just out of date, but also including furniture. When I got married and moved out of the valley to an even better place we brought less junk with us, but still took years to say goodbye to the old reliable cell phone or outdated laptop. It wasn't one of those things where we said sweep everything out for curbside pickup, we're splurging on a whole new us! Fear of overspending (except for charity) shackled us.
Well, it turns out that one particular relic of a habit, was not just unsightly, inefficient or outdated, but actually quite deadly. Not to us, but to those in our charge... namely, one of our housecats.
Because wet or high-quality cat food was so expensive, we had been feeding them cheap dry food so they wouldn't starve or need to be given away. This is one of those old habits of frugality that we never let go of even as our standard of living rose beyond our meager hopes. Those of you who know more about raising cats knows what this means. Most dry cat food is heavy in starches, and is most likely the reason why our year old male cat (now 16) started to show extreme signs of feline diabetes mellitus a few years ago.
It started when he quickly emptied the water bowl on a regular basis. Then fast forward, he got wobbly and would go from tearing through his food or ignoring it. Not noticing the severity of the issue was one mistake. Hemming and hawing over how to deal with his problems was the next. It was when he got skinny as hell and just kept crawling under any kind of cover (usually a certain desk) that we panicked and took him to the vet and found out he had a severe case of feline diabetes and we got our first bit of education about the disease, starting with what it is, and how to give the poor animal insulin injections. The other cat came up with high blood sugar, but not the symptoms, probably because she is younger at almost 13.
Now despite the high quality cat food and the insulin shots, he's back to increased drinking almost as bad as before, considerable weight loss, and other new, worse things: not often lifting his head, not standing properly. Now we've got impending full-on kidney failure to deal with. His chances of seeing 2014 are not high, to be optimistic, and we've got kids in the house that are totally attached to both cats, so this is already causing a chain reaction of drama in the family.
The point of this? If your standard of living is going up, the first order of business should be to check those old relic habits. Especially the habits that have you or your pets living on poor diets. Keep the old laptop or broken Lazy Boy chair if you must, but get the cats off the dry food as soon as you can.
Back when Chimp was invading Iraq and we had practically the square root (or less) of the money we have now, we learned how to be downright hyper frugal. Poverty, in fact, imparts to the wise some serious lessons about frugality. A few of those habits you acquire will cling to you as you rise up the economic ranks, and only gradually go away when you realize it's junk and you need to get rid of it to make room for newer, shinier or higher-quality things. In retrospect our fear of overspending ourselves back into poverty like so many others tend to do, left us shackled to these junk habits when they were no longer necessary.
I can't help but wonder if the frenetic speed of our rise into affluence was part of the problem. When I moved into my first house-I-owned I brought along a lot of junk from the previous place. It took me a while to get to sorting it out and getting rid of stuff, particularly computers and electronics that were just out of date, but also including furniture. When I got married and moved out of the valley to an even better place we brought less junk with us, but still took years to say goodbye to the old reliable cell phone or outdated laptop. It wasn't one of those things where we said sweep everything out for curbside pickup, we're splurging on a whole new us! Fear of overspending (except for charity) shackled us.
Well, it turns out that one particular relic of a habit, was not just unsightly, inefficient or outdated, but actually quite deadly. Not to us, but to those in our charge... namely, one of our housecats.
Because wet or high-quality cat food was so expensive, we had been feeding them cheap dry food so they wouldn't starve or need to be given away. This is one of those old habits of frugality that we never let go of even as our standard of living rose beyond our meager hopes. Those of you who know more about raising cats knows what this means. Most dry cat food is heavy in starches, and is most likely the reason why our year old male cat (now 16) started to show extreme signs of feline diabetes mellitus a few years ago.
It started when he quickly emptied the water bowl on a regular basis. Then fast forward, he got wobbly and would go from tearing through his food or ignoring it. Not noticing the severity of the issue was one mistake. Hemming and hawing over how to deal with his problems was the next. It was when he got skinny as hell and just kept crawling under any kind of cover (usually a certain desk) that we panicked and took him to the vet and found out he had a severe case of feline diabetes and we got our first bit of education about the disease, starting with what it is, and how to give the poor animal insulin injections. The other cat came up with high blood sugar, but not the symptoms, probably because she is younger at almost 13.
Now despite the high quality cat food and the insulin shots, he's back to increased drinking almost as bad as before, considerable weight loss, and other new, worse things: not often lifting his head, not standing properly. Now we've got impending full-on kidney failure to deal with. His chances of seeing 2014 are not high, to be optimistic, and we've got kids in the house that are totally attached to both cats, so this is already causing a chain reaction of drama in the family.
The point of this? If your standard of living is going up, the first order of business should be to check those old relic habits. Especially the habits that have you or your pets living on poor diets. Keep the old laptop or broken Lazy Boy chair if you must, but get the cats off the dry food as soon as you can.
