Nothing much to report until February 27. Mahjong is continuing as are my English classes. I have two new students, making 3 classes a week. Film Club and Book Club were suspended. Film Club is resuming in March, but looks like Book Club has died a natural death.
The Cinnamon Citadel where I used to go swimming has returned my money, so now I am trying to get a membership at the Grand Kandyan. As always, things are not straight forward. They said they were not allowed to take new members by order of the Public Health Inspector (PHI). I had my friend Gamini, a retired PHI, talk to the relevant PHI. He says he never told the hotel they could not take new members, just that they can't let the general public; i.e., day members, use the pool. Then my friend Piyarathne called the owner who said he could see no problem. I am still waiting for them to call me to pay the money. Obviously, a follow-up is needed.
Meanwhile, the only swimming I am getting in is at Simpson's Forest. Went yesterday and had a lovely day as usual.
A new addition has been lunch on Sunday at the Mahaweli Reach Hotel. They offer a lunch buffet for LKR.1500 that is very nice. They offered a special for "ladies" on the Sunday before International Women's Day, so we went and took advantage of it. The food is good and the setting is lovely right on the river.
Lunches at Lesley and Ralph's also continue. In fact, it was one of those lunches that gave rise to one of the events of February 27.
But first, the saga of my beautiful Aya. He got into a fight with one of the outdoor cats who comes to eat, Deykai (means Two as he is the second orange cat to interlope). Aya did not pick the fight. He was defending the front door. He sustained some serious bites on his left front leg. The next day, he was not outside my bedroom door as usual in the morning. I called and called and went up and down the road looking for him. He finally limped home around 1100. His leg look liked it was dislocated, so I rushed him to the vet. This was on Wednesday, February 10. They found a small wound, which they cleaned and gave me some antibiotic cream to apply to it. They also gave him an antibiotic shot and a pain killer. By Saturday, February 13, he wasn't eating and drinking only a little bit. I rushed with him to the vet again. A different doctor this time, discovered a much larger wound. They put in a cannula and gave him dextrose, glucose and saline along with antibiotics, vitamins, an appetite booster and pain killer. They bandaged both legs up.
This procedure went on every day, twice a day. I would take him to the vet in the morning and the mobile unit would come out to the house at night. He was recovering nicely from the wound to the point where they took out the cannula. He had lost .3 kg. of weight at that point. By Thursday, February 25, he wasn't eating and hardly drinking. They gave him saline subcutaneously along with more antibiotics. They also took blood for testing. I took the blood to the lab which called me later to say they could not do the tests as the blood was contaminated. So the mobile unit had to come out and take blood again. He was so dehydrated by this point that they could only find a vein after giving him a full bag of saline subcutaneously.
The results came back from the blood test saying that he had a virus. He started vomiting and having diarrhea. This takes us up the fateful day, February 27.
The day before, I went to Lesley and Ralph's for lunch. I was seriously stressed out by the Aya situation and starting drinking on an almost empty stomach. Ralph and I usually have a cognac after lunch. It seems that we finished the cognac and then he got out the Ballantine's. We were joined by Shantha, the Chief Inspector of Police in Kandy, and the drinking continued. By the time I got home, I don't even know how I got there. I was bombed.
I vomited the entire night, getting no sleep. By 0600 on the 27th, I was really sick. Not only vomiting, but intermittently passing out. I called Lesley, who is a nurse and lives close by. She got out of bed and came up right away. I had had a few moments of feeling only horrible instead of on death's door, so I managed to get up the steps to open the gate for her. Unfortunately, her 3 dogs followed and started making a real commotion in the front yard. She really couldn't do anything because of the dogs.
I then called the ambulance. We have a free ambulance service recently started in Kandy. When I first dialed 1990, they put me on hold. They did come back in a couple of seconds. The only thing I could get out was that I needed help and kept repeating my address. After what seemed like an eternity, they finally got the message and dispatched the ambulance. The "paramedic" called me three times to find out where I was located and the dispatcher called back once to find out who the patient was. You would think they would have gotten the message, that it was me, as I was gasping for breath and pleading with them to hurry. She called back a second time to see if they had arrived yet. They hadn't.
By this time, the worst of it had passed. The tingling in my arms and hands had stopped, I had vomited again, and I was no longer passing out. Lesley managed to flag the ambulance down on the road. She came down to say they wanted me to go up to the ambulance. If I could get up to the road, why would I have called the ambulance in the first place? Finally, they came down. Of course, they were dressed in what looked like HASMAT suits because of the virus. They wouldn't touch me, but did take my pulse and/or blood pressure with the clip thing they put on your finger.
They said they would take me to the hospital. I said I did not want to go to the hospital as I knew what it was (I had experienced food poisoning before) and the worst was passed, but Lesley said I should go. I had managed to put some clothes on, but I needed to put another dress on over the one I already had on. Then the ambulance guy said I needed to bring a bed sheet. Luckily, I had a sheet drying in the hallway, which I grabbed. Of course, they were not going to carry me up the the ambulance, so I managed to get up the stairs with Lesley's help. Then it was the chore of getting in to the ambulance which is about 3 feet off the ground. I managed that with some difficulty. Inside the ambulance there are two benches along the side and a gurney in the middle. They told me to sit down, but I said I had to lie down as I was still woozy. They indicated the gurney which had the side rails up on it. They did not know how to lower the rails, so I had to climb over them to lie down. It was starting to look like a comedy act by now, except for the fact that I still didn't feel too good.
Lesley had started to walk home while they were taking my blood pressure with a proper arm band when the ambulance guy told me she would have to come to the hospital with me. I said we would have to pick her up at her house.
Now the real fun begins. Unlike my previous ambulance experience, no-one is sitting with you in the back. Both attendants are in the front seat. There is not intercom nor do they have the sliding window between the back and the cab open. As they don't know where they are going, they stop every 100 yds. to ask for directions. This involves the "paramedic" getting out of the cab, running around the back of the ambulance and yelling at me to give him directions. We finally manage to get to the right junction but despite me telling them to follow the road by the river (in partial Sinhala), they turn down some obscure tiny lane. The lane is not only small, but there are cars lined up on one side. I am lying down on the gurney and watching the road backwards, so I am completely disoriented, but soon suspect that we are not on the right road. I sit up and start yelling at them through the closed window to stop.
The Chinese fire drill around the ambulance resumes and we have to back this huge vehicle out of the lane. I have to say, the driver was skilled. We get on the right road and Lesley is there to flag us down. I have now decided there is no point in going to the hospital as I was still sick but not critical. Plus I now had visions of PCR tests, etc. So I made them drop me off at Lesley's where I spent the day as a vegetable on her couch. Lesson learned? If you think you are dying in Sri Lanka, don't bother calling an ambulance. Just kiss your ass good-bye. Only good news was that they did not want any money. Good thing too, as they didn't do anything.
After getting to Lesley's I managed to call Vineetha to get her to take Aya to the vet for his morning treatment. She went but somehow missed my instruction to leave him there for the day so they could give him his evening treatment after which I should have been in good enough shape to pick him up. I called her about an hour after her arrival at the vet to find that she had been waiting there. She finally got the message between me and the receptionist and went home. Then around 1400, I got a call from the vet with the bad news that Aya had died. They had tried to save him, even giving him an adrenaline shot to try to revive his heart, but it was too late. By this time he had lost .6 kg. A lot for a cat weighting only 3.7 kg to begin with.
Lesley gave me tea, toast and scrambled eggs once I was feeling better and by 1800 when my tuktuk man came to get me, I was feeling about 50% human. We went to the vet to pick up the cat carrier and to pay them. As I am sitting there talking to the vet, I reinforce my belief that they will dispose of the body. WRONGO! He says they have no facilities to do so and as they rent the property, they cannot bury him on the premises. I tell him in a panic that there is no way I can take the body. I only realize later that, in fact, his body is in the cat carrier that they are about to give back to me. After some consternation, one of the assistants says he will do the deed. Wonderful of him, but as I am sitting there, he takes the cat carrier into the next room and without closing the door, proceeds to transfer the body from the carrier into a garbage bag. I could not see, but I could hear, and my heart was breaking. What an ignominious end for my baby.
 |
| RIP Aya |
The other cats, especially Buddy Boy really felt his passing. Buddy more so as Aya was his brother. Buddy didn't come home for 2 days except to eat. He and Aya would always snuggle with me at night while we watched TV; Aya under my right arm and Buddy under my left. When Buddy finally came for his snuggle, he didn't know what side to go on. Nangi was also particularly close to Aya and kept looking around for him. They have feelings too.
I am off the booze for at least one month.
A new restaurant has opened nearby in Katugastota, just over the bridge from me. Cal-Mex called Los Amigos Locos. I finally went with my friends Simon and Pauline and Ana and Sanji. It was good. A great new addition to an otherwise dismal restaurant scene.
The next day, I had a computer session with Simon and then went for lunch with Pauline. I was having Lesley and Ralph and our 3 star police friend Shantha over for drinks that night (non-alcoholic for me), so Simon and Pauline stayed as well, so we made a bit of a night of it. Shanta brought his assistant as I am needing some police standby for our bitch of a neighbour behind us. They are both nice guys and I now have a backup system if the cow makes any trouble.
It was my landlady's 87th birthday on the 16th. Her granddaughter, Maryam, threw a surprise birthday high tea for her. It was well done and a real surprise. Her two grandchildren, her great-granddaughter, her granddaughter-in-law, some old friends including one woman she went to school with, and me and a friend of Maryam's who works at the hotel. A nice evening.
My dental saga continues. It seems that I have a cavity that may result in another root canal and two teeth that need root planing. I may lose one tooth even with the root planing. More torture and more money. My fortune is invested in my mouth.
Here's a good one! Just as I was watching an episode of Death in Paradise where Inspector Poole is chasing chickens out of his house and off his bed, one of my neighbour's chickens came in and hopped on my bed. I caught her and returned her over the fence but not before she had had a shit on the hall carpet. Just like living on a farm. On reflection, I don't think it was a hen, but a young rooster. Much too big to be a hen.
It is moth season meaning that there are all sorts of interesting moths flying around. On the down side, I have to pick the caterpillars off my plants or they eat them all.
 |
| One of the delicate spiders which never seems to move from the wall. |
 |
| A grasshopper like thing that has himself disguised as a leaf. |
The rains have mostly stopped so we have to water, but it is paying off.
 |
| A healthy tropical bleeding heart vine in the side yard. |
 |
| The flower. |
As always, closing with my remaining furry family. A third outdoor cat has joined them that I have named Blacky. Jet black with green eyes and very small. He is a trouble maker though, so I tend to shoo him away when I see him. The other day he was making himself at home on the peninsula in my kitchen.
 |
| Everyone having their morning fish. Fish has become a regular thing since I had to give it to Aya to entice him to eat. There was heaps left over when he died which the other cats have become very used to. So now they get sardines every morning. We buy them fresh and boil them up. No canned goods here. |
 |
| Putha have a snooze in front of the TV. |
 |
| Buddy and Nangi snuggled together. |
 |
| Putha on his back. A position he assumes quite regularly. |
