Yikes. I will continue to be grateful for my good luck.

There are long ones?!? How long is long? I had one, called my doc in a panic, and they diagnosed and said it would clear in under 30 min. Luckily, they were correct.

I feel like constant simmering rage at the world is appropriately feminine.

My partner and I frequently say to each other, “A PhD doesn’t mean you’re smart. It means you’re stubborn.”

Two tabby cats on wall-mounted shelves sitting pretty and surveying their domain. The left is a girl with dilute tortie colors but tabby striped with a white ruff and paws. The right is a brown tabby with a white chin.

The same two cats on wall-mounted shelf, but the right tabby is cleaning the top of the left tabby’s head, and the left tabby looks very happy

I’m so glad Cloudy is still with you!

Here are some friends taking care of each other. Left is Frankie, right is Eric.

In a cat café, a white cat is happily half asleep on top of a large Keurig placed on a large dresser. Two cats are sitting in the foreground, a tuxedo patterned calico (with polydactyl paws), and in front of her, a brown tabby. The two foreground cats look like a street gang that won’t think twice about violence.

3-for-1 Caturday special, but the front two aren’t sure they like the look of you.

Polyethylene glycol - Wikipedia

Polyethylene glycol.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyeth...

Yeah, just mentioning it because when I was a baby chemist, I favored putting everything in glass (because of plastic leaching) and learned the hard way. 🤦‍♀️

Consulting is such an interesting area. I do not have the personality to recommend solutions self-created issues over and over.

A secondary weird issue - sometimes stuff adheres to glass and the effective concentration is lower out of untreated glass containers than treated glass or plastic. There’s no single best way, and everyone involved needs to be paying attention!

Easier and cheaper and people are just stupid sometimes. There was one particular issue he put out an internal guidance. Like, “do not ever use X inactive when your active ingredient has a Y.” He had another 3 or 4 projects over the next year where he got called in to troubleshoot X/Y formulations.

I can hear him now - “It’s not that HARD, how did they fuck THAT up?” (He no longer does this work anymore because it actually got a bit dull solving the same problems over and over.) But man, someone really, really failed there.

This used to be my partner’s job - dealing with detectable impurities in pharmaceuticals. He had a crazy project involving leaching plasticizer from barrels the active ingredient was shipped inside.

Thanks for answering! An allergy to microcrystalline cellulose is the stuff of nightmares. I’m surprised that industrial food processing doesn’t remove unexpected allergens more effectively. I sense a rabbit hole opening up before me.

And I absolutely don’t think you’re a crank, but I’m a chemist and I’m curious - do you think it’s very small quantities of aflatoxin carrying through on corn products? It’s one of the few hypotheses that makes sense to me given your descriptions.

Someone else said it - if it has bacterial contamination and you aren’t pasteurizing it promptly, you’ll get some growth, and bacteria often produce toxins that are harmful and stick around even after the bacteria are gone.

Yay! Wishing you every happiness.

Kohler makes colored tubs, sinks, and toilets now, but they aren’t cheap.

www.kohler.com/en/products/...

For a simple URI, kitty should be much, much better in 1-2 days after getting antibiotics. I hope it helps and she feel better soon. You’re a good person to make sure she gets the help she needs.

If a round of antibiotics doesn’t help, then a vet can do a broad panel that includes bacteria, virus, and fungal causes for infection. But truth is, starting simple and cheap is often a good bet.

To be honest, we’ve always been told that the herpesvirus tests give a lot of wrong outcomes and our vets basically don’t believe them either way. For our cats, it’s almost always a course of antibiotics first, and if that doesn’t clear it, then we start looking harder.

Poor baby. The good news is that antibiotics should get her feeling better right away for minimal cost. Typical first one they give is doxycycline, which tastes nasty but is most effective and safe.

Breathing through her mouth is a pretty big distress sign in cats - hard to imagine a vet would ignore that if pointed out. The other big danger sign is called “abdominal breathing” meaning she’s using extra muscles to draw air in. Either of those send us to the kitty ER immediately.

That’s lower respiratory/pneumonia. That’s the first thing they check on our sweet girl, and her lungs are always clear but she 100% has a URI. Our vets ask if the nasal discharge is opaque and yellow or green as a clue for bacterial infection. Not sure whether that’s old fashioned or legit.

Allergies most often manifest in cats as itchy skin, so that’s not so likely. Agree with comment above that it’s likely either feline herpes flares or upper respiratory infection. Untreated/repeat URIs can lead to permanent tissue damage, so you might want to be pushy with the vet.

Upper respiratory infection doesn’t have lung involvement.

A product insert that has a multiframe comic of a patient koala visiting a koala dermatologist. There is a pH scale to the right of the comic. The koala patient is colored basic and the dermatologist is colored neutral. The patient koala uses the lotion and turns neutral pH and is happy.

I got a face lotion that included the following. Took me a good long while to figure out what it was telling me.

A white cat sleeping on top of a Keurig. The position of the cat’s head and neck looks very uncomfortable.

Someone switched the coffee to decaf. Let’s see if she notices!

Welcome! You’re in. Happy posting!

Hi, you’re in! Happy posting!

The Catherine Deneuve Dilemma.