Honey Boy

Honey Boy came to me as a Second Chance foster cat on December 16, 2007 (Saturday)-. He was diabetic and overweight, he wouldn't bathe himself, and he stank. His first glucose test was 441. Not a healthy 4 year old boy. All he wanted to do was sit on my lap.

I didn't bother with transitioning him from the dry food garbage he had been fed at the shelter; started him on Wellness the night that he got here and he showed no hesitation in eating it (or demand more at 5:00 am the next morning!). High blood sugar was his only symptom of diabetes. By Monday evening, his glucose was down to 286 on diet alone, but it was back up in the 400s by that evening. I started him on 1/2 unit of Humulin N (the insulin provided by Second Chance) the evening of 12/19/06. He was too low to shoot that next morning (235) since I didn't have any data to show how low he went the night before and I wasn't going to be home to monitor. That night, he was 286 so he got another 1/2 unit.

12/16/06
arrives from rescue shelter, starts Wellness diet--ate it no problem, so no transition period

12/17/06
given remaining antibiotic and deworming medicine--stressful. Decided to postpone ear poke until evening to increase likely of a non-stress reading. Ate the Wellness with gusto but has diarrhea. Not sure if it's from the dewormer, diet change or stress.

First glucose test....441 (499 at the vets at end of November)

12/18/06
Second glucose test 286

12/19/06
pm ps......421....1/2 unit NPH (first insulin)
+3.5.......161

12/20/06
am ps......235 (no insulin because I didn't know enough about how he responds and wasn't going to be around)
pm ps......283....1/2 unit NPH
+4....123

12/21/06
am ps....286....1/2 units NPH
+14......129 (no insulin)

12/22/06
am ps.....262...1/2 unit NPH
pm ps.....213 (before dinner)
+15.......157 (no insulin)

12/23/06
am ps.....fed, no test, no shot--dealing with Lucy's inappetance
+15.......157
+38.......134

12/24/06
+48.......155... 1 drop (about 1/10 of a unit) NPH
+2.5......66
+8........143 (food)
+10.5.....129

12/25/06
never over 140

12/26/06
+54.......140

12/27/07
+65.......122

Honey got exactly 4 injections of 1/2 unit each before he went into remission. Was he really diabetic? I don't think so. He was first taken to Second Chance when he was 2 years old after his family moved out of town and left him behind (declawed but not neutered!). He was adopted with another Second Chance cat and spent almost 2 years in that home before they returned him with diabetes. There's no way to know what caused the high glucose levels, but my experience with him has solidified my belief in a good diet and a little insulin to start off.

Within a month, he was off insulin. At that point I started urging him to bathe himself (I had been wiping his butt for him and was sick of it). So I starting using a warm washcloth to wipe down all of his fur. He liked it and was very cooperative, but it wasn't a strong enough hint. So I started getting the washclothe very wet so that he was dripping. He didn't like that at all, and had to immediately start licking himself dry. We only had to do that a couple of times and voila--a self-cleaning kitty!

Now it's July 2007 and he's lost a couple of pounds and looks great. He plays, his fur is super soft, and his glucose levels are below 70 anytime I remember to check him. On 7/15/07 he had a date with a very nice lady from Raleigh. She was looking for a declawed cat above the age of a kitten. She had just adopted a 7 year old declaw from the Wake Humane Society and wanted a companion for her (she likes other cats). The lady's adult daughter lives here in Chapel Hill, so I invited here to meet Honey instead of taking him to Second Chance (he is NOT a cooperative traveler). They hit it off fabulously. Honey purred very loudly as usual and showed off him cute play moves. He even let me put a ribbon around his neck to help him look extra handsome. I got the call today that she is filling out his adoption papers next Sunday. I will take him to her house that afternoon.

Lucy will be thrilled; the fights have been escalating. Although I will miss him, he's going to the perfect situation. A bean who wants a lap cat and another cat who likes cats. And they lived happily ever after......

How N.C. mistreats its beaches

This isn't really a local issue, and it's probably a copyright violation to copy the article here. But I want to preserve this article as it gets to the same problems the Smith Level Road task force has encountered with DOT. "Engineering" approaches to beach management and road management arrive at different ends than resource management approaches. With apologies to all my engineering friends, we need to stop letting engineers make these management decisions.

Article published Jul 22, 2007
Pilkey: How N.C. mistreats its beaches

At a recent international conference in Australia, I met a South African coastal management official from Capetown who excitedly reported the outcome of a move by his government. In December 2001, recreational driving on beaches was halted throughout South Africa. It proved to be a wise environmental decision.

Almost immediately after the ban, surveys indicated that the numbers of a variety of beach nesting and beach feeding birds increased. Critters living in the beach sand also recovered quickly, and surf zone fishing seemed to be improving in tandem with the recovery of the near-shore ecosystem.

But what excited this young man the most was the return of the leopards. Tracks began to appear on some remote beaches. Finally, a beach hiker reported seeing one of these shy creatures bounding along the swash line.

North Carolina has every reason to be envious of this beach success story at the far-away southern tip of Africa. Here we seem to be going in the opposite direction.

We have grown to accept our beaches as engineering projects not much different from highways. Driving is allowed on many North Carolina beaches, including the Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras national seashores. Even on wild Shackleford Bank, the park service sends a four-wheeler daily up and down the beach to "check things out."

Politicians argue back and forth about funding and about how much sand to use in nourishment projects without a thought about the devastating impact of pumping in new sand on the fauna and flora. The loss of the beach critters is a blow to birds and offshore fish alike.

Bulldozing of sand from the lower to the upper beach, also a death-dealing process to the beach ecosystem, is routinely done in many communities, including those on Topsail Island, Bogue Banks, Holden Beach, Nags Head and Kitty Hawk.

Beach-raking carried out frequently in Myrtle Beach and Virginia Beach and occasionally in a number of smaller North Carolina communities, such as Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach, is as deadly a killer as bulldozing.

Also, a number of North Carolina communities inexplicably don't clean up their beaches as houses and roads collapse into the retreating shorelines. Asphalt chunks abound on Ocean Isle as they do elsewhere on the Outer Banks.

Hundreds of sand bag seawalls line the beaches. Some, such as those in South Nags Head, extend to the mid-tide line.

There is some good news on the sandbag front. The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission has begun taking steps toward removing them. Time will tell if the CRC can withstand a storm of protests.

But the biggest travesty to beaches in North Carolina is our beach nourishment program. We have put more poor quality material on beaches than any other East Coast state. Fist-sized cobbles abound on Oak Island. Sharp shell gravel is found in the intertidal zone of portions of Pine Knoll Shores and Emerald Isle. Hardened mud chunks crop out in Atlantic Beach, and construction debris is found on Holden Beach.

Why do we treat our beaches with such contempt? The primary reason is the political power of beach front property owners anxious to preserve their property.

The reason we have bad beach nourishment material is an ineffective state agency that manages our beaches and an inept federal agency -- the Wilmington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- which has approved all the bad quality beach nourishment projects.

Local governments, with their tiny number of year-round voter-residents, usually don't help much with their focus on development.

The state of North Carolina is about to come up with a new beach and inlet management plan. Let's hope it doesn't accept the status quo that our beaches are simply engineering projects to keep a wealthy few happy.

Let's hope that the consultant group will recognize the treasured, even sacred nature of North Carolinas beaches.

Let's hope the plan will take the long view: that it will recognize that the sea level is rising and that it will work to preserve the beaches for our great-grandchildren.

Orrin Pilkey is director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Duke University.

Copyright © 2007
The News & Record
and Landmark Communications, Inc.

Lady Bird Johnson, 1912 - 2007

Favorite quotes from Lady Bird Johnson


“My heart found its home long ago in the beauty, mystery, order and disorder of the flowering earth.”

“Some may wonder why I chose wildflowers when there are hunger and unemployment and the big bomb in the world. Well, I, for one, think we will survive, and I hope that along the way we can keep alive our experience with the flowering earth. For the bounty of nature is also one of the deep needs of man.”

“As I look back across a span of more than seven decades, I’m grateful for the joy that nature has given me and for the lifetime of experiences that led me to believe that I might repay a part of the debt I’ve incurred for beauty enjoyed.”

The Heart of the Problem

Climate Change: The Heart of The Problem
by Elizabeth Sawin

"Acting close[r] to the heart of the problem recognizes the interconnection of problems and increases the odds that the effort applied solves multiple problems simultaneously.

Excessive CO2 production may be closer to the heart of things, but it’s not THE heart, of course. There are deeper reasons, the reasons that cause us to produce so much greenhouse gas pollution in the first place.

If moving one step closer to the heart of things - moving from the symptom of rising temperature to its cause, CO2 pollution - produces the ability to solve multiple problems with a single solution, then what might be the power of reaching even deeper - into consumerism, into our sense that the Earth is ours to dominate, into the assumptions of the of the industrial growth society?

Go deep enough, find ways to act that are deep enough, and we might find ourselves solving not just warming and ocean acidification, but also mercury pollution and toxics build-up and topsoil loss. We might find choices that could begin to heal both the wounds of the Earth and the wounds we impose on each other - wounds like poverty, oppression, violence, and despair.

Getting to such depths, acknowledging what we find there, and figuring out what to do about what we find won’t be easy. But I believe that this is the direction that climate change and all the other tangled challenges of this moment in time are pointing us towards."