Always Look On The Bright Side...

It's said that having a positive outlook on life is a good thing... and I agree. I know a few people who have a tendency to having a negative outlook on things in general, and get the feeling easily and quickly that everything is against them, or wanting them to suffer, or something in that direction - and it does sound like bad things happen to them more often than to others, and that they have bad luck more often as well. 

Though of course, staying upbeat and positive and optimistic? Sometimes, that's hard to do. For instance, Tuesday this week was rather shitty - literally, in part. The poor little cat had constipation, and it was so bad that she obviously was in great pain and distress. 

The reason for that was a change in her food, which, in turn, is due to her having problems that point to an allergy or a sensitivity to something in her food, including food that she'd been eating without issues for years. Possibly age has increased these sensitivities. Now the hard thing is to find out what is causing that. Current hypothesis is that it's binding agents, which are added to almost all canned cat foods, and which do not need to be declared on the can. That, in turn, means the only way to find out about them is to ask directly at the manufacturer's.

As we've also found that she is sensitive to a number of meats - including beef, which is the main ingredient in most ready-made cat foods, and chicken, which runs a close second - the amount of ready-to-buy foods without binding agents and suitable for her, especially to find out if it is the binding agents, runs very close to zero. There's some few ones, but they are most often in tiny cans, we have a large cat, and I refuse to buy so much packaging, as it would mean several cans per day. (The cat is already the largest producer of waste in form of packages in our household. By far!)

So we switched to raw food, which gives us complete control over what she has, but the change led to the really, really bad constipation. The vet visit solved that, and it actually overshot the goal a little, so we had to deal with some more shit than expected, in places where it was not completely welcome... I will leave the rest to your imagination, or better not. (Overall not too bad. Things are mostly clean again, and the last things to wash lined up for their go. We will cope.)

In addition, I got some news on that same day that were not too delightful as well. Nothing really superdrastic, but somewhere between annoying and troublesome.

In all of that, I did try to see the positive aspects. I was very, very fortunate to get an appointment at the vet straight that afternoon, without having to wait for ages in the waiting room as an unplanned emergency (somebody else had cancelled last minute, and I could slip in). I got an offer for help for one of the bad-news-issues, which made no sense as it would have caused an inordinate amount of effort on the offering party's side, but it was still heart-warming to hear that someone would go to these lengths for me, without a second thought. 

It will pass, I told myself. It will get better soon again. Just keep at it... you'll manage. Also huge luck with the vet appointment. Cat getting better. Everything going to be alright.

And yes, it did. The day after, the cat was getting better; she's almost back to normal now, and has successfully used the litter box with no visible issues. (Whew. Never knew you could be so delighted about cat shit.) There's been a few emails with better news, including one that turned the troublesome issue (late delivery of my medication) into a resolved problem (chances are very high it will arrive in time after all). Plus there were a few other things that are very to utterly delightful in the mail yesterday and today morning.

So I'm pretty happy today, and it feels like it was a very good thing to try and stay positive and not give up and see everything as bleak and horrible and awful. And yes, I know that this can be hard, and sometimes straight out impossible. Before I got on the HRT and my hormones were so far out of whack, dropping a pencil could ruin half the day at minimum, and though it was better than nothing, no amount of trying to be positive would put it into proper perspective. But it's always worth the try to stay as much of an optimist as you can!

(If you read German, there's an interesting article here about how a positive mindset and feeling like someone lucky will make it more probable that good things happen to you.)