Finish the sentence friday! "The hardest choice I had to make..." #ftsf

After a bit of a hiatus, I am now posting again for the Finish the Sentence Friday hop. This week, I am writing about:

"The hardest choice I had to make was..."

Putting my lovely, gorgeous Tuxedo cat to sleep on May 11, 2012. Holmes, aka "Goose"/"SupaGoose"/"Silly Goose", was a very special cat. In July 2006, with only 10 minutes to go until the Dutchess SPCA was closing, I heard a jingling noise that caught my attention among the many cages filled with cats. It was a lovely tuxedo cat, jiggling a toy on the door of his cage from nudging the door so hard. I came over to him and instantly fell in love. He nudged me so hard and it was love at first sight.

Meeting him coincided with me being close to moving out of my parents' house and living on my own. I visited him almost every day for a month until I moved out of my parents house to a room I was renting in a house in Downtown Albany, NY. When we moved in together, he was a little shy and apprehensive at first. But it wasn't long until we got really close.

Me and Goosey hanging out after one of my grad school classes, late September 2006

I moved out of Albany after one semester and transferred to a different graduate school in Valhalla, NY called NY Medical College. I then moved to Long Island for the summer of 2007 to take Organic Chemistry (at a time where I wanted to become an MD instead of a Ph.D.) and ended up meeting my now husband. I moved back home in August 2007 to go back to grad school and spent a lot of time with my Holmesy. He was my snuggle bug - mommy's buddy. Tim (my now hubs) and I moved in together in January 2009, and this was the first time Holmesy had to share his mama with someone else. He was a little shy at first.

Hiding with his sister Cindy Belle on one of his favorite blankets in my closet, January 2009

It wasn't long, however, until he got used to his surroundings and really started to have a blast. He had such an adorable personality and always made everyone's hearts melt whenever they saw him. He was also quite the comedian cat :) very silly (that's how he got the nick name "gooSe" from "Silly goose")

Silly boy trying on my glasses - early 2010, with his favorite blanket that he was cremated with, "Pea Gween"

He started having urinary issues and was diagnosed with calcium oxalate crystals in his bladder. He needed surgery to flush them out. Over the next year and a half, he ended up needing minor surgery and various medications to keep him comfortable, and was on a special diet. Still, it never seemed like "too much". It was never beyond what I thought would be fair to him. But one day in early May 2012, things changed. He started having trouble eating his dry food, in a way I never saw before. I took him to his vet, who was great, and they said that they thought it was just his teeth bothering him. They didn't see any issues.

Still, he had significant issues with eating and it didn't seem to feel right. I knew him so well so I knew something was up. I took him back to the doctor and saw his favorite vet to give him a recheck. When she propped open his mouth to look at his teeth, my heart sank. Like an elevator plummeting from the top of a skyscraper to the bottom floor. When she opened up his mouth, I saw it.

It was a grape sized tumor at the base of his tongue, way in the back of his mouth. It looked so large, throbbing. Like was very uncomfortable. I read that in older cats (he was around 6-7 years old when I adopted him in 2006 and this was 2012), tumors on the tongue like that are not benign. Removal usually meant a feeding tube for a few months because you could never get the whole tumor and it would eventually come back. Chemo was an option.... but only if his heart was good.

And at the moment that the doctor was talking about his tumor, the blood work they did the day before came back. He had end-stage heart failure. Who lives with heart failure and oral sarcoma? Well, this little strong love. I was so amazingly lucky to be able to take him home that Wednesday afternoon and spend 2 more days with him at home, until I made the decision to have him escape his  pain (he had already stopped eating and had a mini stroke the day before) at 5:37 PM on May 11, 2012. 

It was the hardest thing for me to do... my love for him was always everlasting. What would I do without him? I was heartbroken. He was my son.... I always spoke to him and asked him, "Please, Goose, if I get pregnant, please come back in his or her body as part of that baby's spirit". I asked him, Please, Goose. I am ready to be pregnant. I am ready to be a mom.

And as of September 14, 2012, someone a girl with bad endometriosis and a couple chemical pregnancies saw those 2 magical pink lines. I became pregnant with my daughter, and carried my healthy baby girl to term and gave birth to her this past May. I thank Goose every day for being a part of her spirit. I see it in her. It was the hardest thing I had to do, but now he watches us from Heaven. LOVE YOU GOOSE!! <3

Finish the sentence Friday... "My favorite summertime memory was..." #ftsf

We're finally back with another FTSF post after a little break because the beginning of this semester (and me teaching 3 separate classes at 3 separate colleges)!!  Today, the theme of the week is "My favorite summertime memory was...."
...seeing my little girl smile for the first time. My summer wasn't filled with the normal activities that most people enjoy because I gave birth at the end of May. June was wet and yucky and July was too hot to breathe, so we didn't get to enjoy much of the outdoor weather until August. Nevertheless, I still have a favorite memory of the summer that I will hold dear to me. The most amazing thing to me was seeing my little girl smile at me for the first time. All those sleepless nights and cries that we couldn't quite decipher at first.... all my worries about whether or not I would be a good mom... everything went away when I saw this little cutie smile for the first time. Here is one of those pictures :)

If you want to participate in the FTSF hop, please click on the link above!!

Finish the Sentence Fridays - I wasn't really myself when... #ftsf

Time for another entry in the "Finish the Sentence Friday" blog link up!!
It's a fun weekly event hosted by a bunch of great ladies, click on the button above to learn more about the hosts and how you can join in the fun! This week's theme: I wasn't really myself when...
...I took my first qualifying exam for my doctoral program. I'm not sure if my doctoral program is identical to others, but I am going for my Doctor of Public Health degree with a concentration in epidemiology. In my program, you have to take your first qualifying exam about 3 semesters into your studies to basically prove you are ready to study at the "next level" (e.g. propose new theories, challenge existing correlations, etc.) I had always thought that the big scary monster in the closet for me would be the dissertation defense. But once I settled into the program and heard stories about the first qualifying examination, I had a much sooner nightmare to contend with.
The reason why this exam is so frightening is that it determines your future in the program and basically, your life! You have 2 weeks to answer 3 questions - easy enough, right? For our program, there was a basic public health theory question, a track specific question and a question on public health leadership. Doesn't sound so bad! Well... you have 5 pages, double spaced per question to basically synthesize every single article you've ever come across in the realm of the question. If you think you can summarize these articles and simply report back, you're wrong! It's like baking a cake - you have to take all of the ingredients (e.g., important parts of an article from author X, a helpful chapter from a textbook written by author Y) and synthesize it into a tasty concoction of current information and trends. Did I mention that you only have 1 chance to retake the exam if you fail and if you fail that attempt, you have to leave the program?!

Sounds about right :).

If it sounds overwhelming, that's because it is! From the moment the exam was emailed to me, all I did was eat, sleep and breathe "first exam". Like the rest of my classmates, I abandoned non-essential internet usage (especially Facebook and Twitter!!), and completely dedicated myself to completing the exam to the best of my abilities. When I realized I couldn't resist the temptation of having a television in the same room as the room where I was doing most of my work, I ended up using the computer lab of my undergraduate alma mater (whose students were on winter break so it was relatively quiet there) to re-read articles I had saved that I knew would be important as well as those on our official reading list, scouring Google Scholar for articles to support a point I KNEW that I had heard before and typing/highlighting my draft answers in more colors than a bag of jellybeans!!
Even though 2 weeks SEEMED like a long time, it wasn't. Especially considering it took me a week to write out an answer to the first question that I was confident about (and still had the other 2 to go). Getting 8 hours of sleep suddenly became a distant fantasy, the likes of which was only forgotten by consuming massive amounts of Diet Mountain Dew. Also, my dinners consisted of whatever was in the nearest vending machine, most often doritos or fritos. I was a walking zombie, but even though I was incredibly sleep deprived, I had to use my brain MORE than I would have on a full night sleep. I was a machine - a nutty, sleep-deprived, malnourished studying machine!!
It got so nuts that I didn't sleep for almost 40 hours straight as the deadline approached. The icing on the cake was that I still had to get my butt up after only sleeping a few hours once I officially submitted the exam to get on a train back down to NYC (to Lehman College in the Bronx) for my first day of class. Wow!  I am happy to report back that I passed the exam as of March 2012 :). But unfortunately, more scary hurdles are ahead in my academic career (my second comprehensive exam in February, and dissertation-related fun for the remainder of 2014/2015). Although now that I have a baby, I think I have more training in how t handle that "functioning on little sleep" thing :)
Thanks for reading :)
~Tia