Help Harpo Continue Bringing Joy

I'm not really sure what to do with this fundraiser now, other than the obvious, paying off Harpo's remaining balance, along with Gummitch's and Groucho's, which I took out usurious loans for rather than raise it again. Gummitch has been fine since he started a new food, Groucho gets imaging and senior labs later this month.

"Anything beyond the goal will go to the Velvet Fund" was predicated on Harpo still being alive. And I was very upset that Dove Lewis refused to refill Harpo's antibiotics, telling me to just keep him comfortable with pain meds until we finally got in with the new primary. I will always wonder if he would have recovered if they had. It was so, so close.

But of course that is not the fault of the low income people helped by the fund, or their pets. I'll work out what to do with that once I regain some equilibrium. I've sent them $500 for now. I was thinking I could later run contests where people could donate $5 to a fund to win one of Harpo's many tooth marked Pride/social justice magnets. I want to include Tanasbourne ER as well. That is who saved him years ago after Dove Lewis turned us away, and that is where he died.

The plan when I finally got back into safe housing again with your help was to throw myself into social media full throttle so Harpo and I could earn enough to buy a duplex with the friend who helped me save him from cancer, and found a rescue called Harpo's Friends, so he could continue to bring joy long after he was gone. But my friend died, I broke down, and just as I did the previous two times I had a golden opportunity to actually make a living doing creative work that I enjoyed, I let self-loathing sabotage self-preservation via my inability to handle self-promotion.

There's a reason I never appear in my videos. If I can't crop enough of myself out of an image, I don't use it. I don't even have a mirror in this house. Every time I streamed, I was terribly anxious about accidentally showing myself. People compliment me on my voice all the time, but all I hear is how it's become weaker and thinner while my breathing has grown louder and more labored. I'd obsess over this stupid stuff until I started dissociating.

Judging from what mutuals with smaller followings than I have make, if I had actually streamed every day, letting people watch me edit until the meows inspired Harpo to start bringing things, and actually kept up with subscriber videos and merch instead of just giving up in despair and shutting the shop in shame when I couldn't access my late friend's spreadsheets, I'd have $1.3 million to buy this place on 13th St and renovate it into a cat rescue that helps human beings too, by providing subsidized housing to people stuck in the situation you helped me escape. (I use the number 13 as a mindfulness tool, so finding that place right after Harpo died was a little extra gut punch.)

Even if I thought I could crowdfund that much (lol), it would be wildly inappropriate to try in the wake of the wildfires. But I don't need to own a property to found a rescue, because I was lucky enough to find a house that cost less than many apartments, owned by a kind, sympathetic person who was happy to let me paint bright colors and foster kittens.

Fortunately, Harpo was as busy as I was paralyzed, and I was able to film him even when completely dissociated. I have so much unused footage that I could probably post a new video every day for 13 months, which happens to be as long as I am committed to living in this house unless I break the lease. Once the well starts to run dry, I'll start doing supercuts of individual stuffies and auction them off for the Harpo's Friends nonprofit. A CPA that works with nonprofits popped up on Reddit with an offer of help.

I've been talking to PDX Cat Trapper about fostering kittens for them, especially neonates, for which I am unusually well-suited. My natural sleep cycle is only four hours a night, and it doesn't matter if it's broken into two shifts. When I try to sleep more than that, I feel like normal people do when they only sleep four hours. I also am just down the road from the Oregon Humane Society, where I adopted Groucho and Harpo 16 years ago. Months of sleeping on the sofa when Harpo was sick taught me I don't actually need a bed, so I threw away the ancient mattress, gave away the frame, and will make that a dedicated fostering room.

Maybe people will be interested in watching me edit even if Harpo isn't there, with a second camera on kittens. Maybe they'll want to subscribe even if I can't give them tooth marked and pawtographed cards and custom videos. Speaking of which, I screwed some of you over in that regard. Unsnarling the wreckage of the KoFi to find every unfulfilled order and subscription perk is the next priority after unsnarling the wreckage of a house I neglected for months. I may have shut the shop, but Harpo continued pawtographing things, so I have over a thousand cards and posters in reserve, along with a huge stack of tooth marked magnets to give to people I've wronged.

So now the plan is to just try to hang on here, doing social media and looking for a new job. I've had no luck at all with that so far. I didn't work for almost a decade after my encounter with a drunk driver, and then spent almost a decade doing captioning before AI came along and wiped out countless jobs in captioning, editing, copy writing, etc. There are still jobs, but I'm in my 50s with a decade-long gap in my resume.

That's what makes it all the more appalling that I wasted a chance to make social media and rescue my actual job. I knew this was coming, but I just let the train hit me. My brain is so broken that the only difference between me and the homeless person muttering and gesticulating and picking at themselves on the street is I don't have to do it in front of people who hate me for being sick. I'd have never been able to keep the captioning job for as long as I did if it wasn't super, super flexible.

That's why I honestly no longer really care if I achieve the dream of running a rescue for both kitties and humans on property I bought and renovated for the purpose. Ever since my head injury, my depression, PTSD, and ADHD have been so much worse that I am completely worn out. And now I have to live with the burden failing yet again to turn my life around by doing something I wanted to do, something that would have been fun. Just fulfilling my obligations to 16-year-old Groucho and 13-year-old Gummitch will be enough.

Thank you all so much. I don't deserve you.

*original story*

Harpo is at Dove Lewis which is a non-profit hospital. They treat injured wildlife and strays, and operate on a sliding scale. If we raise more funds than he actually needs, we will make a donation to the Velvet Fund which helps other low-income people whose pets are not as famous as Harpo, but no less loved.

Here's the original estimate, which does not include the fine needle aspirations they later told me they wanted to do. But people sent us enough money via PayPal yesterday to cover those.

Harpo had been doing great, eating well, gaining weight, bringing me things again. The swings of the poop pendulum had gotten shorter and slower, requiring less and less intervention to keep them where we wanted them, on the softer side of normal. He had not needed any laxative or motility medication in almost two weeks, and rarely vomited anymore.

But then we tried a medication to help with his muscle wasting, and the diarrhea began again, and wouldn't stop after we discontinued it. He lost all that he gained and then some. I started blending his food as fine as baby food so he could eat more to stay ahead of it, but he continued to lose weight even while eating 8-10 cans a day. He would just poop it right out an hour later, then meow for more food. His liquid diet has been so messy that Groucho and Gummitch have to wash his face for him. I was really worried this might be it

Since he was hospitalized in late August for having poop stuck in his ascending colon, he's had two checkups with his oncologist, who put him on a low dose of chlorambucil for the first time in over five years. His cancer has been so well-controlled that he did not continue with chemo beyond the first course, even though it's usually life long. It seemed likely that there was something going on other than the cancer, given that his ordeal began RIGHT after the diet change, and began to improve RIGHT after I gave him his old food back.

We had an appointment with an internal medicine specialist at Dove Lewis 10/9. Since their diagnostics require anesthesia, I had him admitted late on 10/7, so they could do everything they could to make that safer. For he was so depleted from the diarrhea that he was starting to get wobbly. He got his electrolytes replenished and received a blood transfusion, and immediately began charming the staff. For while Harpo obviously does not LIKE being in the hospital, it doesn't scare him. He understands they're trying to help him, and accepts the indignities he is subjected to with good grace.

The doctor said that while his labs don't show anything catastrophic, there were some red flags that they wanted to investigate by doing fine needle aspiration of his liver and pancreas. The main thing was the endoscopy and biopsy so they can figure out exactly what type of cells are causing his IBD, neutrophils, eosinophils, etc. Then they can figure out how to treat it.

If this was just part of an inevitable decline that Harpo could not recover from, I would be making different care decisions. He's the fourth of my cats to develop cancer. I sold my own eggs to pay for treatment for my first one, who I stole when I was 17, from someone who was going to euthanize him for behavioral problems they caused by declawing him. So I know when to make that terrible call.

But for now, all indications are that we're at the beginning of Harpo's final chapter rather than its end, and that there's no reason that he can't happily do the job he loves so much, bringing joy to people around the world, a while longer. His appetite and spirit remain undiminished.