Tamme-Lauri oak in Estonia...

Tamme-Lauri oak in Estonia...  I've visited this majestic oak several times, between 1995 and 2002. The paper road map of Estonia that I purchased when I toured there had several dozen individual trees of distinction marked, and I visited them all.  The locals took very good care of each of these trees, even through the horrible Soviet years.  These days, when the country is far more prosperous, care is being lavished on them.  Estonia is the only place where I've ever seen anything like this...

Mo'i update...

Mo'i update...  Yesterday Mo'i got chest X-rays and a cardiac ultrasound, and neither of those diagnostics detected anything at all awry.  Naturally, the arrhythmia that started us down this path was completely absent.  The cardiologist told us that this eliminated all but a few of the possible causes.  The remaining possibilities were tumors on the spleen or liver (through some poorly understood mechanism, these can cause arrhythmia) or microscopic cardiac disease that's too small for the diagnostics to pick up.  It also could have been some “anomalous” (read “something we don’t understand” event that may or may not repeat itself.  The cardiologist saw nothing (even with the previous day's ECG in hand) that was severe enough to be treated.  He didn't think the arrhythmia we observed on Monday was severe enough to have caused the lethargic spell we saw.  That means that either the lethargy was completely unrelated to the arrhythmia, or that he had a much worse arrhythmia for that period.

Further diagnostics might have been able to detect one of the other possible causes.  However, when we queried the cardiologist about treatment for any of those other possibilities, they were all treatments we would not put Mo'i through at this stage (surgery, radiation, etc.).  The poor guy has problems we already know about that are not treatable, he's 16 years old, and has little enough time left no matter what we did about his heart.  We just couldn't put him through more misery for yet another medical problem.  The cardiologist, naturally, would like to have understood what the cause of the problem was – but he did understand that if that didn't lead to treatment, it really didn't matter to us (and certainly not to Mo'i).  

Yesterday and today Mo'i seems just fine, behaving in his usual old-age fashion.  His appetite is normal, and he's moving around like we're used to seeing.  This morning he enjoyed his banana ends as usual, and ate a bonus bowl of food with gusto.  We're just going to keep a good eye on him (if a severe arrhythmia shows up, we can detect it ourselves with a stethoscope, and get treatment) and be thankful for each hour we have left...