robertwoodsdvm.com Blog

Written by: Annie Burris of The Orange County Register:

COSTA MESAA small black cat with a patch of white fur on its chest walks up to crossing guard Barbara Scalla in the Killybrooke Elementary School parking lot.
Seventeen-year-old Stormy waits as Scalla gets her folding chair, hat, stop sign and yellow crossing-guard jacket.
Then the odd couple make their way across the street to take up their post at Killybrooke Lane and Stonefield Street. There, they work the 7:30 to 8:45 a.m. shift.
Stormy greets the children and lets them pet her. Scalla walks the pupils across the street.
Scalla and the cat have had this routine for about four years, making Stormy the unofficial mascot of Killybrooke and Stonefield.
“She brings happiness,” said Rachel Keane, a sixth-grader who has been crossing at that corner since kindergarten, Tuesday morning. “She is probably the fun of this whole corner.”
Stormy is well-paid for her work.
“She knows I am going to feed her, so she comes up to me and meows,” said Scalla, 69, of Huntington Beach, about their ritual. “I say, ‘Just a minute. Let me get my jacket on,’ and she just sits there and waits.”
Stormy has been a fixture at the corner since long before she began her routine with Scalla, but previous crossing guards were not as accepting. When Scalla began at the corner, she welcomed the feline companionship.
At first, Stormy would jump in her chair and go to sleep.
“But now she jumps in my lap,” said Scalla, who has two cats of her own.
Stormy lives with her owners Melanie and John Whittaker at their home on Killybrooke and Stonefield. The cat has always been a mixture of curious and friendly, they said.
Melanie Whittaker said Stormy used to follow her when she worked at Killybrooke Elementary in the school office and as a teacher’s aide.
“I’d be in the office or whatever and I can remember she walked into the third-grade class one time and into the office one time and I had to say, ‘Come on Stormy. Let’s go home,’” said Whittaker, 53.
The Whittakers also have a 3-year-old Shih Tzu named Missy that likes to sleep on the same blanket as Stormy.
Son Steve Whittaker, 26, realized his cat’s popularity in high school when friends from different high schools would mention Stormy. Students who had gone to Killybrooke Elementary remembered the cat and word of the friendly feline spread.
“She is like a little celebrity,” he said. “I guess my cat is officially a celebrity.”

It offers a video of Stormy at the crosswalk at: www.ocregister.com/costamesa

This past friday, May 15th, there was an article written in the Orange County Register by: Marilynn Marchinone titled: “Study: Ginger capsules reduce nausea in chemo patients”. The first sentence sets the tone for the article: “Ginger, long used as a folk remedy for soothing tummyaches, helped tame one of the most dreaded side effects of cancer treatment-nausea from chemotherapy, the first large study to test the herb for this has found.” The study involved 644 patients from cancer centers around the nation who had suffered nausea in a previous round of chemotherapy. Prescription medication can curb the vomiting, but nearly 3/4ths of chemotherapy patients still suffer nausea. Patients taking the ginger scored their nausea as having a 40% improvement over the previous chemotherapy treatments without the ginger.
This is just another example of how an integration of both Eastern & Western medicine can benefit a patient. Always keep an open mind and remember that there are options.

I am sure you are all anxiously awaiting news on the toilet training of our siamese cat “Doc”. Sharing a bathroom with a siamese cat is an experience in it and of itself. Foot prints on the toilet seat is understatement while the training litter “pan” is in the toilet. So if you are brave enough to try, I suggest a guest bathroom and one that the cat will always have access too. Seeing how he sleeps in our bed, our only choice was OUR bathroom.
He used the training pan once we showed him where it was.
Then we followed the suggestion and slowly reduced the amount of litter in the pan each day. At the end of a week, we removed the pan completely and he was a little stressed out that day, but eventually used the toilet.
The next afternoon, there was a very loud SPLOOOOOOSH followed by a half sopping wet siamese cat running down the stairs. Apparently, the angle of the toilet seat, combined with his slippery declawed (he came that way, I did not declaw him) paws equals a siamese cat falling in the toilet.
How bad do I feel that he fell in the toilet? Bad enough to give him his litter box back.
So now he is half toilet trained and has an option. If you must know, his preference is to urinate in the toilet and dig around in the litter box for the other.
Now if we can only teach him to flush.