Cashing out some Steem to pay for the veterinary bill

Good morning, everyone. I hope all of my Steem friends have been good lately, and that some of you might even have missed my seeing my biology posts in your feed. In this post I'm going to be doing another full @valth blog post to explain why I have been absent from the blockchain lately (believe me, I'm not going to disappear from Steemit anytime soon).

Why @valth has been gone for almost a week

About a week ago, I started to notice how my pet pug had began to be very lazy - even more so than usual. He did not really do anything beside sleep, and ate a bit less than I liked. I figured that he probably had the flu or something like that, and expected him to get better after a few days of relaxing.

However, the opposite happened. When the weekend arrived, he had gotten progressively worse, and now he didn't even want to walk anymore. When I managed to get him up to his feet, he could not walk straight, but rather just walk to the left, or go around in circles. After doing some tests to try to figure out what was wrong, me and my wife quickly agreed that he most likely had a neurological disorder, due to a few different reasons. He kind of behaved as a drunk person. At this point we're a bit over our heads when it comes to dog disease, so it was obviously time to visit the veterinarian.

After some more tests and a blood analysis, he agreed with us that it was a neurological problem, and pinpointed it to likely be necrotizing meningoencephalitis, also known as Pug Dog encephalitis (PDE). Basically it is an inflammation of a part of the brain, which leads to death in almost all cases if the dog does not respond to the treatment.

Right now he is being treated by a drug called Prednisolone, and he seems to be responding fine. He is acting a little better, but I don't want to celebrate just yet, because he is still a long way from being "cured" (cured is a pretty bad word actually, since there is no cure - just removal of the symptoms).

Due to the fact that it is a "common" pug disease, the insurance won't cover the veterinary bill, so for this reason I have cashed out some of the Steem/SBD on my account for the first time. I cashed out almost $1,000, and the sad part is that the vet bill was almost this high as well..

Going forward

So, that's pretty much the reason why I haven't had either time or energy to be on Steemit the last few days. I've been very busy with going to the vet, administering medicine, making sure he is not having any seizures etc.

Life is starting to get back to normal now, because it's not like we can just quit real life because our dog is sick, and I fully plan to start spending more time on Steemit again. I have so many posts and comments to read and respond to, and sorry that I haven't gotten around to checking them out earlier. I know from @ginabot that a lot of you have mentioned me in various posts and comments, so I'm definitely looking forward to getting back to Steemit now.

And thanks for reading this post. I honestly don't know why I'm sharing this with all of you, but it feels kind of therapeutic to write this, and to be able to share my misfortune. Anyway, check back later tonight for a science post again, and hopefully I have been able to respond to most missed comments in the meantime.