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not a good day
had several moments today. Today was chock full of moments. In fact, there were so many moments, I feared that if one more moment hit me I would completely snap and run for the hills screaming. Pounce is sick. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. The vet doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. We got an x-ray done and all it shows is that he has a lot of air in his stomach and his esophagus. The air could be from all the choking and gasping and yowling he did on the car ride to the vet or it could be something really serious. We don’t know. We’re supposed to take him to a specialized clinic in a few days if he doesn’t get better.
But even though I’m sadder than sad about Pounce, that was not why I had so many “moments” today. Today I think I fully understood the wrath and wrangling of a full-blown-two-year-old. It’s true. The twos are terrible! Worse than I ever imagined and Baby Bug is probably a pretty good kid. I do not know how you parents of multiple kids do it. I’m ready to wave my white flag in defeat. She really got the best of me today.
It was probably not smart to take Baby Bug with me to the vet today with Pounce. I didn’t really have a choice since Toby’s been working like a mad man and I don’t have a list of babysitters handy to help out when a sudden cat illness might strike. But I went early and I thought I could get him in and looked at before lunchtime and nap time. It’s a first-come first-serve sort of clinic and you just never know if you’re going to be lucky and breeze right in or if you are going to be stuck in the waiting room for a few hours.
We got stuck waiting. And waiting and waiting waiting waiting…
Play this clip over and over for three hours straight with no break. It sort of sounds cute at first but quickly that one note (a b sharp perhaps?) starts to get very very very old. It’s sort of like Chinese water torture.
Then imagine that you are trying to translate the whining into English and you have to pay attention or else a five alarm dolphin squeal will go off in your ears and break windows. Then imagine Baby Bug throwing herself on the dirty veterinarian waiting room floor, slathering her wet snotty tears in cat urine.
So lovely, no?
THEN imagine that there is a crotchety old @hole of a man in the waiting room making loud comments to the girls at the front desk about you and your poor mothering skills. I know I should not care what old crotchety @holes say but I guess I was not born with that amazing ability to let stuff like that roll off my back. I don’t really care what he thinks. I know he’s a mean old man and he probably needs a drink but it didn’t stop me from sweating and stressing about how to keep Baby Bug quiet.
Nothing worked. I tried to color with her. I even offered to let her draw with my favorite Sharpie pen. I threw her in the air and made funny sounds. I let her comb my hair and poke me in the eye. I invented funny games of jumping over the lines in the linoleum. I gave her cookies. I let her dump the contents of my purse. I even let her climb on the magazine rack. Nothing stopped the whining. Nothing! It’s a constant with her these days.
I kept telling myself that how you act under stress shows your true character. It’s my mantra these days. Be calm. Do not freak out. Do not yell at the two-year-old. Do not start crying. Do not threaten to put the two-year-old in the smelly urinated in cat carrier. What would Jesus do sort of stuff. I barely held my crap together today. Barely.
I know these are the precious years. I know it’s important to enjoy every moment. I know they fly by fast and you never get a chance to do them over again. But man! Can I do this? This is harder than anything I’ve ever done! This is harder than that one time I had to interview the president of my college about a sexual harassment scandal. And that was NOT easy. Believe me.
Now that she’s blessedly asleep (no nap today) I am a little bit proud of myself that I didn’t lose it. I may have sweat blood out of my arm pits but I didn’t slap her like I wanted to so badly. I didn’t yell. I didn’t even call Toby crying until after we were in the car driving home. I almost… pretty much held it together. It didn’t feel like it but it’s over.
Now I can just worry about Pounce and hope that tomorrow is a better day.
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Poor Lily
Poor Lily. She has to wear a cone.
If you know Lily at all, you know why this is particularly horrible for her. She’s a licking sort of cat. Always licking licking licking. When she was a kitten she would lick us constantly and sometimes lick up whole big long pieces of string. She gives herself baths all day long. Thankfully she usually seems pretty healthy. She doesn’t lick one spot and lick herself bare like some pets I’ve known.
So anyway, she had a tuuuuuumor (say that with your best Arnold Swartzenegger accent). She had it for a long time. Like a year or so. I know, we are horrible pet owners. But seriously, she seemed fine. It didn’t seem to bother her so we didn’t really worry about it.
It got bigger and bigger and after a while it seemed like she was growing a fifth leg so we took her to the fancy schmancy cat vet. That was a bad idea. They wanted $1000 to do surgery. Toby didn’t think that was necessary. He thought he could remove it himself with a syringe. Toby worked in a free medical clinic during college and removed tumors from humans… so he’s not completely full of hot air. He probably could do it. But who wants to? Gross! Tumor! Yuck!
We decided that we needed to find a cheaper vet. That was easier said than done. Everything is so expensive where we live. You can’t just open the phone book and look for an ad that says, “cheap”. In fact, most of them advertise silly things like “brass beds for your pampered pet”. Oh please. My cat does not need a brass bed. She likes sleeping in cardboard just fine. Not that I don’t love my cat and enjoy spoiling her, I do. I just don’t trust vets.
I know there are “free clinics” for spaying and neutering. It was just a matter of finding one. After some sleuthing (and a field trip or two) I finally found an adoption agency that gave me the low down scoop for affordable vets. Sure enough, just a little trip to Little Mexico (aka Santa Ana) and I found a vet that was excellent.
They were really great. I’m going there again. It was clean and neat and organized. There was a separate entrance for cats and dogs. The girls behind the counter were quicker and more organized than Baby Bug’s pediatrician office. (Which doesn’t say much since I think the girls at Baby Bug’s doctor’s office are all on Valium or something.) They were more on top of it than Starbucks. I think they have to be because they were very busy.
But that wasn’t all. Everyone was cheerful. There were animals coming and going all the time and no horrible yowling or yipping. You didn’t hear yowls of pain coming from down the hall. The pet owners seemed really happy too. Probably because they weren’t thinking about how they would have to sell their first born so they could pay their vet bill.
It could be a facade. They could just sedate everyone. But I don’t think they do. When I went in to talk to the doctor about Lily, he was very kind. I expressed my concern about anesthesia because once I had a pet go into surgery and never come out. He reassured me that Lily was very strong and would be fine. He said they’d never lost an animal during surgery. He would also make sure she wasn’t in pain, which relieved me some because part of me always wonders if they cut corners on pain blockers since it’s not like the animal is going to tattle on them.
We had to leave her there for the whole day. That was a bit rough. Baby Bug cried her eyes out. The girls in the office of course thought that was adorable. We love Lily a lot and it shows, even if we don’t take her to the vet to get her tumor removed for a whole year.
Lily is home and totally fine. She purrs up a storm the second we scratch her head. She doesn’t like her cone too much. She bumps into things and eating out of her food bowl has been a bit of a challenge but it hasn’t stopped her.
In two weeks we will take Lily back to the vet to get her sutures removed and her cone off. In meantime we are having fun wearing lampshades on our heads to commiserate.
