This.
Month.
Is.
Going.
To.
Kill.
Me.
I'm sorry I didn't stick to the posting schedule this week, but things have been absolutely loopy. Every time I tried to stick to a decent schedule (beyond the blog; just waking up was a chore), something got in my way.
I started off the week still sick from whatever I caught at the Imbolc ritual. It had turned into a cough which then turned into this nauseating, terrible phlegm attack. I coughed so hard I threw up on multiple occasions - and once I throw up, there is no salvaging the day for me. I couldn't keep Nyquil down, so I was feeling the full effects of the cold (flu?).
I still have a slight cough, but I'd say I'm over it. Aaron still has a hard cough, so he's not quite there yet.
On late Sunday night/Monday morning, I was cleaning up my spiritual room when I heard one of the cats using the litter box in the bathroom. There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about this, but my psychic (psycho?) pet mom intuition kicked in and I checked the litter box. There absolutely is everything out of the ordinary about this - the litter box is not my chore, primarily because it gives me huge asthma attacks. But something made me check it. Lo and behold, whoever went prior to me checking it had dropped a bloody bomb. Not good! It was bright red blood, which fortunately meant it wasn't something lethal, but blood in stool is never something pleasant. I was too slow on the move to see who it was, and frankly, it could have been a one-time fluke. Thus I tried to ignore it, but my gut was telling me otherwise.
By Tuesday morning, the blood had not went away, and I had discovered it was little Apollo. I tried to give it another 24 hours to diminish, but by Wednesday morning, I was making an appointment with my vet.
Picture this: I've been up for 24 hours working on Valentine's Day commissions. I have an appointment for Apollo at 2 pm, the earliest they could get me in. At 1:30, I'm plumb tired, but I scoop Apollo in the crate and drag him out to my car. Some "wonderful" person has commandeered Aaron's spot, and there's a huge snow/ice dune between us, so I slip slide all over that in attempt to not scrape said person's car with the crate while trying to get it into my car. I succeed, plop down into my driver's seat, buckle myself in and...
My car won't start.
I shit you not.
Analyzing the situation, I probably should have known. In early January, I attempted to start my car in -33F weather (Stupid Marietta. Stupid, stupid, stupid.). It tried to turn but wouldn't and I knew pretty instantly that it involved my battery. The next day, it struggled to turn on and my clock was set at 12 AM.
However, ever since that day, my car has not stalled, stuttered or hesitated on starting. It's been fine! I just assumed that it was the cold and the incident was isolated.
Ho boy was I wrong.
So here I am with a screaming (not meowing, not whining, screaming) 6-month-old kitten in my back seat who's, for all intents and purposes, bleeding from his anus, and my car won't start to get us to the vet.
I get out of my car and throw my purse down into the ice dune, screaming at my car. I can see over the other car (tall ice dune, right?), that a neighbor is jumping another neighbor's car. However, instead of being, you know, neighborly and offering me a jump, he just laughs. And not the fatherly, "I'm going to offer to help" kind. It might as well have been, well...
You get my point.
I try to call various people, including my husband, but everyone's too busy to come. Fair enough; I'm asking for a huge favor - I need to get Apollo to the vet ASAP, so I need a ride pretty much right now.
But, as luck would have it, Sara and David were free! Not only did they swoop by to rescue me, but they stuck around until Aaron and I could get a new battery for my car and helped install it! Not that a battery's terribly hard to install, but I've never had to do it on my own before, so it definitely helped with confidence.
Thank you so much, Sara and David. You guys are life-savers!
Apollo, on the other hand, has the IQ of a common household plant. Apparently, he got into something he wasn't supposed to get into and that was the cause of his anal dysfunction. Doesn't surprise me. That kitten learned the worst traits from both of my older ones: how to climb the impossible (Hermes) and how to open the impossible (Zeus). Likely, he got into the trash can cabinet and into the trash.
How do I know? I caught him in there today.
Besides, the rodent will eat literally anything. I've had to pull everything from plastic to Zeus's fur to dish soap from his mouth. Seriously, I accidentally knocked over a bottle of dish soap and he was there before I could blink attempting to lap it up.
Dumb as bricks.
So that cost me, of course, and summed up my Wednesday.
But wait! There's more!
I don't have nearly as elaborate stories for the rest of the week, but suffice to say it wasn't good. Aaron worked until nearly 8 pm on Thursday because of a program malfunction at his job. And Hermes started wheezing with his tongue out on Friday morning, which is pretty much an insta-vet-visit. When cats wheeze with their tongue out, that indicates something is obstructing the breathing passage. It more or less means they're suffocating. Granted, it was for less-than-one-minute spurts, but I didn't want to find out what would happen if it lasted longer than that. So I took him in. They hospitalized him for a day and did blood work, and now he's on medication too.
There honestly hasn't been a moment in this household since December that one of the pets has not been on some form of medication. Between Zeus's UTI, Artie's stomach thing, Zeus's tooth surgery, Apollo's bleeding rear and Hermes's wheeze, it's been an active 30 days. Every time I leave the vet, the desk nurses tell me they sincerely hope not to see me until our yearly. I hope, at this point, that everything's over.
I'd say I feel like a giant hypochondriac for my pets, but everything I've taken them in for has been a legitimate issue that has ended up in either hospitalization, surgery, medication or some combination of the set. And no single one symptom can be traced back to one common factor. Zeus's UTI? That cat's a stress ball, and it was left over from December. Artie's stomach thing? Lamb fat's too rich for him suddenly. Apollo's rear? Cat climbs and gets into everything. Zeus's tooth? Apparently there was always something wrong with it; it was a ticking time bomb. Hermes's wheezing? Bronchial infection.
I guess what I can be thankful for is my fantastic intuition when it comes to it. I spotted Zeus's UTI, Apollo's symptoms and Hermes's wheezing very early on. Artie's stomach thing was a bit of an off-on fluke and Zeus's tooth almost had to break for me to notice what was going on, but everything else? I was told repeatedly that I'm very observant of my pets and that their ailments were in the "very early stages - barely noticeable really unless you knew what to look for."
I know my babies.
That being said, I'm so ridiculously far behind on February's goals that I almost feel like merging them with March and calling this month off. I'm exhausted. Notice the immense amount of italics up there? That's how exhausted I am. Between everything that happened this week, and being worn out from my cold still, trying to work has been like pulling teeth. I ended up having to ask for some deadline extensions (which I loathe doing, and only did so to repeat customers who know my typical output and would be more accepting). It feels terribly unprofessional, but I tried to sort out something I could do to lower my stress this week and that was pretty much the only solution.
So with that, I've been up all night working on commissions and I need some sleep before I start up again today. I hope you all have a fantastic Sunday. Here's hoping this upcoming week is better!
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