Adventures at the Vet

The past couple days have been doozies. Yesterday's big activity was taking the cats to the vet to be spayed and neutered. Glenda came with me. We took the cats into the vet's office, and there was a little dog there (with ears dyed blue, of course) wandering around. The cats, who were already nervous, were not thrilled. We carried Pepper in a top-loading cat carrier (i.e. picnic basket) that Glenda lent me. Chili was in a more familiar model with a door that opened on the front, so she was a bit harder to get out. The vet asked me to pull her out. It was difficult to oblige as I tried to shoo the dog away with one hand and pry a terrified Chili out with the other. We weighed Chili and took her over to the exam table for a sedative shot. Cue Chili yowling loudly and springing off the table in terror. It is not until this point that the vet finally realized he should put the dog into its crate. Chili went back into her carrier to wait until the sedative kicked in. Glenda and I left with heavy hearts.

In the parking lot, I got a phone call from Keegan, whose ship was just off the coast where he could get some cell phone reception. I was distracted and worried about the cats and about being rude to Glenda.

Glenda and I decided to try a new Turkish restaurant for lunch. She had a lamb wrap, and they made me a special vegetarian shish-kebab with falafel instead of meat. It was good but a little spicy. After lunch, we wandered around a bit doing some shopping. One of our stops was the market, where we found, to our horror, a new item for sale: giant, squirming, caterpillar-like grubs in a bin of sawdust. Blearghh!

In the afternoon, we met Joy and Kayoko for coffee at the Pompeii coffeeshop, which is a really great new place that we've started hanging out. Kayoko and I had enormous pots of peppermint tea, Joy had coffee, and Glenda had a beautiful hot chocolate. We shared a huge waffle with ice cream. I really enjoyed our conversation. Kayoko has been helping us plan our trip to Japan, so we talked a bit about that, but also a lot about current events and some about how there are a lot of really scary poisionous snakes in Wyoming (where Glenda is from).

Finally, it was time to collect the kittens. They were both wearing those horrible plastic space-cat collars and were absolutely miserable about it. Pepper struggled manfully against his all the way home. When we got there, he leapt out of his carrier, took a long break at the litterbox, and then stalked around searching for food. Chili was a little slower to emerge and clearly felt much, much worse. I was a total basket case worrying about the two of them and worrying about taking them back to the vet today for "after care." Glenda kept me company, helped me keep Pepper entertained by things other than licking his wound, and offered to take Pepper home with her to enjoy playing with her cats and so he wouldn't bother Chili. I took her up on it. Following was a night with very little sleep, during which I woke up every time Chili did and followed her like a madwoman making sure she was ok. She was.

Today I spent the morning being a basket case and watching the set-up for the annual Doekpo Beach Penguin Swim, where a bunch of crazy people go swimming in the icy ocean. I couldn't believe how long some of them stayed in the water! Today there was a particularly cold wind, too. I talked to Mom and Dad on the phone and on Skype and agonized over whether it would be worth further trauma to take the kittens back to the vet. I took them, and it wasn't so bad. The dog was safely stowed, the kittens both got antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and their wounds cleaned, and we were in and out quickly.

The afternoon was long and relaxed. Chili and I are bonding while she lies around sick and miserable. I am worried that she hasn't been eating much. She has eaten a few meager bites of food off of my finger, but not much more. I wish I could ask her how she feels. And I wish Keegan wasn't gone, so he could tell me not to worry, like he always does.