Critter Update

 

And to add to the joy of nations* Pav has done a u-turn and decided to finish being on heat after all.  And is dripping thick gooey blood all over the landscape. ** What a good thing she stays in the kitchen at the cottage—on the lino.  And for the moment there is No Rioting at the mews.  For more than merely the sake of the carpets.  Rioting might create excitement.  At the moment while hellhounds are VERY VERY INDEED VERY interested in her rear end, they’ve always been far too interested in her rear end and this interest doesn’t seem to have mutated into anything alarming.  Yet.  There has been no singing in the small hours*** and no manifestations of Mr Hyde from either of my Dr Jekylls.  Nor are Pav and I being followed around town by drooling swains . . . yet.†

The good news is . . . hellhounds have eaten three meals in a row.††  This is a first in some time.†††  Last two days there has been some really epic melting down by the hellgoddess—not that it does any good.‡  It’s still not like three meals in a row means we’re headed back up out of the pit of despond and self-starvation again—the reason this bout has been so appalling is because every time they look they are coming out of it they slide back in again—but I will take what I can get.

The bad news is that I had (maybe) four hours of sleep last night, mainly due to Night Horrors‡‡ but also because Pav took exception to the herd of rhinoceroses trotting up the cul de sac at about seven a.m.‡‡‡ and barked her frelling little head off.  SHUT. UP.  I COULD USE A NICE FURRY HEARTHRUG YOU KNOW.  For someone with ME my adrenals can sure spike it out there, given the (unfortunate) chance.

So . . . we’re waiting for the first lot of lab results.  I took several unpleasant little bags and bottles to the clinic on Monday and ranted at length to one of the two senior vets.  Who listened.§  I was told they should hear something by the end of this week, but I’m resigned to the almost certain fact that this is only the beginning.  After all, we did all this six years ago with the hellhounds.

. . . I was planning to answer some of the comments on the Bad News thread plus respond to some suggestions I’ve had by email but I am so tired I’m not sure how many sentences I have left in me tonight.  Water, which several of you have mentioned:  I’m putting us back on bottled water, although water was about the first thing I thought of six years ago, and bottled water didn’t make any difference then§§, although if it’s a parasite that’s closing the door after the horse has hit the high road.  It still gives me a faint spurious sense that I’m doing something.  Electro/environmental sensitivity:  I’ve thought of that too because I’ve wondered for thirteen years now what relationship that may have with the mutable beast that is ME.§§§  I’m hoping this is something they can see under a microscope.

The vet said they’d test for ‘everything’.  I’m compiling a list and will measure his ‘everything’ with mine after we get these first results.  And then I’ll try to decide what to do next.  I agree that we’re probably looking at specialist diagnosticians here but . . .

. . . I’ll think about it tomorrow.

* * *

* This is one of Peter’s phrases.  As, he says, is the one about you can’t call yourself a gardener unless you like to weed.  I certainly remember first hearing that more or less the moment I moved over here—I’ve told you that his first official fiancé’s gift to me was a pair of secateurs, haven’t I?—and by extension then from Peter.  But I hadn’t realised it originated with Peter.

I spent nearly three hours today weeding.  Yes.  It was good.  Except for the standing on the plants you’re trying to save and the being clawed to pieces by your roses.  As Peter also says, Roses don’t know who their friends are.

** Ah, nature.  What a dratblasted dinglebrained system.  This comes of creating a world in six days instead of taking your time in the planning stages and thinking things through carefully.

*** Except by me.

† Right now is when I REALLY REALLY REALLY don’t want to meet up with Toxic Purulence Dog.  We last saw him the day before Pav started dripping.  Eeep.

†† Pav has eaten a small airplane hangar and a Honda Civic.

††† See this grey hair?

‡ If I threw thunderbolts like Zeus, this entire town would look like the surface of the moon.

‡‡ The kind where if you shut your eyes everybody dies.  Ordinarily I sleep very badly in daylight and it’s a nuisance it gets light so early this time of year but lately I don’t think about turning my reading light off till the sun has taken over outdoors and is leaking through the curtains.^

^ Or the curtain-equivalents, as the case may be, as it is in my bedroom.

‡‡‡ This would be approximately an hour after I got to sleep in the first place.

§ More than one of my animal-oriented friends don’t like my vets, and it’s perfectly true they’ve got some stuff spectacularly wrong.  But they have virtues.  One of them is demonstrated here:  they listen.  There’s no nonsense about they’re the experts and they know best and stop complicating matters by trying to tell them about your individual knowledge about your individual critter^.   They’re also always available.  Their emergency out of office hours phone answering system WORKS as I have way too much occasion to know.  Rowan of the previous generation was accident prone, but her accidents only happened out of office hours and on weekends.  And when you come to the end of the line and need to have someone put down—they come to you so your critter can die at home.  And if this needs to happen on a Sunday afternoon, that’s okay too.

^ My loathing of most standard doctors is leaking through here

§§ I filter our drinking water at the cottage although it’s just one of the basic little charcoal dealies, and it wouldn’t protect us from anything serious.  It’s doing something, because I like the taste better than what comes raw out of the tap.  Peter doesn’t filter the water at the mews but he’s the only one of the five of us who does not have intestinal strangenesses.

§§§ I was nearly the last person I knew to go over to wifi, because I worried about all that extra signal washing around.  But when everyone in your neighbourhood has wifi you’re swimming in the stuff anyway, so you might as well join the fun.