my babies

It was a Sunday and we’d made arrangements to visit. A woman walked in just after I did. I couldn’t see her from the room where I was, but I heard her announce quite unselfconsciously to the lab tech that she was here to see her daughter. I listened to her in the next room cooing and coddling her daughter, a cat named Spitfire, who was apparently pretty sick.

My Zap is at the kitty hospital. She’s lost weight, is really jaundiced and is on an IV to flush out her blood. We don’t know yet what else is wrong. This is awful.

They took her off the IV and brought her to us in one of the exam rooms, so I let Isaac come in and see her too. He was just happy to see his buddy, doesn’t really understand where she is. Although, when I told him we had to bring her to the doctor, he did bring her a blanket and try to take her temperature with the ear thermometer.

After about an hour with her, she ate a little. Then we had to leave.

The vet people kept saying the oddest things to me like, “She hasn’t shown any signs of distress,” and “She’s so well behaved!” Huh? Distress isn’t always the one who yowls and tries to scratch your eyes out. Well-behaved?? This is my concern? This will make me feel better?

We are so completely fucked up. This is exactly why I’ve wished for years that I would just collapse in the street when I felt the depression gripping my internal organs, shaking my rib cage like prison bars. The squeaky wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, and the rest of us suffer in silence. Tell ourselves it couldn’t be “that bad” or someone else would surely notice.

My Zappy gets heart palpitations going to the vet on a well-check (literally). I don’t want her in there another night! She curls in on herself and stays like that. How can that kind of stress be good for recovery?

Well-behaved. I could have easily been at some back to school night somewhere = someday, some asshole teacher telling me my boy is “well-behaved” when no one has bothered to check in on what’s going on inside his precious little head, what triggers current trauma may be setting off, what he needs, whether or not he’s crying out.

In my dreams, Zap and Isaac are often interchangeable. At first, I will have to take Zap to school, then it is Isaac. Then, he is sick, but when I open the blanket it is my cat.

Later:
I’m just back from transferring Zap to a specialty clinic that is 45 minutes away. She wasn’t responding to the fluids. An ultrasound in the morning. More to come. I have to go to bed.