cats

Dorian the kitty-lady returned to a cat-party in her bedroom.

Yesterday, Mrs. Rhodester came home after having spent two weeks in the hospital.

This is not a pleasant experience, as any of you know if you’ve been through it. When I last spent time in a hospital I had my parents hanging out with me, so it’s been a long, LONG while. I think Betty Rubble was my nurse.

Mrs. Rhodester, aka Dorian, has had chronic health problems for years but it all got kind of bad late last year when she collapsed in excruciating pain and I had to rush her to the emergency room at San Francisco General, where we waited with about twenty other people who were also in excruciating pain.

I won’t bore you with the excruciating details, so we’ll just say she had nine hours of surgery where they did stuff, then she had seven months of recuperating from the stuff they did, then she had to go back in two weeks ago to have some of the stuff they did undone. Now she has about another seven months of getting better ahead of her, but hopefully they won’t have to do or undo any more things.

She’s been an absolute trooper through it all. Back in December they ran a tube up her nose that went all the way into her stomach. During this process she just sat there saying, “Is that all you got? Come on bitch, bring it on!” while I gagged a little and saw birds swirling around my head.

They didn’t have to do that this time, but she did have needles sticking out of her. Fortunately they were delivering nice drugs, so I’m not sure she noticed. She was eventually weaned off the needle drugs onto pill drugs, and then they started giving her less of those as she was better able to cope with the pain. She’s still taking the pill drugs but if you could see what they did to her tummy you’d need a few yourself just to walk away from it intact.

Being the helpful husband of 21 years, I’ve been the one recruited to change her dressing now that she’s home, mainly because the cats would just get fur in her wounds. I’m kind of squeamish (as a kid I cut an earthworm in half and had to have therapy) so I’m really not the best candidate for this job but there’s just no-one else to do it.

I had to suck it up and watch the nurse demonstrate it for me, but now that I’ve done it a bunch of times it’s a piece of cake. You could put golf-balls in the holes they made in her and at first I was all dizzy and swimmy when the dressing came off, but now I’m used to it and we talk about what we’re going to have for dinner as I’m changing it all out. After I’m done I make a marinara sauce and slather it over liver.

I’d say that’s progress.

We have some healing to do now that she’s home and, although she’s taking it slow and easy, she’s going to get better and we’re going to go for walks and stuff as soon as she feels up to it. I have yet to tell her about the zipline they installed at the Embarcadero here in San Francisco, but I will once I feel confidant that she’s not going to run down there and hook herself up until she’s ready.

The kitties threw a little party when Dorian came home. They hired a stripper who jumped out of a can of tuna and there was a little mouse-clown that juggled and told jokes for about 15 minutes until they ate it.