I Don't Care If Monday's Blue

You could probably say I’ve had a spell of bad luck. Naturally I’m talking about middle-class employed white girl bad luck, not poverty-stricken Somalian bad luck. That kind of bad luck would involve my last goat being eaten by neighboring dogs and contracting a flesh-eating virus while trying to squeeze the last drop of milk out of my shriveled breast for my crying baby, who’s covered in flies and clinging to the legs of Sally Struthers. So forgive me my self-centered drivel today, because I’d like to start at the beginning and just work my way forward. Maybe I’ll find a pattern. And then I can kill the pattern, preferably by breaking the pattern’s knees.

It started with a combination of bronchitis, sinusitis and laryngitis. Not so bad, really. I mean, I was just choking runny snot down my throat and coughing it back up again for shits and giggles. Breathing is very highly overrated. But then the running snot made a trail of inflamed tissue down my throat, which made a lovely home for my acid reflux. I ended up with actual bleeding lesions on my esophagus that didn’t go away for a week and a half.

The first morning I woke up without a crusty nose and an aching throat, I felt like throwing myself a party. I was healed! I met Kasi for dinner at a small Italian place downtown and ordered the special, the pan-seared salmon. Food was finally tasting like food and I couldn’t have been happier, as sinus infections convert normal food into peanut butter. Cheerios? Tastes like peanut butter. Chicken? Tastes like peanut butter. I might have mentioned on here that I can’t stand peanut butter. Hence, an eleven day stretch of peanut butter flavored everything was about as amusing as rubbing battery acid on my arm. But oh, the delicious salmon! Flaky and seasoned, it was! I especially enjoyed that seasoning when I contracted the stomach flu at 3am and vomited up fish, spinach, bread and diet coke until 5am, when I switched to straight stomach bile for another ten hours. I would have tried to drown myself in the bathtub but I didn’t have a stopper.

Four days later I took The Demonspawn to the vet for some routine shots and a little declawing action, because my sofa is new and I happen to quite like the arms covered in intact, rather than shredded, fabric. But the vet killed Llama (undeniably my favorite) with an overdose of Valium. I was sad.

The next day I went in for a procedure involving a radio transmitter being implanted in my esophagus (by the aliens) and a catheter through my nose. Unfortunately I was one of the .2% of people who react badly to the implantation. When I say badly I mean that stabbing myself in the chest with a fork was a viable option for over five days. Christmas was a blast. Also, I have an insanely high tolerance for Valium.

The day after Christmas my mother drug me to the animal shelter because she needed to adopt a friend for her current cat, Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson used to have a friend named Sherlock but Sherlock got runned over by a reindeer. There was another cat in the house named Cleo who maintained his superior cat-distance for over eight years, refusing to give in to Dr. Watson’s friendly gestures. Then Cleo died of some strange ear-slash-eye-slash-mouth infection but he was eighteen so it’s not like we were surprised. Very long lead in to the fact that my mother was looking for a new kitty friend for Watson and the animal shelter seemed like a good place to start. Save the animals from Certain Death!

She narrowed it down to two sweet ones, one orange and fat and another one small and gray. With Certain Death looming over their heads I decided to take the small gray one, naming her Josephine. She went immediately to the vet for declawing and spaying because I thought if someone was going to kill another one of my cats, they might as well do it before I got all attached. But two days later she started sneezing. Then strange liquid coughs that made her tiny chest heave with effort. I took her to the emergency vet and was told to squirt antibiotics down her throat twice a day. No need to worry, they say. Cats get this all the time.

The Sunday of New Year’s Eve was a no-go. I misread a new bottle of pills, assuming when it said Take With Food it meant that any food was acceptable. What it meant to say was Take With Five Course Meal Or Severe Nausea And Vomiting Will Occur. Also, Attempting To Operate Machinery While Vomiting Can Lead To Messiness. I rang in the new year with re-runs of CSI and a bottle of Pepto.

By Thursday I was kissing Josephine on the nose and tearing up in front of my Kervorkian vet as she sent her off to kitty cat heaven. No need to worry, indeed.

That afternoon I took myself out for a late lunch and early beer. My boss works with a lot of women and recognizes mental instability when it’s crying in front of him. During lunch my right arm started to feel weird, kind of like it was asleep but without the tingle. As the day progressed I became more and more jittery and everything from my eyeballs to my toenails felt like they were stuck in limbo. I wanted my finger to press Channel Up on the remote, but my finger was cranky and slow to respond.

By lunchtime the next day I was miserable. I hadn’t slept a single minute and I was feeling like Michael J. Fox but without Rush Limbaugh to make fun of me. I called my specialist doctor and talked to his nurse, who told me to turn the car around and head to the nearest pharmacy for some Benadryl. Apparently if you don’t act fast these side effects can last for a very long time, as in weeks or months. Fearing the worst I took three times the normal dose and waited for relief. Three hours later I was still wide-eyed and crazy. It took many more Benadryls and many more hours before I felt human again. It was a wicked fun experience, one I’d pay people to never experience again.

I think it would be kind of dryly amusing to end this with a “And I stubbed my fucking toe this morning” but I’m not about to encourage anything else, plus I’d be lying. I want no more dead pets, no more strange pains, no more exhausting stomach viruses and no more alien transmitters in my esophagus. Which is why I spent all day Saturday inside apartment, refusing to even unlock the front door. My big accomplishment for the day was taking a shower and watching John Grisham movies on TNT.

**After rereading this I see no pattern. Obviously I have just pissed somebody off.

I’m not a resolution maker because January 1st is exactly the same as any other day of the year. It just happens to be when some yo-yo way back in the day decided to restart the 12-month calendar. It could be the month of Gilgamesh for all I care; I just like to put on a pretty dress now and then. Make kiss a boy at midnight. Toss back some overly-sweet champagne.

But this year I’ve decided that I’m done. Bad luck is supposed to come in threes, and this shit is getting old. I’d better be getting something really nice for my birthday. Like a hot, gainfully employed man with the ability to form grammatically correct sentences. Or I could win the lottery. I’d be fine with that, too.

Around We Go

Right this very second there’s an abominably fat red-breasted Robin sitting on a dismally gray tree branch directly outside my window. She or he or it, whatever you’d like to call it, has been there for a good ten minutes. We’ve been having a staring contest of sorts, all while I figure out exactly how pathetic and melodramatic I’d like to sound. And I think, or I hope, that we’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really no cover up for my patheticness, but there’s a distinct possibility I could tone down the melodramatic blathering. Our agreement was sealed with a flutter of his tail feathers and the drop of his multicolored poop on my neighbor’s lawn furniture.

Two mornings ago I took my new cat Josephine to the vet for the third time. She’d been coughing and wheezing and these are just not things that cats should do. They should sleep in the sun and curl gently on your lap. Eat tasty morsels of lunch meat that get “accidentally” dropped on the kitchen floor. Shed ridiculous amounts of fur so the cat-mom has a reason to run the vacuum every Saturday. And sometimes on Wednesday, if she’s feeling productive.

But this time was serious. Even I, with a lack a stethoscope, could hear the fluid rattling gently in her lungs with each labored breath. My stomach was in knots during the drive over because this cat had already become my favorite. She liked to cuddle and roll on her back for a nice tummy rub. She liked to crawl on my side while I watched late night television, turning in circles until she found just the right combination of soft belly and hip to make a bed.

You see where this is going, I’m sure. I wouldn't have this dramatic of a lead-in without some terribly sad ending.

The vet drew blood, took x-rays, ran tests. When she called me back to the examination room, she had the kind of look you see on the faces of actors during weekly viewings of ER or Grey’s Anatomy. The look that says I have bad news, but I’m going to take twenty minutes of your time to get to it, not counting commercials.

She explained the blood work, snapped x-ray films up on the wall and flicked off the lights. “See here?” she said. “Nothing but fluid.” My options, Josephine’s options, rather, were slim. She would never get better, not permanently. So it was drugs to combat the pain, or the option for which Dr. Kervorkian is sitting in a jail cell.

“It’s very quick, no pain, only sleep,” she said.

Josephine was brought back into the exam room wrapped in a towel. They’d already sedated her. I gave her a final kiss on the nose and told her I was sorry and I hoped she forgave me. I had no right to play God, but here I was, signing away the life of a living, breathing thing. I told her she’d been the perfect cat, the perfect companion and I was so very, very sorry. So unbelievably sorry.

I cried when they shaved her arm, I cried when they found a vein for the needle, I cried when the hand I’d left resting on her belly no longer rose with her breath.

Calgon Done Took Me Away

Theoretically, my New Years could have been very exciting. I’d purchased a dress, a stunning one actually. New shoes. Pretty jewelry. And then Kasi called me at 8:15am to tell me she’d contracted the dreaded Stomach Death which, as I personally know, involves at least 15 hours of compulsive vomiting and many hours of delicate conversation with your stomach. It’s very easy to misread Stomach. Sometimes he may say that he’d like some jell-o when in fact he wants nothing at all to do with jell-o. Stomach just meant that at some future point in time he’d like jell-o, but definitely not NOW, what the hell were you thinking putting that down your gullet?

And then I went and misread the portion on the back of my new medicine bottle that says, in stern block letters, Take With Food. In my defense, I did take it with food. A small can of mandarin oranges. Because this, my friends, is definitely food. Tasty and delicious food. Not so tasty on the way back up, because they kind of form one giant gloopy mandarin orange that threatens to clog your nasal cavity. Do not pretend you don’t have nose vomit because I know you do. Just accept it and move on.

As such, I was in no mood for an evening of festivities and neither was Kasi. So I spent the Eve watching reruns of CSI (the original Las Vegas one, not the one with the abominably creepy David Caruso) until 4am because they kept showing these To Be Continued episodes. Naturally, I had to make sure that Nick made it out of the glass box alive and that Grissom would somehow incorporate his expansive bug knowledge into the plotline.

In other news, I have named my new kitty Josephine. Not Gidget or Sugar Monkey or even Bobo, as suggested by the Arabian Dumbass. Josephine is sweetness personified. Like pancakes in a cuddly furry form. However, she and her upper respiratory infection are also money personified. Two emergency vet visits = depleted checking account.

If anyone has any money making schemes they’d like to suggest, I’m totally game.

And I’d like to move here. Should anyone know of a way to make money while writing mindless drivel on the internet without the following of dooce, please let me know. I could use a cottage lifestyle in Spain.

Dear Santa: Your elves have shitty valium.

I thought about describing my pill-popping Christmas by going into great detail about my mental disintegration after the vet “accidentally” killed Llama (with valium, no less). I would describe the ever-increasing emotional hysteria, culminating in an office meltdown of epic proportions. Then on to the brief but stern admonishment from my boss regarding throwing sharp projectile objects in spaces that might be occupied by other humans. My story would end when a sympathetic coworker popped open a bottle of valium and force fed three orange pills down my throat, which left me comatose and slightly drooly. After which I was fired for my unsatisfactory conduct.**

But then I realized not everyone finds me amusing. Plus, this is the holiday season, and whether you sing that crazy dradle song or the one about a baby in a poop-filled barn, most deities hate liars, especially blatant ones. And while I definitely cried, okay, sobbed, on the phone with my mother after the vet called with his bad news, I wouldn’t describe my emotional state as unstable. Pissed off would be far more realistic. And maybe just a little sad. Oh, and guilty. See below:

By the time I finally managed to call the vet back, it was late afternoon. I’d spent my morning within the bowels of a hospital eating eggs laced with nuclear matter and reclining under what appeared to be a giant black drum. While it’s inordinately uncomfortable for me to lie perfectly still for any length of time, this was by far the most enjoyable portion of my day. Possibly because I hadn’t been able to eat anything since 9pm the night before and I’m not one of those kids who forget to eat. Forget my keys, maybe. Eating, never. As such, those nuclear eggs were like manna from heaven.

The only moderately cool thing from that whole ordeal was watching the little nuclear bits hang out in my stomach. They kind of resembled very busy microscopic ants with a tendency to stay in a giant dotty cluster. I’m using the word ‘cool’ very loosely, because while it was neat in that ‘look at my innards!’ kind of way, I’ll be the first to admit that I have very irrational semi-fears about things. Mostly they involve aliens, alien babies and bird noises. My greatest fear would have me standing next to a long-armed alien while I birthed his alien spawn from my stomach, all while they communicated via bird noises. So it shouldn’t have come as any great surprise that while watching the little nuclear bits move around in my abdominal cavity, the Crazy part of my brain was all “You know that’s how they breed, don’t you? The eggs are merely a vehicle for their alien spawn. Look at them on the screen- invading every molecule of your body. You’re going to be the Mary for the bug-eyed alien race.”

The non-crazy part of my brain, the one that deals frequently with my overactive and slightly paranoid imagination, responded by sighing in resignation. “You’re going to write about this on the internet, aren’t you? This is not how you get boys to make out with you.”

However, I’m going to blame low blood sugar on the brief (but stunning) coup by Crazy Brain. I’m quite aware that nuclear matter does not equal alien babies and should the previous admission diminish anyone’s desire to make out with me, I’m deeply sorry.

Following my nuclear morning, I was sent to another hospital building for a CAT scan. This wasn’t nearly as amusing as the egg test, mainly because I had to drink a gallon of pink Crystal Light infused with some unidentifiable substance. I was not to drink it too quickly, however, because it would make me nauseated. I nodded my head in acknowledgement when the nurse told me this, then informed her that everything makes me nauseated so this should be wicked exciting.

The scan itself wasn’t anything to write home about, with the exception of whatever drug was injected into the vein in my right arm. After the technician left the room, her voice came over the intercom and told me that I would probably feel like I was wetting myself and that my pelvis would feel abnormally warm. Personally, I feel that this is the sort of information that should be shared before the drug injection. But hey, who’s judging?

Now that I’ve run through my six hours of hospital visiting, you can understand why it took me five and a half hours to return the message left by my vet. I thought it was just a normal update on the declawing and shot-giving for The Demonspawn. Maybe letting me know that they were resting comfortably, ready for pickup after 5pm. Unbeknownst to me, Llama was definitely resting comfortably. In a fucking body bag. He’d died when the nurse had injected the kitty cat valium into his hind leg. Dropped dead right on the table, the vet said. I got to hear about that ‘dropping dead’ part about eight or nine times, which is exactly the mental image you want of your pet. Right next to the one of an ice-encrusted ball of fluff inside the confines of a plastic ziploc bag. Because I’d taken so long to return his call, he said, they’d had to put him in the freezer. To halt decomposition. Again, THANKS FOR THAT MENTAL IMAGE, ASSHOLE.

So I drove across town to pick up Lily, because one pet death was really all I could handle. Had I ingested more than Crystal Light and nuclear eggs that day, I probably would have had the energy to disembowel the vet like I envisioned on my drive over. But hunger and sadness hand rendered me weak, and instead I just held Lily’s furry little body to my chest and cried silently all the way home. Feeling like a horrible cat-mother for sending them off for an unnecessary procedure, just to save my new couch from frenzied clawing. Feeling horrible and heartless for shoving a normally docile Llama into his cat carrier, clawing and hissing all the way. Feeling even guiltier for thinking, over and over, you had to kill my favorite one, didn’t you?


Oh, and before you think I was kidding about the elves making shitty valium, I’m totally not. Tomorrow I promise to tell you how I made contact with the aliens via the radio transmitter implanted in my esophagus. And no, I’m not kidding. At least about the radio transmitter. The alien part is up for interpretation.

** Just so we're clear, I'm not terminated. Nor did I have a hissy fit and throw objects at humans. I did let a tear or twelve slip out when everyone at work stopped by to hug me, and it was all very Terms of Endearment-y.