Today I took my lunch break at the vet’s office, this time with Mama Cass, who is going to have her baby making factory closed, posthaste.  Right now, I’m waiting for Dr. Jim to call me and let me know if her blood tests come back negative for Scary Cat Diseases. He told me that he will suggest putting her down if they’re positive (Mama is feral, will never be an inside cat, and would only spread these Scary Cat Diseases around the ‘hood). I don’t know if he realized how unprepared I was to hear him say that, but I’m due for a bit of reality in Heather’s Wild Kingdom, I suppose.

Update

Mama Cass is negative for any Scary Cat Diseases, out of surgery and everything went fine. She’s spending the night at the vet so that tomorrow we can release her back into the wild.

I’m burnt out.

On top of life, the last few weeks have been exceptionally stressful at work – I live by deadlines and sometimes, there are honestly just too many to manage well but I’m me, so I refuse to admit that and simply do more, longer. Until, well, until it’s as though I can smell the brain cells burning, like hair caught in the business end of a blow dryer.

I’m tired. Like, the kind of tired that they’d lock you up for back in the day, in a yellow wallpapered room and watch from a safe distance as you started to form meaningful relationships with the images you saw in it. I’m arguing with the wallpaper, people.

All I want to do is sleep but even sleep is an exercise in frustration. Night sweats. Bad dreams.  I worry about the as yet unsaved kitten factor living in my yard, my own sick cat who, out of sheer stubbornness, refuses to get well, my job that I’m falling behind on and this enormous personal crisis I’m having that we can’t even go into right now.  Sometimes it feels like someone is standing on my chest and I think maybe if I just go back to bed, it won’t feel as heavy.  And in the midst of it, my husband, a man who doesn’t actually ever clean anything but manages to constantly place our crap into tidy, right-angled arrangements and call it cleaning, erupted in fury that I’d let the utility room get messy. I can’t even breathe and he’s mad that he can smell cat food.

I stood there, bouncing a sick kitten on my hip, suddenly thinking about tensile strength and would it actually show if I just broke inside?

He was sorry, brought home flowers. I cleaned and daydreamed about taking a nap.

Also, I promise to start writing about things not related to rescuing dying kittens again. Very soon. Like, probably tomorrow.

Yesterday afternoon, Vera moved out.

Midge capital-h-hated her (even their briefest interaction was tense and awful) and though Hal largely ignored her, his inability to get over this illness (back to the vet yesterday; Dr. Jim doesn’t suspect anything sinister) had all the earmarks of stress and well, my mother-in-law met Vera on Saturday and fell, as one does, in love with the little ball of fluff.

“I can’t think of a better home,” I said to the Dork Lord, as much as to myself. “I mean, if anyone’s going to treat her like a tiny, furry person, your mom will.”

“She will treat her like a princess.”

It was true. And really the best you can hope for, your sweet little rescue going to someone who will love it to the same ridiculous degree you would yourself. Plus, we’ll still get to see her. But do you know how many times I’ve stopped myself from checking in on her in the last 20 hours? THIS MANY.

(Actual number of times I have checked in on her = THIS MANY – 2. I have been so restrained.)

At this moment, Little Gray Kitten (whom we’re tentatively calling Vera B. after her umbilical cord attachment to a certain Vera Bradley tote), is probably lying very, very still because her belly is too fat to move. This, Miss B, is what we refer to as a First World Problem. Welcome to the fray.

To those of you who made donations to help with vet costs, I cannot thank you enough. You’ve made such a nice dent in that emergency vet bill, it’s almost like it never happened. So, thank you – from the bottom of my heart and the strained circumference of Vera B’s belly.

Now that the antibiotic is working and she is eating her weight in smelly cat food every oh, six minutes, I’m working on getting her past the Terrified of Everything phase. Holy cow, she’s timid. To get her used to being handled, I wrap her in a towel and carry her around the house, doing ordinary things, having ordinary loud conversations, and all the while nuzzling her (my god, she’s soft) so she knows that members of the two-legged set are not so horrible. She’s already at the point she nuzzles me back – headbutts me, really – and purrs and cuddles and oh! did you hear that sound? RUN AND HIDE. Last night, I spent 30 minutes trying to coax her out of the interior of the office sleeper sofa. Somehow during our lessons on how to pounce things, she managed to find a wee hole that allowed her to wiggle into the frame of the couch arm. And she was not about to come out. She’d lick stinky food off my fingers and swat at me through the tear in the fabric, as though it were some terrific new game – the game that would never end – and it dawned on me that one, single, solitary pound of kitten can be a gigantic pain in the tush.

This kitten will not be the gettin’ fur on the furniture kind. She will be too busy hiding under it.

Over the weekend, our previous kitten rescue effort, the freakishly fearless Midge, discovered she had the ability to jump. Like, leap small buildings in a single bound jump. In my head, I hear an ACME cartoon boing! every time I see her launch herself on to some new lofty vertical surface. It’s pretty amusing to watch. Well, to most of us. The only one who is not amused in the least by her kangaroo rat skillz is Hal, because now he has exactly zero options about sharing his special gimpy tooth food, his well worn bed and his cool, damp sink. He’s least happy about the sink sharing and makes it no secret that he would prefer she discover someplace else to find totally irresistible.

And Midge, well, she makes it no secret that she doesn’t care what he’d prefer.

Sometimes, I look at that mug and I just want to EAT her. I’m guessing Hal feels similarly inclined.