Oh Dave, thank you...I know my sister could certainly use some prayers. She's acting as though none of this is bothering her, but it's easy to tell that she's worried. She's very distracted and a bit too unconcerned. I think other than waiting for the biopsy results, this will be the hardest...waiting for the procedure to be done and to find out if this was caught early.
Yofi too can always use prayers; this infection thing has been going on for so long. While it's healing wonderfully right now, I still have two fears. First, once he's cleared and no longer has to wear his cone, I'm afraid he might tear at the area again (I'm considering Susan's idea, once his cone comes off...to dress The Boy in little boy bunny clothing to keep it covered up (won't he be thrilled with that!). And I'm also afraid that the darned infection might just come back on its own. Only time will tell.
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Today was a particularly not-so-great day for me, I think. This morning started off with me running a bit late for work. I had to bathe Yofi's face and apply more drops to his eyes (have been treating him with a mild boric acid solution and some 'Clear Eyes' drops, and he has shown signs of improvement...knock on a wooden rabbit hutch), and had to remove his cone and scrub that clean. That darned Cone of Silence has to be removed and cleaned twice a day, because Yofi tends to get the rim full of those wonderfully mushy, smelly yummy bunny poops. Some days it's not so bad, while others...you'd swear he had purposefully ground them in, somehow spinning The Cone in the process so the entire edge gets decorated. This morning the coating was pretty average, but still took a while to clean; after all, those bunny poops are, I swear, engineered to adhere to any surface, forever, once dry. Then after Yofi maintenance it was on to the dogs, going for a walk, feeding them, cleaning up after them, shushing Izzy for barking, shushing Kaya for barking, shushing the two of them together, and finally booting their noisy rear ends out to the backyard. Then it was back to the rabbit room again, this time to clean dirtied dishes and refresh hay, water, and veggies. And finally it was my turn to get ready for work, then run for the bus to catch it.
I got almost halfway to work - almost to the place where I get off the bus, duck into Tim Horton's to pick up my once-a-day coffee habit, and catch the next bus...when traffic suddenly came to a halt. There were sirens blaring and red lights flashing, and when I craned my neck and looked out the window I could see part of what was a collision, right in the middle of the intersection. Nothing new for Ottawa...the drivers here are sometimes insane, running red lights, trying to run down pedestrians, shaking fists and screaming obscenities, all to get that extra half a minute ahead of the next guy. It looked like there were no major injuries at this one (though I'm still grateful not to have been one of the poor people it happened to!), but the intersection was hopelessly loggerheaded. I was just about to get up and leave the bus, since it was only about a 3 minute walk away from the Tim Horton's anyway, when the driver was instructed by the police to take a detour. And what a detour he took. He went down every side street he could find, maneuvered and manipulated that extra-long poor folks' stretch limo around tight turns and parked cars, and just kept driving, and driving, and driving. Finally he looped around and got back onto the main road, only now he was about a 10-minute walk away from my point of destination, the coffee shop. I began to panic...what do I do? Do I stay on the bus and go to work, sans Tim Horton's best in hand? Could I function all day without that wonderful brew in front of me, waiting to be savoured? NO Tim Horton's coffee? All day?? I couldn't do it. So I jumped off the bus (yes, waited until he stopped first) and ran the few blocks back to Timmies. Ordered coffee, ran a few blocks back up the road again (since they were diverting traffic, the buses would be skipping the stops in that area), and finally caught another bus and made it to work. Late, but I'd arrived. Then I sat down at the computer and started my work day.
Around 9:30 one of my coworkers came in to ask if my email was working. "Sure", I said, "I sent out three emails already this morning...they went out fine" and I showed her the messages in my Sent box.
"That's odd," she said, "Everyone else can't even log into their email". Huh, I thought; for once something electronic is working for me, while everyone else is having the issue. Weird, but hey, at least mine's up and running.
At 10:00 an editor came in and handed me a couple of papers, asking me to perform a web check on them (check the paper for any errors in the 'back' section of our website, before approving it to be posted live). I had a ton of work to catch up on, a huge stack of papers sitting beside me to check, as well as a stack of papers to be sent out to a contract company for 'premarking', but I thought that I might be able to squeeze them in if I worked very quickly. So I took them, and 5 minutes later opened Internet Explorer to sign in to our site. Half an hour later I was still sitting there waiting for the sign-in to go through. ARGH! Anyway, long story short, we wound up having problems off and on all day with internet connection, email (turns out all of the messages that I sent, didn't go...so much for being the only one with a working Outlook), and programs crashing. I worked on one very math-heavy LaTeX paper (tons of work converting that to Word, cleanup involved takes forever) for about 3 hours, and then Word and MS Office crashed completely, and I don't think any of my saved work got saved. Finally the end of the work day came, and I rushed off to catch an early bus to get home. Just enough time, I calculated, to arrive, let the dogs out, scrub Yofi's Cone, and get him and Kaya ready for our pet taxi pickup to the vet. I might even have 5 minutes to spare, just to sit down and relax.
It was not to be. I walked into the house, took off my coat and then went to the bedroom. Opened the door, and was almost knocked over by the overwhelming smell. Diarrhea. Dog diarrhea. Izzy. :X
The little rotter had somehow, in the course of the day, managed to pull some of the blanket that covers his crate into it, where he went to work redecorating the fringes. Tattered bits of blanket (oh, and tattered bits of a jacket sleeve that was next to the crate) were tugged through the bars, some parts consumed, some eaten and then - obviously not to his taste - spit out again. The odd thing though, was that I couldn't see any doggie doo-doo in the crate, even though the smell was rank enough to make a skunk recoil in horror. I opened the crate tentatively, pulled Izzy out, checked him over (not a drop of anything was on him) and then shoved both him and Kaya into the backyard while I performed a closer inspection. It didn't take long for me to find ground zero. Pulling the crate away from the wall, I saw it: diarrhea sprayed over an entire wall behind it, rungs of the crate close to the floor dripping with it, and an oozing, fetid puddle of it squished beneath the crate's tray. What a bleepity-bleep-bleeping mess! Obviously I couldn't leave it that way until coming back from the vets, as the smell would probably have melted the walls had it remained there much longer, but I also was going to have to put Izzy back in the crate before leaving anyway. So I shovelled, mopped, and scoured with lightning speed (and in the midst of this discovered that I was almost out of paper towels) to get everything clean and tidy(ish). I still had Yofi to do yet, and the pet taxi man would be arriving shortly. Then, just as I was cleaning up the last of it all, Izzy came running back into the bedroom, ball in mouth, tail wagging furiously. I looked over at him and said, "Do you SEE what you did here?!?" He looked back at me, dropped the ball, opened his mouth and spewed vomit. All over the carpet. Alllll over the carpet. AARRRGGGHHH!!! Back again to mop, bucket. cleanser, air freshener, you name it. Scurried and scrubbed like there was no tomorrow. Tossed everything in a bucket, cleaned myself up, then ran to get Yofi, hoping his Cone would be good enough to go. But nope...The Boy had once again decorated it with a ring around the collar of goo. So - ran into the bathroom with cone, scrubbed, wiped, cleaned, ran back out and saw the pet taxi guy waiting patiently in the driveway. Grabbed Yofi, put him in a carrier, grabbed Kaya, leashed her, grabbed purse, coat, prayed that Izzy would be okay, and ran out the door.
On the way to the vets the traffic was horrendous. There has been construction going on in the west end of the city since probably mid-1965, and tonight the congestion of cars was terrible. The normally 20 minute drive took closer to 40 minutes, and at one point the cab driver, trying to pull into a sidestreet that led to the main thoroughfare the clinic was on, took a chance and stepped on the gas, as no one had been willing to let him go. He managed to get through all right, but the sharp turn toppled poor Yofi's carrier, and The Boy got a bit shaken and stirred. I don't know how he did it, but it was like the carrier tumbled on its own, while Yofi sat motionless with it moving around him. He never toppled over himself, simply sat there upright the entire time. I'm still not sure how he defied the law of gravity like that...maybe there's a Law of Yofi that supersedes all others. At any rate, he wasn't hurt; just mad.
So we got into the clinic and the vet (not Yofi's regular vet...but the visit was simply to remove stitches anyway) looked at Yof while I filled her in on his latest *flareups* - eyes turning red and inflamed, ears dried out and red. The ear problem was cleared up easily with a few applications of Bag Balm, and his eyes were actually looking better...but I wanted her to look at them anyway, as he may have needed a topical antibiotic. The vet technician keep oohing and aahhing over Yofi, but he was having none of the flattery this time. He was SO beyond upset at this point. So when the technician went to get Yofi out of his carrier he somehow latched onto the floor with all four feet and would. not. budge. She smiled and said, 'Oh, I don't think he wants to come out' (I thought, 'Oh, really???' lol) and then she grabbed his backside to try and pull him out. Uh oh, I mused, he is definitely not going to like this...and I was right. As soon as the technician began to pull, he grabbed the blanket that was in the carrier and attacked it. Impressive grunts and snorts flew through the air like some sort of lagomorphic profanity. He raged and roared, blanket bearing the brunt of his wrath, while the vet tech commented, 'I think your bunny is a bit upset'. Upset?? I thought. He's downright FURIOUS! For a few moments there it was almost like a scene right out of Jurassic Park, where you don't quite see the velociraptor, but you can feel the crate it's in as it shakes and vibrates, and you can hear those beastly screams coming from within. In the end The Boy did emerge, eyes wild, body tensed, but no longer acting quite like something otherworldly. I do admit though, I was half expecting to see his head start spinning around, spewing pea soup as it did, as he was being excavated from the cage.
Once out, Yofi did calm down. They removed The Cone (obviously NOT The Cone of Silence at this point), checked his owwie, looked briefly at his eyes, and then decided to take him into the back room to examine him further. The reason for the vet visit was to remove the stitches that were put in place after the biopsy was done, and so they were going to do that while he was back there too. I sat back with Kaya and waited as they walked away with My Boy, wondering how well the entire process would go.
Ten minutes later they returned. The vet looked a bit perplexed. "You know," she said, "He doesn't have any stitches to remove". Huh? No stitches? "But I saw at least one stitch on him a couple of days ago", I responded. "Well", she said, "there's none there now". So I took a quick look at the area, and I could no longer see anything except for the scab that had formed not long after he had come home. Yof, I thought to him, What the heck...where did your stitches go? But he wasn't answering me. He wasn't talking to anybody.
"He looks good," this vet said, "and we took pictures of his eyes for his vet to see when he comes in tomorrow. But it looks like he just has a case of conjunctivitis. It should clear up quickly." The technician, who was now standing a bit further away, added, "Oh, and he's quite the character". I was going to ask her what she meant by that...what was Yofi doing in the back examining room? But I held my tongue, noticing that the poor girl was looking a bit more ashen than she had before she'd left with him.
Then the vet tech said, "Time to go back in your cage, mister" and attempted to stuff 12 lbs of Yofi through that small carrier door. She was in such a hurry that she'd even forgotten to put his cone back on his head, which sort of answered my question about what 'quite the character' must have meant. And of course inserting a Yofi into a carrier is as decidedly hard as extracting a Yofi can be, so the struggle once again began. And once again, in the end Yofi relented and went in, but not before throwing in a grunted bunny cuss or two first.
At last we were ready to leave. Almost. I had to sit in the front and wait for the bill and pick up some ointment for Yofi's red eye. So we sat for about 10 minutes, and just as we were being called to the counter the vet came running out of the exam room toward me. Uh oh, I once again thought. This can't be good. "Excuse me," she whispered, "but can you bring your rabbit back into the exam room for a minute? We just noticed some blood on the floor and wanted to make sure he's okay".
Blood? On the floor? Now I was confused. Even though The Boy was mad as H-E-double-hockeysticks at everyone, I didn't think he'd actually attacked the vet tech (who at this moment is most likely surfing the 'net for alternate career choices). And his infection had healed, he wasn't exactly leaking from any appendages or anything, so...where did the blood come from??
Turns out The Boy has now developed another condition. He once again has a sore hock. When the vet reached in and turned him around in the carrier to check him over (she didn't dare even attempt to take him out) one glaring red heel flashed out at her as he shifted his weight and tried to go in the opposite direction. Oh, cripes. How on EARTH did Yofi manage to get sore hocks again? He's housed on vet bedding, it's changed every other day, his litter (Woody Pet with Carefresh on top) is scooped daily, and he hasn't been on carpeting in some time. Well, I just sighed and shook my head at this new challenge...I mean, treat the infection, CHECK. Treat the ears that were obsessively licked red and raw, CHECK. Treat the eyes that were weeping and angry red, CHECK. Now this, feet too. So it's treat the feet that power the legs that run the ears that are connected to the eyes that...on and on. High maintenance rabbit? Holy cheese and crackers!
And that was, officially, finally, the end of the vet visit. And the beginning of the end of one very weird day. Oddly, I was watching a show on AMC last night (the season premiere of The Walking Dead) and as I sat and watched this group of people trying desperately not to be eaten by the dripping, soddy, filthy, foul-mouthed undead who lumbered and lurched their way (in herds, no less) toward the still sorta living, I thought, boy...these guys have it bad...I'm glad I'm not one of them....
As Bill Cosby used to say, Never Challenge Worse. :expressionless
