Adrienne was taking care of a kitty for some friends. The kitty’s name is Kitty, which is odd because when my brother David was a child, he also had a kitty named Kitty. That’s some kind of coincidence!
So as to prevent cat conflagration, we kept Kitty out of the house, which means he’s been batching it with me in my office, and hanging out in the garage.
The trouble started when he escaped a few nights ago.
He scooted under the deck. I failed to check immediately, and apparently he ran out into the driveway. He comes when Adrienne calls him, so I asked her to. She failed to find him beneath the deck, but found him in the street and picked him up.
She was about to place him back into my office, but she didn’t see our own cat Percy sitting there. When she began to put Kitty down, he figured that she was feeding him to Percy, and he freaked out and bit her very badly.
She came with tears from the pain. We tried to make it bleed more to get any germs out, and put band-aids on it. The next morning, however, it was badly swollen, so we resolved to visit the 5pm drop-in clinic, because it was getting worse instead of better.
They sent her to the emergency room, where she got an intraveinous drip with antibiotics, and some more to take, and we went home.
And it got far worse.
On her follow-up the next afternoon, they admitted her to the hospital, and an orthopedic surgeon inserted some thin tubes to get bacteria-killers down into her fingers, so she was very uncomfortable with a lot of tubes in and out.
Other than childbirth, she’s never been in a hospital, but she got to spend Christmas Eve there for her first visit. Running a high fever and dopey from morphine, she dozed fitfully through the night.
I told her that it wasn’t so much a family Christmas that had turned surreal, but rather that she was having an adventure, and that for her first visit to the hospital, she’d already made arrangements for her daughters to come and visit.
She was starting to feel better, and had finally dropped the fever this morning, but this afternoon when her daughter Layla arrived and we went to see her, she’d had a bad relapse, with raging fever, lots of pain and nausea.
I feel so sorry for her, though I’m grateful that our town has such a nice hospital with skill folk working there. Everyone has been very nice to her.
In the meantime, our traditional Family Christmas Dinner of Chinese Food will be held without her.
Bummer.
Leave a Reply