Crash

I'm procrastinating on a project that's due today. Ugh, ugh. I should be hanging out with Sam, but I just didn't get this project done early in the week, so I lose my day with my baby, even though I'm home and can pop in to visit him while he plays with his babysitter.

Zev, our young kitty, was hit by a car on Monday. I got the call at work -- Adam sounding sick, waiting at the vet for more news. I raced over, steeling myself for the inevitable news, cursing our decision to let him go outside. "He might die from this," the vet said when I got there, "but I don't think he will." That was the first moment of hope. The xray showed blood in his lungs and a broken jaw and he was in shock and in pain. There was nothing we could do by waiting there, so I drove back to work, feeling the horrible sensation of not being in the place where I should be -- Sam with a babysitter, Zev in an exam room, and me dropping the balls I had been juggling so furiously since I went back to work.

Zev's breathing slowly improved as the day went on and they let us take our battered little kitty home with us, just for the night, so that we wouldn't have to transfer him to the hospital. Up every two hours to check on him, I listened to his breathing and tried to curl up on the bathroom floor, but he just turned away, doped up on painkillers and so far removed. "He's here, but he's not here," Adam said.

The next day, he went back to the vet for more IV therapy and antibiotics, and the vet said the next hurdle was getting him to eat. That took another 24 hours, but he did eat with the help of an appetite stimulant (I meant to ask if it was some sort of marijuana extract so that, when he was feeling better, we could joke about the munchies). And then Zev started hissing at the vet techs when they came around, and then he started wailing for more food, and that's when we all decided that our kitty was coming back to us.

And now he's curled up on the bed here next to me, and everything is right again, my family is in one piece, and I can breathe.