Trauma

My poor kitty cat hurt himself really, really bad.
:(

I don't want to gross anybody out, but I didn't know whether to throw up or cry.

Alejandro is not The Cat That Flips Out. That would be Ella. I dread taking her to the vet because she goes berserker, tries to maul people, and will not let me put her down. Allie just goes "meep" and then everybody laughs at how cute it is that he's so huge and he's such a whiny baby and they pet him.

This time, Allie freaked out. Way worse than I've ever seen a cat freak out. I don't even recognize him.

Everybody in the house has been crying, including Ella, who was very disturbed that we left with Alejandro, came back alone and smelling like The Vet.

He came home covered in poo, bandaged, and wearing a collar that is, as far as I can tell, the reason for the freakout.

Oh, and he's missing two inches of tail. :(

The collar is to keep him from trying to eat his bandage off, so he will heal, and I didn't understand why the vet kept going on and on about how so many owners will take the thing off and then the cat licks the wound and then two weeks of healing turns into a month or more.

I get it now.

This has been the worst day. First he hurts himself, then I see the injury (ackackACK!), then we go to the emergency vet and they shave his tail so we can see the injury more (ackackackackfreakin@#$%@#$@#$@#$!) and send us home with giant horse pills. I don't sleep, then he goes to the vet in the morning and we have to leave him, then we try to work all day, then we come back to the Exorcist.

Oh, and before that? The vet shows me gory amputation pics without warning me.

He's going to be OK. It's just I can't get the poo off of him because he goes berserker, and I can't let him on my furniture because he's got poo on him, and I can't feed him with the collar on and I can't take the collar off, and he keeps bumping into things and getting mad.

By tomorrow or the next day I will either a)have my cat back or b)he will have regressed to infancy and will be sitting in a puddle of his own saliva in a corner staring at the wall. But at least he will heal (I have a pill popper and am apparently still a pro at giving him antibiotics even if he wants to kill anyone who comes near him) and we won't have to worry about him getting any horrid infections in his spinal cord.

And, they gave him good pain meds.

But I think Ella needs her kitty Xanax refilled. And maybe we need some people-strength.

Keep the big guy in your thoughts, will you?

Meg & Me

So Meg Swansen's column in VK this issue is all about brioche stitch in the round and how she had to come up with a way to do it because her mother was told it was impossible.

So she knit a brioche hat in the round for the magazine.

And it's not NEARLY as cool as the brioche hat I knit in the round a month or two ago to play with the reversible brioche decreases I came up with to flat-knit a brioche scarf for a class I was going to teach.

Yes, you heard me, for probably the first and last time in my life as a knitter, my unvention is better than Meg's

Picture forthcoming, if it shows up. If anyone has noticed, spammers have attacked my blog and you can't see it if you enter the URL for the main page directly. Blogger swears they don't notice. Hmm.