You've Got to be Kidding Me.

Today we had to rush one of my cats, D, into the vet for an emergency appointment. D has nystagmus, a weird disorder of the eyes which causes her to constantly see the world as shaking back and forth. Most animals with nystagmus can only walk in circles, but D's brain has compensated for it and she's able to run with the best of them. However, she cannot jump. I don't mean this physically; her legs work just fine, she just can't judge distances properly and won't jump up to high locations as cats are generally wont to do and won't jump down once she's gotten to one. She'll climb if she can, though. Anyway. Today D found herself on the wrong side of the baby gate we currently have across the upstairs bathroom. Usually, the gate on that bathroom has holes wide enough for a cat to pass through, but for various reasons we've had to rearrange our gates in the house. So, with D in the bathroom, smacking the gate around and trying unsuccessfully to push herself under it, i decided to come to her rescue. I walked up the stairs and picked her up, and then i had intended to carry her down the stairs to sit on the couch and pet her. However, also probably due to the nystagmus, D does not like to be picked up. She clawed me in the hand and sprang out in the most opportune direction with all the fervor she could muster. Unfortunately, i was facing the stairs when this happened. She went flying down the whole flight of stairs, her back half hitting the bottom step with a terrifying crack and/or thud as her front flopped onto the carpet below. She then took off running for the basement for some reason, speeding down two more partial flights of stairs (we have a tri-level house; our staircases average 7 steps each) before i caught up with her on the bottom, in the basement. Why she rushed down there, i'll never know. I carried her back up to the couch and set her down next to Amanda, who you may recall is a Veterinary Technician. As i did, D let out a horrendous yowl and flopped over, limp. I was looking her in the eye when it happened and i swear they glazed over and went vacant. Panic set in and for a moment, both Amanda and i thought she was dead. We were about to rush her in to the UW Emergency clinic when she suddenly came back and started to act normal again. We watched her for a few minutes and Amanda determined that she'd probably be ok to make the longer trip to our regular vet clinic, which she did, and everything was fine. Amanda took her to work tonight anyway to keep her under observation. But there's nothing funny or entertaining about that story. That's not even the reason i set out to write this tonight - i hadn't actually expected that part of the story to be so long. So here's the TL;DR version of everything i've already said: my cat went to the vet, and it reminded me of another story. Last year, my other young cat, D's sister Seras Victoria, ate a dose of the dog's Rimadyl. In less than a second she ingested just over the lethal dose of Rimadyl for a cat her size. We immediately threw her in the car and drove her over to VES (Veterinary Emergency Services) on Madison's East side because it was closest. $400 later, Seras was ok, except for that we had to monitor her closely for the next month since there was a high probability of kidney failure. While we were in the waiting room at VES, as they were torturing my cat in the back room trying desperately to get her to vomit, my cell phone rang. It was Bill, the placement director for MMI, the school i was on the verge of graduating from. He asked how i was doing and i gave him a synopses of my current state, to which he was vaguely sympathetic but in a purely businesslike way. "So, i hear that you're the outdoorsy type and you like to hunt," he said with all earnestness. How do i respond to that? Slack-jawed, that's how. "What?" "I hear, that you're the outdoorsy type, and you like to hunt." "Did you mean to call Jesse?" i asked. Jesse's outdoorsy. He likes to hunt. He was in my class. Bill asserted that he had not, and in what was probably some kind of breach of a confidentiality agreement of some kind, informed me that Jesse was not eligible for the job and told me why. Not that Jesse wouldn't have told me himself, it just seemed a little unprofessional for Bill to be so forthcoming. "Well, i don't know where you heard that from, because that could not be farther from the truth." Seriously, it couldn't. If i were a type of wildlife, i would be a mushroom. I prefer a cool, dark, enclosed environment where i don't have to move around too much. I work a job where i sit in front of a computer. I'm aspiring to a better job where i sit in front of a computer. In my spare time, i sit in front of a computer. While i paced the waiting room at VES, waiting to find out if my furry little child was even going to survive the rest of the damn day, Bill went on and on talking about how great of a job this would be for me, where i would travel up to Canada during the ass end of winter, wake up and sit on a frozen lake at 4am every day, and film a bunch of guys shooting ducks. Ducks, for the love of god! Ducks! Can you read my screen name over there? The one that says, "Dr. Ducks"?!?! Let's recap all of this: i'm in the waiting room where the closest thing i ever plan to having to a child is probably dying a horrible death, and i am being offered lucrative sums of money to make snuff films of someone killing my namesake. I told him i'd think about it.