Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Stressful Week for Keith

I'm here and Keith is in Vegas going back and forth to the hospital. His mom is scared and panicked and combative with the therapists who are trying to give her breathing treatments and drain fluid from her lungs. She had one session of radiation to try and shrink the tumor that is blocking her breathing and then they found that she has a bacteria that lives in people's stomachs but when the body is stressed it flares up and gives you diarrhea and is highly contagious. She is in isolation and everyone has to dress up in a hazmat suit to visit her. He's on his way back to the hospital this morning to go with her to get her lung drained and she is totally freaked out about it, even though they've drained it once before and she doesn't even remember. It's heartbreaking for him and his brothers to see her so frail and sick.

He had to fill out an application for his old job and will have to go through the whole hiring process again. He really liked the new job but after realizing he would have to live out of motel rooms for years while he built up seniority decided that the traveling life just wasn't for him, called his old boss to see if he could come back, and they said he could. They called the main headquarters to see if they could just reinstate him, but no, he has to start all over again. We are hoping that nothing goes wrong there and he won't end up with no job at all. So, right now we feel like we are kind of in limbo.

After a few weeks of Lucy calming down and all the cats going back to normal, she went crazy again last night. I'm at the table eating dinner all nice and peaceful and all of a sudden she went off on Buddy and tore into him, chasing him all over the house biting and scratching, me right behind spraying her with the water bottle. Buddy hid under the covers growling and whining, Pepper hid in the garage, growling and whining, and all the rest of the cats hid under the bed. Keith had told me that if she went nuts again to throw her out of the house, so I opened up the back door, waited until she got curious enough to go outside, and then shut the door. She sat on the back porch and I put a blanket and some food out there, and then she and Pepper tried to kill each other through the glass door, Buddy kept looking out and whining, and finally I just shut the blinds and tried to ignore the fact that she was outside. I heard three separate cat fights out there last night and knew she was tearing into any stray cat that crossed the yard. After a kind of restless night, I went outside to look for her and give her some food and didn't see her anywhere. I'm kind of hoping she has run off and won't be able to find her way back, cruel as that may be. If she does find her way back we are going to have to take her to the pound. I can't deal with a cat that goes off like that and makes all the other cats so upset and scared.

Ugh, what a week this is turning out to be.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awww, I'm so sorry that Lucy can't get along with the other kitties... My mom had a cat once that was out of control and she let the cat out one day and it never came back... she felt bad, but relieved in a way too. ♥

Anonymous said...

Oh, and I'm so glad to hear that Keith can get his old job back, that's so great, hope everything works out okay. ;)