Friday morning, I drop my wife off at work and take Tess in to the Ann Arbor Animal Hospital. They do the standard poking & prodding, take blood samples, weigh her, take her temperature (she hates that) and then dose her up with antibiotics, anti-nausea medication, and ‘subcutaneous lactated ringer’ – basically a shot of liquids to help fight dehydration. We’re to keep an eye on her, and if she doesn’t want dinner or breakfast, we’re to bring her in for further testing.

Friday night we cook up some chicken. She doesn’t want any. She does drink some water though. Saturday morning she still doesn’t want any chicken. And while we’re getting showered & dressed to take her in to the vet, she throws up all the water she’s drunk. We hurry her in.

Saturday morning at the vet. Tess gets weighed, gets her temperature taken (she hates that) and is bustled away for X-Rays. The vet comes back and shows us her pictures.

Tess’s intestines are bunched up into a sort of cucumber shape. Swelling is keeping anything from passing out of her stomach into her small intestine. The vet sits us down and tells us about a condition called FIP – Feline Infectious Peritonitis. It’s basically the worst case scenario – an untreatable infection that causes the digestive tract to swell up. She says possibly the worst thing I’ve heard from a vet: “If she’s got this, get another cat.”

We agree to go ahead with further testing. An ultrasound, biopsy, and exploratory surgery will be able to determine if she’s got FIP or if it’s some other sort of blockage. We sign off on the resuscitation agreement (Yes, resuscitate her. No, don’t use ‘extreme’ measures.) in case something goes wrong during the testing. We leave a deposit with the front desk and go home. Worry level is high.

It’s now Saturday afternoon. We get a call from the vet. It looks like some sort of intestinal blockage, and it doesn’t look like FIP. This is good news. We give them the go-ahead for surgery. For those of you who are in the know on medical terminology, the plan is to resect the bowel, remove any necrotic tissue, perform sterile lavage on the abdominal cavity and start a regimen of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory medications.

If you don’t know what that means… well, it’s pretty nasty.

Early Saturday evening. Jeannette is feeling antsy, so she makes plans to meet up with Kevin and Amy. I’m more of an introvert – I’d rather do my worrying in private and not burden my friends with my emotional baggage. That may seem weird to you extroverts – that’s ok, you seem kinda weird to me.

At any rate, early Saturday evening we get a call from the vet. Tess is done with surgery. It’s good news. We caught the situation early enough that there’s no necrotic tissue – basically, even though her intestines were blocked, they’re not dead. They’ve taken biopsies and tissue samples that they’re going to send to the lab to figure out why her digestive system shut down. The possible causes aren’t great – they include things like stomach cancer – but she’s in the recovery stage from the surgery. They’ll keep her in intravenous fluids and nutrients for a day or two, and then they’ll see if she’ll take food and water.

She’ll be staying in the intensive care unit for a couple of days, but we should be able to visit her starting tomorrow.

Thanks to all for your good thoughts!

Honestly, I’ve got very little sympathy for Kerouac – showing up drunk for the show and blabbering on like he does is beyond unprofessional. But I can see why he’d need some insulation between himself and reality here. Every time Buckley opens his mouth and drones on in his smug, condescending voice… Well, if he were alive I’d want to slap him. As it is, I fight the urge to rent a back-hoe, dig him up and turn his blithering skull into a bathroom fixture.

One of the gunmen shouts out, “Hey! The pizza is here!”

The driver gets out of the car. It’s David Hasselhoff, carrying an insulated pizza bag.

The gunman’s jaw drops. “Holy shit! Hey Angie! Knight Rider just delivered our pizzas!”

The driver sighs, “I get that all the time, I just look like him, ok?”

“But you’re driving KITT!”

“No it’s just a Trans-Am. Look, the pizzas are gonna be $175.”

Angie, the leader of the operation, looks out from behind the viewfinder of her camera and frowns. “What are you talking about?”

“Eight large pizzas, two cheese breads, and the $100 fee for delivering to the middle of a freaking containment zone!”

“No, I mean didn’t one of my guys at the checkpoints pay you already?”

The pizza driver looks confused for a moment. He begins to ask “What checkpoints?” but then a wave of zombies topples a stack of burnt out cars across the path that he arrived by. A short, desperate gunfight ensues, but the marksmen have let themselves be distracted by the arrival of David Hasselhoff, and the zombies moving up the channel have gotten too close. Hassehoff and Angie manage to get into the Trans-Am just as the camp is overwhelmed.

“Drive, dammit!”

“They’ve blocked the way I came in!”

“Then head through them and down the hill! We’ve got to let people know that there’s a containment breach!”

Hasselhoff floors the engine, and with a roar the Trans-Am plows through the crowd of zombies, tires squealing and squishing as he wrenches it down the hill. As the car roars away in a spray of undead flesh, the scene fades to black.

Here’s the deal. I’m going to try to post here more often, but no promises. I’ve been doing some server maintenance that had fallen by the wayside, and it kind of kicked off my urge to vent more in public. Y’see, the hosting company got hacked back in January and I needed to reset my login passwords. Then I checked the server logs and found that I had an insecure installation of some gallery software that had become a link farm for spam sites. And some Russian streaming music site had somehow sucked up half my bandwidth.

So obviously I haven’t paid enough attention to this place for far too long. To make up for it, I’ve just gone through and back-linked a whole slew of comics. Read, enjoy, comment on them here. I’ll post other stuff too, I promise.