Elizabethan cat

The problem with not blogging for a month is good lord where do you even begin again. I don't have the slightest idea where I even left off. Hold on, let me go check...

Right. So, a month later and Booie is still wearing the collar. Well, for a week or two in there, she wore a black and white striped dog shirt. But that was not ideal as the issue was that one section of her incision, under her armpit, was remaining moist and not healing up properly. The shirt was just exacerbating that problem and making it even harder for the wound to breathe.

She's worn the collar ever since. She's gotten used to it, as much as she could. At one point, after most of the stitches had been removed, a small hole in the incision re-opened and fluid continued to dribble out, which was pretty gross. The vet assured me it was what her body wanted to do, so he allowed the hole to remain open for a week and then he put some little stitches in, which somehow got pulled out within 24 hours (or possibly they just disolved too quickly), so it stayed open another week. The vet said not to worry, it was all part of the process.

Last week he put in two staples. I have high hopes of them coming out this week and the cone coming off. The cat is getting rather greasy, as I'm sure she knows. She needs a bath. And I'm tired of being head butted at 3am by the cone. And I'm no longer laughing at the sound like whisking she makes when she scratches at the plastic cone with her hind leg.

Booie has never been one to appreciate being picked up. I pretty much never picked her up, except on the rare occasion after returning from a trip when I'd grab her and give her a hug and then she'd make a pitiful noise and I'd put her down. I've had to pick her up a bunch lately and have had to negotiate an open wound which I didn't want to touch if I didn't have to (so as not to hurt her). I have developed a technique of wrapping my arms around her and then sliding one underneath her so she's standing on it. This way I don't have to put any undue pressure on her underside. Surprisingly, she has gotten used to being picked up this way and doesn't really resist.

Otherwise, it has been 6 weeks since the surgery and there are no lumps that the vet can feel at this time.

I also turned 33. Jeff took me to Baltimore for an overnight and we saw The Decemberists and they were just as good as the last time we saw them. It was a few days after the election and same as the last time we saw them, they had the audience sing "hear all the bombs fade away" over and over and I don't know why, but that just really gets me, especially this time, when we were so full of new hope.

I haven't spent any quality time in Baltimore since approximately 1994. It's quite charming, actually. There is a good beer bar there called Brewer's Art.