Clueless Christmas

It's been a frantic, busy period. Days at work are long and hard right now.
I've volunteered most of my free time away wrapping books at the local Big
Chain Bookstore, earning donations for the cat shelter I give time to.
Christmas has once again failed to take care of itself, leaving me in my
usual last-minute frenzy of desperation. The Prof leaves for California
tomorrow afternoon, and won't be back until late next week. I'll be
spending Christmas with my younger sister's new fianc�s family whom I've
never met before, and who apparently are very, very Catholic. (I'm very,
very nonreligious/unreligious/irreligious.) The Prof often refers to this
period of the year as "Jingle Hell". He has a point.

Last month, as my handful of steady readers will recall, I took Clueless
Wonder for his regular annual veterinary check-up. I had recently
discovered fleas on the other three cats, and since Clueless has heart and
kidney problems, I wanted to get some bloodwork done to make sure that he
didn't have any problems. Everything looked good on him, except that his
creatinine was up a bit, meaning his kidneys were perhaps a little worse
than they had been this time last year.

Shortly after that last visit, George started refusing to eat. Over the
course of the next three weeks he lost about three-quarters of a pound.
This is not a good thing. It's bad for any animal to lose weight rapidly,
but in cats (an ponies) rapid weight loss can damage the liver. I tried
everything I could think of to get him to eat, but finally ended up bringing
him back to the vet on Monday of this week.

Several sets of blood work, one ultra-sound, an x-ray, and a set of biopsies
later, and it turns out that Clueless has an infected pancreas. He's still
in the hospital, on IV fluids and antibiotics, and once we get him
stabilized enough, he'll have to undergo surgery to obtain a pancreas biopsy
and confirm the diagnosis, as well as clean out some of the damaged tissue.
He'll be hospitalized through Christmas, with the surgery tentatively
scheduled for Monday if we can get him stabilized enough. Meanwhile, he
gets a central venous line tonight, so we can get plenty of fluids into him.

I have no idea how I'm going to pay for all this, and I don't care. Tonight
I'll go through my jewelry box and see what I have that can be sold. That
might cover half of this or so. The vet clinic gave me the number of a
financing company that creates credit accounts for this sort of thing, but
they charge 22.98% interest annually. My credit card can do better than
that. I'll look into getting a second job come the New Year. That should
help too.