I was just minding my own business and casually browsing around on amazon.com and ran across this.

I really don’t know what to say other than this, for some reason, absolutely freaks me out.

Since you’ve already read about what happened…now it’s time to show you the pictures.

Here is the irritated little girl with her swollen lip, after returning from the vet.

The bottom lip is visibly red and puffy, both from the surgery and the wire pin that is right there inside her mouth.

Here is a shot of the exterior of the staple that is holding the bones together. I am not able to show a picture of the inside of her mouth - cat owners will probably understand why - but it looks like the same wire used for braces, just without the braces part.

This day has been rough so far, and I’m hoping that it improves quickly.

Starting in the wee hours of the night, I dealt with feline frustration at having no food in their bowl. This was because Siobhan was scheduled for her dental cleaning this morning and was not allowed to eat any food after 8pm the prior night.

Well if Siobhan can’t eat, the boys can’t either, because I really don’t have a good way to separate them at the food area. So back and forth they wandered across my belly, trying desperately to get me to wake up and give them food at 2am. Then Siobhan started pulling at a plastic bag with her nails, creating that annoying crinkly plastic sound that is oh so enjoyable at 3:13am.

David finally crawled in bed around 4am, because he made the mistake of drinking a huge cup of iced coffee around 10pm and couldn’t get to sleep.

As we approached 6am, Lasher decided it was time to get more aggressive, so he walked back and forth up to my face and swatting his tail into my nose. I pushed him away over and over again, but realistically I was not going to get much sleep.

I woke up around 7:30am, showered, and got the carrier ready to take Siobhan out to a vet in North Highlands, which was recommended by Banfield, because their have a cardiologist on staff. Due to her heart issues, I needed to find a place that could use the appropriate anesthesia that would be easy on the heart. Originally, I had gone to UC Davis, but had a very negative experience there and decided not to go back.

So…we’re in the car heading north when Sio starts making the sounds she makes when she’s got to use the bathroom. I had prepared for this eventuality - she did this the last time she rode in the car, so I pulled over to the side, wiped up the carrier, and replaced the little towel with a fresh one.

Unfortunately, when I got back into the car, I discovered that none of the buttons on the driver door were functioning. I could not raise or lower the windows (the two back windows were down about 3 inches), could adjust either mirror, and could not lock or unlock the doors. Even as I pulled back onto the street, my driver door did not auto-lock like the others did. I even tried to use the window button on the door behind me, but the window would not move. A complete electrical failure of the door systems. This car is cursed.

Great. Just yesterday I had noticed that the outdoor temperature display in the car had gone on the fritz. It either displayed —, or -40F. Obviously, in the Sacramento summer it’s not -40F. Something was wrong, but I could have dealt with a faulty temperature gauge, not with a much larger electrical problem. I tried to run the a/c, but apparently it felt that if the temperature outside was -40F, regardless of whether I had the a/c button on, it needed to put out hot hair. Lovely.

Off we went to the vet and I dropped Sio off for her dental, which she desperately needed ($650 that I wouldn’t have had to pay if Banfield had a cardiologist), and made my way down to the Volvo dealer, having called them ahead of time to tell them I was on the way.

Thankfully, the dealer found a loaner vehicle for me, and I was able to get back home and back to work.

So a cat’s at the shop and my car’s at the shop. Let’s hope that both come back better than new :-).

Update as of 2:08pm: The doctor found some type of crack in Siobhan’s lower jaw, while she was under anesthesia, and he will be putting a wire around two teeth to pull them closer together to help fuse the crack. He has no idea what caused it or where it might have come from, but said it should be ok within 4-6 weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, Siobhan went in for a routine comprehensive exam, and the doctor discovered a heart murmur during the checkup. I had planned for her to get a teeth cleaning the same day, but with the possibility of a heart murmur, they did not want to use any anesthesia on her until they knew exactly what was going on.

So a few days later, we went back to the vet for an ultrasound of the heart, and low and behold - heart disease (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) and a grade 3 heart murmur (on a scale of 1-6). If you’re not familiar with this medical issue, it’s when the valves do not close completely and blood washes backward in the heart. It can cause significant medical issues, and eventually death.

When I was growing up, our dog Jini had a very severe heart murmur, but she lived for 14 years without many problems at all - so it’s not as if a murmur in and of itself is an immediate death sentence, however, it’s something that can be managed.

We immediately put Siobhan on heart medication, which slows down the heart and hopefully minimizes or prevents the backwash caused by a murmur. She will also have to undergo ultrasounds every 6 months so that the doctor can measure the heart muscle for any thickening.

Today we went back in for a checkup, since she’s been on the medication for a week - it went very well. The heart rate, even though she was nervous, was well within normal for this medication (100-150), and the doctor could not hear any sign of the murmur. That doesn’t mean everything is fixed, it just means that the medication is thankfully doing its job.

The main side effect we’ve noticed is that for the first couple of days on the medicine, she ran a bit of a fever, and was very lethargic - a normal reaction to a shot or medication. After a couple days of that, she is mostly back to normal, with just a bit of lethargy still present. It will take some adapting to this, since we’re used to her jumping through the air after things, swatting at Lasher during playtime, and tearing around the house knocking things over. The latter item we could do without :-).

I’ll be posting progress as we know more, but for now it’s wait-and-see until the next ultrasound, and hopefully the disease is slowing to a crawl.

Today’s Daily Snippet

Incident Type: Traffic Hazard - Loose Animal
Location: SB BIRD LANDING RD JSO 113
info as of: 2/13/2007 8:21:04 AM

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

7:33AM RP ADV HER EMPLOYEE WHO WAS DRIVING TK CONTINUED, DID NOT SEE WHERE COW LANDED
7:31AM UNK IF COW IN RWY
7:31AM RED 3 AXLE WORK TK VS COW
7:31AM LEFT TURN AT STOP SIGN TOWARDS COLLINSVILLE 2-3 MILES ON CURVE TOWARDS JERICO

Don’t you just love how it sounds like a Mortal Kombat event. Truck vs. Cow. Choose Your Destiny! Animality! Truck WINS! Waaaa ha ha ha ha!

Apparently the truck driver hit the cow so hard it flew and landed somewhere outside their field of vision. Who hits an animal on the road and doesn’t stop to see if it’s ok??

I remember one evening in college, I was driving home from work, and at the time, I lived about 10 minutes away, down a long dark highway…THUMP THUMP!

What the hell was that? Turns out it was a rabbit…I could have cared less about any damage to the car, I was just sick that I’d hit something and probably killed it. Unfortunately, it was so dark that I could not see into the ditch areas to see if the animal was there. There wasn’t any evidence on the highway, other than what I had seen as it ran in front of the car.

A cow is a bit different. I would venture to say that if you hit a cow, there’s going to be significant damage to your vehicle, and there’s no way you could “lose” the cow in the process. There will be plenty of evidence, and likely the cow hasn’t gone very far, given the fact that most of them weigh enough to not remain airbourn long.

I’m the kind of person who saves drowning worms in a rainstorm…call me crazy (and you probably just did), but if I hit something, I’m sure as heck gonna stop and do something about it.

BEIJING - Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in eastern China — and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a 4-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported Wednesday.

[...]

A court ruled the boy’s screaming was “the only unexpected abnormal sound” and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear. [Link]

Wow…443 chickens. That’s a lot of chickens. A heck of a lot of chickens.

I simply can not imagine the trauma they must have gone through with all that screaming going on.

I know that if a 4 year old boy was screaming at me for a prolonged period of time, there would be at least one death.