Is it really Friday? Finally? This has been a spectacularly long and worrisome week, and I’m glad it’s pretty much wrapped up.
Saturday, I woke up to find that Rory had another blockage. One of the vets from the 24-hour emergency clinic has a practice about 30 minutes south of me, so I took him there. The plan was that the vet would clear the blockage, then take Rory home with him that night and take him to work at the emergency clinic with him the next day. He cleared the blockage and catheterized him, but he became blocked again. That blockage was cleared, and I was supposed to pick him up Thursday, but he became blocked yet again. Apparently, the crystals in his bladder are so compacted that they’re like concrete. There is also quite a bit of scar tissue in his bladder and urethra. Poor cat. That has to be hellishly painful.
Luckily, one of the vets who works at the emergency clinic also has a cat clinic–in Spencer! She’s got ultrasound equipment at her clinic and will, hopefully, be able to break up the mass of crystals so that they can be passed. Assuming that goes well, he’ll come home on Saturday or Monday to recover. Later, he’ll need to have his urethra widened, so that if more crystals form, they will be able to be passed.
I have no idea what a week’s stay at an emergency clinic is going to cost. I don’t want to know how much it’s going to cost. The mere thought makes me want to throw up.
So, since I’m in denial, I thought I’d engage in some retail therapy. Not a lot of retail therapy, mind you, but a little bit.
When I was in 4th grade, our class read a dramatic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary. It was a bizarre experience, because the story covered only her time in hiding. There was very little explanation for why she was in hiding, or for what happened to her after her family was found. I expect that the powers that be decided that such details were beyond the comprehension of young children (heck, they’re beyond the comprehension of most adults) or that they might give kids nightmares (again, who wouldn’t get nightmares?). The thing that sticks out in my mind is that we were told that concentration camp victims were treated like dogs, and that Anne died a month before her camp was liberated. I remember visualizing people being kept in dog kennels and being fed dog food, and, while that would’ve sucked mightily, I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why people had died from it. Let that be a lesson to those who deal with children to be careful what you tell them.
I read the Scholastic edition of Anne’s diary when I was in 6th grade. By that time, I better understood what had happened during the Holocaust and what it meant to be an inmate in one of the Nazi death camps. I also began to understand why I found Anne’s story so interesting. Obviously, it gave me a window on the Holocaust. The horrors that happened are like stars in the sky–too numerous to comprehend when taken all together. But, looking at those events through the lens of one person’s experience provides a framework to hang everything on. More importantly for me, though, I think my fascination with Anne’s story lay in the realization that one person’s voice can be important; that a single voice can resonate so clearly across time and space
The Nazis could kill millions of people, but they couldn’t stifle the voice of one small girl. That is power.
So, anyway, when I was in high school, my family moved across state. I lost almost all of my childhood books, including my well worn copy of Anne Frank’s diary. I haven’t read it since then, and I thought it was about time to visit my old friend.
red paper boat 