My Best Friends

I absolutely LOVE this cat!!! He has the sweetest personality and he's soooooooo smart! I swear, he knows how to talk! He wakes me up almost every morning (if I'm not already up) at 4:00am. If I try to ignore him, he taps me on my chin or licks the tip of my nose. He truly brings me great joy!

What a weekend!

This all started on Friday - September 28th, when we became foster parents to Dexter, an 11-month-old pit bull mix puppy.

We've been progressively introducing him (and his bubbly, over-active personality) to the cats. It's been pretty slow going, but on Friday - 10/5 Dexter met Sassy.

Sassy wasn't too excited about that, but he managed to get away from him... UNTIL Rufus got involved.

Rufus is a doxie, and trained to hunt, and he was not about to give up on Sassy, so I decided to get involved... MISTAKE! Sassy totally SPAZZED! He bit me like 5 times and then CHOMP! On both sides of my right thumb. It hurt so incredibly bad; I literally screamed out when it happened, and immediately dropped Sassy. However, I still had to protect him from Rufus. I had Jesse get me a big towel so I could wrap Sass up like a burrito and take him to the bedroom, where I held him for an hour hoping he would calm down. Eventually, I let him go and he ran under the bed for the night. It's 5 days later, and he's still pretty apprehensive. In the meantime, my thumb blew up and turned bright red (as well as several of the other bites), but I've been bit by a cat before, so I knew to keep an eye on it to make sure I didn't get blood poisoning. We bought epsom salt, so I could soak it, and a brace to keep it from getting banged around, but neither were really taking the pain away. Then, on Saturday - 10/6 I was trying to take a nap, and one of the cats threw up on their blanket on top of my dresser. I didn't want the mess to fall to the floor, so I got up to clean up the mess, and that's when the trouble started... I got really dizzy, so I stopped and hung onto the dresser, but apparently I blacked out for a second and landed on the floor. All I remembered was hearing a cracking sound in my foot. Well, I called for Jesse, for help with the messy blanket that I was now lying next to on the floor, and managed to crawl myself back into bed. I was sore from falling but wasn't concerned until I got up from my nap and had trouble walking on my right foot. Throughout the night the pain got worse and worse, and by 2:00am I was begging Jesse to take me to the hospital. The ER people were not very pleased with me... They couldn't figure out why I didn't go in for the cat bites. I didn't go for the thumb, I went for my foot... I really thought I had broken it, by that point. But, because I have a history of blood clots in my legs they insisted that I have an ultra-sound of my leg, first. (They did find a blood clot by my knee, but that still wasn't my problem.) Then, they finally did several x-rays of my ankle and foot. The results came back negative for a break or fracture, but I severely sprained my right ankle... It is sooooooooooooo painful... From my toes to the ankle hurts! And, because I didn't (and still don't) know why I blacked out, they insisted I needed to be admitted to the hospital. The interesting part of that is that they did not determine what happened to me, other than I was having trouble stabalizing my blood pressure... It would hit rock bottom and then slowly return to normal. So, now I have a brace on my foot, and I'm getting around using a walker (because OT/PT showed me how much easier it is to use over crutches). They released me from the hospital around 1:30 on Monday, and now, I have follow ups with doctors for the cellulitis from the cat bite and the recovery of my ankle, AND... While I was in the hospital they ran some tests (why I do NOT know) that said my kidneys are only working at 33%, so now they're all worked up about that! I'm really ready for this mess to be over, especially since I can't drive myself any where... It's not fun! Any way, that's