Black Doggerel

Bournemouth Hospital's on a virus alert and has banned visitors. That puts me at a loose end for the day, and I am very much not reassured to hear that Mum had diarrhoea and was vomiting yesterday.

Sister T had labour pains from Saturday night through to Sunday afternoon, but they didn't become frequent enough to go to hospital and then they stopped. Mum says - I wouldn't know this stuff - that's an awfully long time for false labour pains. No news since yesterday.

Sister E came and took Maisie away yesterday afternoon. Apparently she yowled and crapped in the cat carrier all the way to London, immediately dived behind the cooker on arrival and hasn't come out yet. That's about what I expected. I'll be surprised if E sees her this side of Wednesday, but she really didn't like being on her own and Mum looks like being in hospital at least another two weeks. I still think we did the right thing.

Mum wants me to carry on going to Grimmauld Place every day and tidy. I don't think I'm being unreasonable and selfish refusing to do it for at least the next few days.

Fucking hell, my mother's cat is trying to kill me.

( More whining. More angst. Believe me, I know this is getting tedious. )

just had a call from sister E. she can't take Maisie for another two weeks. She's going away again. How nice for her.


oh fuck.

( If I keep saying that it might become true. Cut for length and excessive whining. )

The good news: It's cooler today.

Mum's gained enough strength from the electrolyte drip to start being irritating. That has to be good news, doesn't it?

She woke me up this morning phoning from the hospital. She wanted me to spend the afternoon at Grimmauld Place waiting for the NTL people to come and take away the cable/broadband box. If I'd had a bit more than half an hour's notice (Mum was quite sure she'd told me, but she was wrong there) and if it hadn't been brutally hot* I might have agreed to do it. As it is - sod them. I already have to go shopping for her and bring her more things and feed the cat, but I can do all that this evening. I felt guilty even as I was saying it, but fuck them. They'll just have to turn up some other time.

Took the dogs for their morning walk and ran into Spike's girlfriend Ella and her mum out in their front garden. She's tried to register at LJ but hasn't yet found a username she likes that someone doesn't already have - I hope she does, it'd be way cool to have a dog person here that I see in Real Life. Her evil cat, beautiful yellow-eyed Rio, teased my dogs by popping in and out of the bushes at the side of the house**, and he and the dogs caught me at a bad moment and pulled me over... I didn't let go of the leashes (I never do) but I have a lovely bleeding scrape all down my left arm. We told dog-related injury stories and bitched about flexi-leads and yucca plants. I love Ella, she and Spike are two of a kind and I can't wait to show pictures.

( cut for family and cat rambling. )

*anyone who tells me I don't know what hot is and it's much hotter where they are will be slapped with a wet fish and possibly defriended. I'm REALLY not in the mood.


**yes, they are indoor/outdoor cats. I don't believe that necessarily makes someone a stupid pet owner, depending on the cat and where you live - and she lives at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac where the cats are on a first-name basis with all the dogs and people who live there and the only road nearby is a dead end where nothing goes faster than 5mph. Would I let my cat out if I lived there? I don't know. I do know that she generally knows where they all are. It's another argument I'm not prepared to have in my journal today, in any case.

First off, the Maisie update. She's fine. Her leg is a little stiff and uncomfortable still, but it looks like she was either phenomenally lucky or the first vet was being very alarmist.

This is the full story. I have half a mind to post it in stupidpetowners, and if Mum hadn't been so very, very upset I might have ripped her a new one.

Thursday afternoon: I go over to Mum's, I can't remember why. Mum tells me that Maisie has been in a fight, she's limping, but she's gone outside and now Mum's worried because she's outside. I question Mum carefully - she's already distraught and worried, and it's hard to get any sense out of her, but she tells me Maisie has been in and out of the house a couple of times since the fight. So I thought she probably wasn't all that badly hurt - she tends to clear off outside if the dogs turn up when she's in the mood for peace and quiet anyway, if she's been back in the house since the fight she's clearly not slinking off somewhere to die or anything dramatic like that. I tell Mum this, and I tell her that even a small cat bite can cause nasty infections, and when Maisie comes back in she's to look her over carefully for flesh wounds, and if there are any we'll get her to the vet for some preventative measures. I tell her not to worry so much, and I go home.

Please note, I never saw Maisie myself on Thursday.

Thursday night, around midnight: Mum phones me. She tells me she can't find any flesh wounds, but Maisie's leg is swollen and she's complaining. (I can hear her complaining over the phone.) Mum is panicked, almost hysterical and making very little sense. I didn't ask, but she'd also had a fair amount to drink. I tell her the vet has an emergency number, but she decides to wait till morning.

Friday morning - Mum calls me at tennish to ask for the vet's phone number, which I know by heart since Spike and Squish are such accident magnets. She calls back to tell me she has an appointment at 2.30, and she wants me to come and hold her hand. She's still distraught and not all that coherent. Before I left to go over there I had an email conversation with my sister E, who's also been on the phone with Mum, but I learn from the emails that Mum hasn't been coherent enough to explain anything except how upset she is that Maisie's hurt - E doesn't know until I tell her when it happened or that we have a vet's appointment or really anything at all.

Friday afternoon - I arrive at Mum's at 2.15, with only a few minutes to spare before we have to leave. Mum calls down from upstairs to ask whether she should put Maisie in her carrier or just hold her. I tell her to use the carrier. At this point, my cousin's boyfriend (who does Mum's garden and had turned up unexpectedly to do the lawn) accidentally lets Squish out of the back gate and he takes off up the road, so I'm distracted by that while Mum packs Maisie up. Squish is found and stuffed back into the house, I wedge the back gate shut and we go to the vet's.

Maisie is huddled in the back of the carrier. This the first time I've laid eyes on her since the fight. She's clearly unhappy, but she's sitting so I can't see the leg. I decide against trying to get her out to look at it, since the vet will be doing that anyway in a matter of minutes.

We get to the vet's surgery and Mum is so shaky, distraught and weepy she can't manage to get Maisie out of the carrier, so I do it for her. This is the first chance I've had to look at the leg - it's huge and Maisie's clearly very unhappy and in pain. The vet feels the leg and tells us it feels like it's swollen with pus. He pulls the leg forward to get a better look.

This is when I notice the strand of elastic looped round Maisie's shoulder. Maisie wasn't injured at all - she'd somehow gotten her leg caught in the "safety" elastic on her collar.

I wanted to sink into the ground. I could practically see the thought bubble over the vet's head - how the hell do you not notice that?? I told Mum back on Thursday afternoon to check her over carefully and she told me on Thursday night that she had. I'm assuming she was too scared of causing Maisie any pain to go over her really thoroughly, I don't know. I can't get my head around this at all - the woman I grew up with was never the type to lose all her common sense in a crisis, but that's what seems to have happened. I'm still baffled.

The vet we saw on Friday gave us a very poor prognosis. Maisie's leg was cold and he couldn't feel a pulse in it, but he said there was an "outside chance" (his words) that she wouldn't have to lose it. He gives her a shot of antibiotic and a shot of steroids for the swelling, a course of tablets and tells us to massage the leg and bring her back in the morning.

Maisie was very pissed off and unhappy still, but her leg was warm again and supporting her weight inside two hours, and by morning the swelling had almost completely gone and she was using it to swipe at Spike, who was even more stalkerish than usual - obviously he could tell she wasn't happy and he was worried, but she wasn't in the mood to appreciate it.

( And now, a whole passel of daft memes to lighten the mood. )

I am spending the night at Mum's, because Maisie has had an accident that may, possibly (worst case scenario) lead to her losing her leg and my poor mother is distraught and doesn't want to be alone, and we have another appointment at the vet at 0950 tomorrow morning. Which is why I'm not on MSN or Trillian today - I left it all logged on at home and they don't like being logged on in two places at once. And IM conversations are impossibly frustrating with this stupid retarded nasty keyboard Mum has here anyway.

I think Maisie's leg will probably be OK, actually. It's a lot better since we came back from the vet's and she's walking on it and moving it with only a little discomfort. I'll post the whole stupid story tomorrow when I have a functioning keyboard. Using this one is painful, and not in any sort of a good way.

You've all heard me bitching, pissing and moaning ad nauseam about how my entire social and sex life lives in the computer, right? So naturally, I turn to the computer once again to attempt to do something about it: look.

There's already been more response than the Trekkie site. And, in the meantime, I add another name to my list of fascinating men on the wrong continent, while all my UK contacts (so far) are either gay, strictly platonic, young enough to have been my sons, or in at least one case, all three. Perhaps it's the climate, or the Prophets (or whoever) telling me I ought to relocate.

After coming back from the vet's, I left Squish to snuggle with Mum and cheer her up while I decompressed by taking Spike to the park by himself for an hour. Poor Spike - I've been having to concentrate on Squish's issues so much lately that he's been shortchanged, purely because he's the one I don't have to worry about. We threw balls, we danced, he played with a terrier puppy that we've met a couple of times before, and we spent a good amount of time just sitting side by side in the grass loving each other. It was a jewel of a moment in a stinking dung heap of a day. My hero

Squish has added Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary to his playlist. On the other hand, he's learning to control the urge to sing at the top of his voice every single time he hears one of his songs - last night he slept through Black Dog - but he'll still sing out if I encourage him. I'll make a civilised dog out of the little monster yet...

I've realised exactly why I was far, far better at falconry than I'll ever be at dog training, and why my sister (who's a riding instructor and horse freak) never got on with hawks but can make my dogs behave better than I can with one look. Training a hawk is an essentially submissive process - you don't look the hawk in the eye, you indulge her every whim, and it's impossible to dominate or command a hawk to do anything, ever - you simply alienate her if you try. She does end up doing what you want her to do, yes, but the very core of successful hawk training is manipulating her to do what you want while she remains convinced it was all her idea in the first place. It's completely opposite in nature to working with a dog or a horse.

Even the old falconry terms reflect this. You don't "break" a hawk, you "man" her, "make" her and "serve" her. Although it's still the hawk that wears the leather cuffs and the leash, the whole dynamic of the relationship puts her in the dominant position - looking down on you from the sky or the top of a tree while you scurry around arranging the world to her liking.

Ted Hughes spotted this too, look:

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed -
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark -
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began,
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.