You scream, I scream....

Dido and I had pretty harrowing days today. Given that our backyard is Grand Central Station for neighborhood cats, I took her to the vet this afternoon to have a yearly check-up and to get her immunizations up to date as well. We never bothered to get her vaccinated for feline leukemia in Colorado or Iowa. I had her vaccinated once for it in Ohio because the vet said that it was rampant there (yet another reason to hate Ohio). But, given her dust-ups with at least three different cats, I figured it was a good idea in California.

It should be noted that this is the same cat hospital/vet clinic where Derellek took Lucy so I was a little wierded out about being there anyway. Dido yowled in her carrier the whole ride over there (it's over near Land Park) which is normal. The clinic had a mascot cat who was a larger, male version of Dido (with some British shorthair mixed in, I think). He sniffed her carrier on the floor while we were checking in at the front desk and Dido growled at him. Then, she was pretty quiet....

....until I dumped her out of her carrier (had to up-end it to get her out). The vet wanted to test her for feline leukemia and feline AIDS (I thought they were the same thing??) before vaccinating her since it doesn't make sense to protect her from a disease she's already got. Luckily, the test came back negative, so we're in the clear.

But, the test itself was an ordeal. Apparently, it was a simple blood test, but I had to wrap Dido up in a towel so the vet assistant could carry her out of the exam room and back to the lab to run the test. I heard the most God-awful shrieks of terror for 5 loooong minutes. Seriously, shrieks of terror. These are the same shrieks that she does to Walter which usually end in a low growl, but they weren't ending in a growl today. When she came back to the exam room, Dido had gained another vet assistant and BOTH of them were wearing leather BBQ-grill style gloves and holding her down, still wrapped in the towel. Apparently, my girl is a FIGHTER.

I always thought those women who described not being to bear the sound of their babies crying as over-reacting, hovering types until this afternoon. The vet assistant who ran the front desk had to talk to me to keep me from shrieking myself. Seriously, I was tearing up like *I* was the one being wrapped in a towel, held down by two strangers while a third poked me with a needle.

Although, now that I think about it, I do recall a similar experience when I was 9 and had stitches on my right cheek from falling face-first onto a water sprinkler. My parents had to drive me up to San Angelo to a doc-in-the-box walk-in clinic. My dad and brother went somewhere and left Mom and me there. The relatively youngish doctor insisted that he had to drape my face, to "protect the field," while he did the stitches but I wouldn't let them put anything over my face. According to my father, you could hear my screams from the parking lot when they came back and he walked into the exam room in time to see me kick the doctor as hard as I could in the crotch while my mother held my arm(s) down. Needless to say, I'm really surprised I didn't have more of a scar on my cheek from that episode!

I was too upset to take any pictures during the screaming, but here's a picture of the cat clinic's resident mascot, Boz:



And here's the African Queen herself, plotting revenge against me, I'm sure:



I think a day like today deserves a little ice cream salve....more on that later though: