Kitty Woes, Hangovers and the Miracle of Ceramic Tile

I keep not posting my birthday party highlights. The reason is that I'm not in the mood.

I took Kristen the kitty angel of joy to the vet on Friday for her routine annual exam only to find out that she has a tumor in her mouth and needs a $700 dollar surgery to get it out. And then we have to send it to a lab to find out if there's cancer in that thar tumor or not. As if this wasn't frightening enough, they were concerned that she might not survive surgery with her heart condition, so I had to take her for another echocardiogram before they would clear her for surgery. So now my cat has a cardiologist. (Maybe I'm overthinking this, but how does a person decide they want to be a kitty cardiologist? I can see how people decide to become a veterinarian: "I love animals! I should work with them!", but how do you go from that to, "I love animals! I should work with them! But just their hearts."? Or maybe they just find out in vet school that they're good at it? I just don't know.) The cardiologist said her heart was doing very well on her medication and in fact should continue to do well for years before she starts showing signs of heart failure. So she has that going for her. Of course, she charmed everybody in the place with her sweet disposition and tiny frightened meows, because that is what she does. So she is cleared for surgery, which will occur on Tuesday.

So, not really in a party recap mood you understand.

This is not to say there haven't been some smiling times. When I got home from the vet on Friday with my awful news, I sobbed for an hour on the bartender. He did his best to be comforting, but he had to go to work. That was ok, because I had a plan for the evening: get obnoxiously drunk and pass out.

People that know me well know that despite most of my social life occurring inside of a bar, I actually drink very little. Two to three ciders once a week spread over 5 hours is my typical limit. In hindsight, I should have taken that into consideration before deciding to drink an entire bottle of wine by myself. In an hour and a half. Melle informed me later "you have to work your way up to being a wino." Oops.

Halfway through the bottle I remembered to call MrSteve, who knew I was at the vet and was waiting for the story. I also explained my excessive drinking plan, thinking he would try to talk me out of my self destruction. Instead he said "I have a bottle of Captain just sitting here that I've never opened. I should bring it to you!" I seriously have the best friends in the universe.

MrSteve ended up staying, I think as much to prevent me from seriously injuring myself as anything, and we had a grand old time looking up Monty Python sketches, eulogies, and Bob the Enzyte guy on the internet, as well as MST3K-ing an episode of Numbers. I also spoke to Melle on the phone while MrSteve made pirate noises in the background. Apparently I spilled things a lot. (I do that sober though, just not on other people as much. Sorry Steve.) We took in a little William Shatner music.

I woke up on the bathroom floor. I have been known to do this before. It's a tradition that started at the Christmas Eve Eve Drinking Extravaganza of 1999 (I believe. Kelly? Doug? Simmy?) and continued at the 25th Anniversary of the Birth of TupperDoug party a few years later. Since then I've found that sleeping on the bathroom floor is good because 1) if you have to ralph you are right next to the toilet and 2) the floor is nice and cool which paradoxally helps to keep you from vomiting. Also "and then I woke up on the bathroom floor" is a great way to end a story. I've got the bartender doing it now too which is hilarious.

Thanks to my bathroom tile sleeping ways I did not vomit. This proved to be a mistake the next day when I woke up certain that I was dying. My head, stomach, liver, esophagus and inner ear fluid mutinied. Several other organs tried to escape. I did not even need to swallow any water. I could just pour it on my skin and my body absorbed it instantly. I looked on the bright side - I was obviously not cut out to be an alcoholic. In the future I plan to drown my sorrow by eating an entire block of cheese instead.

I promise I will get to the birthday thing, what with the appearance of the brothers whose last name rhymes with "shmongola" and the forcing people to sing and the light saber appearing as drug paraphernalia. Eventually.