September | 2015 | A Girl Named Wanda

Lucy has resting bitch face.

Meet Lucy.

Lucy is my daughter Bryn’s cat, and she’s three years old.

My husband, Dan, rescued Lucy as a four week old kitten. He found her abandoned in the parking garage by his office. She was trapped behind a security fence without food or water. He heard her crying, and being the animal lover that he is, he went to investigate. His rescue efforts included contacting security to open the fence and then chasing this scared kitten through the garage and underneath a car to retrieve her. I remember his phone call that day so clearly. He said, “I can’t take her to a shelter. She’s so small. Can I bring her home?”

So, Lucy became a part of our family that day. She was tiny, malnourished and covered in fleas. Dan saved her life and brought her home to us. And that was probably the last time Lucy let Dan love on her.

Lucy is a one person cat, and her person is Bryn. She claimed Bryn for her own, and it has been so for now and all time. They do everything together. Sleep, eat, homework, you name it and Lucy is right there by Bryn’s side. When I wake Bryn up in the morning for school, Lucy helps. She will lick Bryn’s nose, or sometimes she will just lay right across her face when I’m trying to get her up. It’s very sweet to see them together. Best friends.

For all her love and sweetness for Bryn, Lucy is a bad girl. She has a terrible habit of eating things that aren’t food. She especially likes hair rubber bands and tearing up and eating these black foam rubber mats that lay underneath my treadmill. The mat is about an inch thick and protects the hard wood floors from the heavy equipment. Every few weeks I will find a pool of cat vomit with chunks of foam rubber matting or hair ties. I’m always shocked that she manages to puke it all up without hurting herself.

About three weeks ago, Lucy became very sick. Like, projectile vomiting dark green bile from her stomach sick. We were immediately concerned about an obstruction so we took her to the vet. They did abdominal x-rays but didn’t find anything. Everything else was normal, so they treated her for dehydration and sent her home. Three days later she started vomiting again. Back to the vet we go. She wasn’t eating or drinking and it was obvious she was dehydrated again. The vet hospitalized her and did two more rounds of abdominal x-rays over a 24 hour period. The radiologist who reviewed the x-rays observed an area of the her small intestine to be somewhat enlarged and recommended an ultrasound. We transported her to another vet’s office who had the staff and ability to do an ultrasound, as well as emergency surgery if it became necessary.

We were right. She was obstructed. The ultrasound revealed that there was something in her small intestine and other things in her stomach that should not have been there. The vet recommended emergency surgery right away.

Do you want to know what abdominal surgery on a cat costs? It costs about $3,300.00. And this is in addition to the $1,800.00 we already spent at the other vet. What would you do? How do I put a price tag on the life of my daughter’s best friend? How do I say this cat’s life isn’t worth $5,000.00? Those were the choices we were left with because without surgery, her intestine would have ruptured and she would have died.

If I didn’t have the resources, this would be a different post. If Lucy was a fifteen year old cat diagnosed with terminal cancer, this would be a different post. But I did have the resources, and Lucy is a healthy three year old cat with something stuck in her belly. So, after I drank half a bottle of wine and ate a HUGE piece of Coconut Joy cake for dinner to calm myself down, we gave the vet the thumbs up and off to surgery she went!

The vet called us after surgery and told us they removed a piece of the black foam rubber from her small intestine. They also sucked some other debris out of her stomach. When we picked her up, they sent home the offending object, and I was shocked to see it was a piece of foam rubber about two inches long and an inch wide! How she got that down her throat without choking to death is unbelievable!

See that three inch incision on her tummy? Scars are cool.

Lucy is one very lucky little cat. And based on her new loving personality since she’s been home from surgery, I think she knows just how close to death she came.

Meet Lucy. The cat who lived.

Labor Day weekend Dan and I went to Chicago without the kids for a wedding. One of my college roommates was getting married and we haven’t had a grown-up only weekend in almost a year. It was fantastic!

When I travel without my kids everything is different. I can drink wine on the plane, only pack for myself, and read smutty chic-lit on my Kindle instead of entertaining two kids for four hours with snacks, Ipad games and constant reminders to stop kicking the seat in front of them. I relaxed, enjoyed the flight into my favorite city, and did my best to get over the fact that I had to sit in the suck-hump-middle seat in order to sit next to my husband on the flight. No one likes the middle seat, on any airplane, ever.

Chicago was amazing, as always, and the wedding was so fun. I’ve been blessed in my life with the gift of incredible, life long friendships, and my college friends are some of the most outrageous, hilarious, intelligent, dynamic, beautiful women I know. We’ve all gone on to do different things with our careers and family, but when we come together it’s like no time has passed and we’re all nineteen again with fake ID’s trying to sneak into bars and pick up hot guys, except now those hot guys are our husbands.

Here’s the recap, and nicknames have been given to protect the guilty.

On the way to the wedding, TSGHLM’s (This Summer’s Gonna Hurt Like A Motherfucker-her requested nickname) dress split up the side. Dr. Evil and I took turns sewing her back into her dress on the Uber ride into downtown Chicago. Unfortunately, Dr. Evil gets car sick, and trying to sew TSGHLM’s dress caused her to become extremely nauseated. She managed to hold it together, I took over the sewing, and no pre-wedding car sickness occurred. TSGHLM’s dress was repaired and I can now add car seamstress to my list of party tricks.

During dinner Dr. Evil kept trying to build a glass pyramid on the table with all the empty wine and champagne glasses. The wait staff would calmly walk over and dismantle her pyramid without too much fuss and take the empty glasses. She would wait until they walked away and we would drain our glasses so she could re-build her crystal masterpiece. We had a lot of glasses. When they finally reprimanded her for her inappropriate behavior, she responded by adding another tier to her tower.

Also, at some later point during dinner, someone who’s judgment was definitely questionable decided that the party favors on the table, which looked to me like crystal candle holders embossed with the bride and groom’s name and wedding date, were actually small wine glasses. So they became wine glasses, and I’m still unclear on their actual function.

During the reception, Trixie decided to re-create the Patrick Swayze/Jennifer Grey scene in Dirty Dancing by crawling across the dance floor, on her hands and knees, in her evening dress, toward another of our friends sitting at a table. She completed the crawl but might have been too drunk to get back up. I was laughing so hard I missed part of it, but I’m pretty sure she had to call for an assist.

During an epic dance performance, I may or may not have allowed Dr. Evil to motor-boat my chest on the dance floor. I’m super classy like that, and you may be realizing why we call her Dr. Evil.

The Bride, whom we shall call Ellie, got busted in the bathroom for smoking an e-cigarette. The event staff had to reprimand her, at her own wedding! She also had her sister cut the tulle out from under her dress during the reception. Nothing says good times like vandalizing your own wedding gown on your big day!

There was a really beautiful moment when the DJ played Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper. Our small, drunk army of roommates and friends gathered around Ellie and circled her on the dance floor. We danced around her, singing at the top of our lungs while each of us took turns dancing with her in the center of our circle. It was a complete and total love fest as well as a gesture of loyalty and solidarity that has remained unchanged for the past 23 years.

I’m pleased to report that there were no public displays of nudity or pressed ham. And believe me when I say that’s progress, folks. At this point in my life, with this group of friends, I could never run for public office. There is way too much photographic evidence of the good times we’ve had in life. Dan showed me cell phone video of me rocking out with the ladies like a wannabe 80’s rock goddess on the dance floor, and I said, “Oh, that’s the wine talking. That’s ugly dancing! Delete that and we shall never speak of it.”

I woke up the next afternoon feeling like road kill. We spent the day like we would’ve in college. We laid on the couch, watched movies, ate good food and made fun of each other and our epically bad behavior. We’re forty! It’s like all maturity goes out the window when we’re together. We egg each other on and enable each other for the sake of entertainment and bragging rights. When I expressed this to Dan his most wonderful and appreciated response was, “I love your friends.”

Yeah, I love them too.