A knife through the heart

If you have a cat, you may understand what I'm referring to when I speak of the noise that cats make when put in the car. For some reason, it never seems to come out of them at any other time, no matter the circumstance. But put a cat in a car and suddenly there is this wailing, howling, ungodly SOUND that is enough to jar anyone's nerves.

We took our dear Emma to the vet this morning for shots, spaying, declawing and deworming, and got to enjoy a good 20 minutes of that awful NOISE that no matter what we did we couldn't comfort out of her. Once she got there the noise stopped, but I still felt like the worst parent ever. She was nervous, she was hungry and thirsty (but I couldn't feed her this morning because the vet said not to), and she didn't understand why we were leaving her. She was so miserable, and we couldn't even explain that we were coming back!

The vet, however, is anything BUT miserable, if the price tag of this little visit is any indication. We recieved a quote over the phone that was HIGH, but somewhat doable (if we don't eat or heat our appartment for the rest of our lives...). But when we got there, the lady kept saying, "Such and such is extra, but we really recommend it." What was clear, though, was that she was really saying, "You don't have to do these extra things if you're horrible people who hate your cat." And, of course, it's 7:45 in the morning, so we're not thinking straight enough to consider the pros and cons when we're exhausted out of our heads and Paul needs to get out of there so he's not late for school.

My final thought as we walked out of the office --- This cat had better live a good many years, or I'm going to be VERY mad.

They said I could call at 1 p.m. and check on how things went. I'll update you all when I know more.