Late yesterday afternoon, I wrote a snarky post and then took it down.  It had been quite a day.  First, I had another medical emergency with Boo that had me on the phone with Sherod at 6:30 in the morning, both of us trying not to cry, agreeing that it was more than likely that I needed to have her put down yesterday morning.  She had barely been able to get up and had been staggering around.  Her hind quarters couldn’t seem to work and she had what looked like an accident with incontinence.  After Sherod and I talked, I went numb, got my clothes on, lifted Boo into the car when she couldn’t get in herself, and headed for Selma.

Ms. Boo will live to see some more days.  She does have some back problems but they are not so far along so a medicine the vet prescribed will help.  It wasn’t incontinence but a ruptured abscess on her rump that we were dealing with.  Boo’s on antibiotics for that and is far more frisky today than she was yesterday.

Driving home from Selma, still in the early morning, I was shaky with relief when my phone began to ring. I decided not to answer — just too stressed out to talk and drive safely.  But the calls kept coming in and I finally answered.  Sherod was on the line to tell me that TDC needed to talk to me urgently.  Maria has a mass the size of a softball in her abdomen.  Her doctor is almost completely sure it is an ovarian cyst but won’t know for sure without going in to remove it.  I liked what I heard of this doctor over the phone—good bedside manner, good understanding of the special needs of a person like Maria.  He has other residents from TDC in his practice so he knows.  The surgery is scheduled for the 8th of August.  It will be laproscopic and Maria should be in and out of the hospital on the same day, as long as everything goes as planned.  Something more to absorb and the nagging unease until we know for sure what we are dealing with.

I am thankful for the continued strength I find holding myself tight to the commitments and routines I have established for myself.  After getting the first round of meds down Boo (she is not cooperative and for one who does not do slime, slobber or snot, this task is not fun.  I told Sherod I have me an A#@ Hole Dog, literally and figuratively, right now), I worked hard to meet a deadline I had with my big ECF project and worked some more on my small house projects.  But as evening falls around here, it still gets lonely and I knew better than to stay here.  I’ve been wanting to see a movie called Chef and it is playing in a theater in Montgomery so I punched in the address and thanked my lucky stars for the GPS in my car that allowed me the freedom I needed to take my little self to the movies.  It’s not a short ride—45 minutes.  Coming home, the highway from Montgomery to Selma was pitch dark for a good part of the trajectory.   But I did it and that was very good.

The movie was charming, though the plot line is a little thin and Sofía Vergara gets on my last nerve.  There is this marvelous sequence where three of the protagonists are constructing a Cubano sandwich.  It made my mouth water and it made me miss South Florida quite intensely for a little while.   What mattered though, was I had gotten through another tough day in one piece.

This morning I have done another patch of mowing and picked a few blueberries from the bush I found hidden amidst the Scuppernong vine in the back yard.  It will take years for Sherod and me to discover all the treasures that former owners of this piece of land left for us.  The blueberries were delicious…