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The packet came back on Friday. It was pretty good. I can't complain.

The weekend has been like a horrible nightmare, but finally I woke up from it and everything is ok. One of our cats had surgery on Friday for a problem with his ear that's been going on for more than a year. He had already had a procedure on it in February which didn't work , so we took him to the teaching hospital at Michigan State University. They went in through his throat and cleared out a mass that they think was a polyp. He seemed to be recovering fine, but then on Friday evening, he went into cardiac arrest. Thank goodness, Erica, the veterinary student who was assigned to him, was there watching over him. She saw that he had stopped breathing and got one of the emergency room doctors and they resuscitated him. He wasn't doing very well on Friday night. It might sound odd, but it's one of the hardest things I've ever been through. Some people would say, "It's just a cat," but really, they are so much like people, except that they don't hold on to grudges or bad feelings. They just love us and want us to love them. And this cat in particular is so sweet and even tempered. And he's a hugger.

I don't have kids, so I don't know this, but I think it must be what parents feel. When you are responsible for the welfare of a living being and that being is with you for years and you have a bond with them, it is terribly stressful when their welfare is suddenly out of your control.

So Friday night I kept waking up. I had a headache because I had been sobbing for a long time after we got the first call saying that he had gone into cardiac arrest and they were trying to revive him. He was breathing again by the time I went to bed, but not as well as they would have liked. On Saturdaymorning, the doctor called again to say that he had gotten better over night. We were scheduled to visit him, and the doctor said we still could. He warned me that "he is not the Anubis you know." I wasn't sure what this meant, except that he had a lot of tubes running into and out of him.

He was in intensive care when Marc and I got there. Erica took us in to see him in his little container. He was on an IV, had oxygen and a heart monitor. His neck was shaved for the surgery, which looked weird, but then Erica said, "He's showing signs of blindness right now. Dr. Haupman says sometimes cats recover from that and sometimes they don't." That was a terrible shock. I'd been so concerned about him losing his hearing, yet a vision loss would be much worse for him than deafness. We stayed with him for about ten minutes and then we came home.

I thought about him all night, reading about blindness associated with cardiac arrest, wanting to know if there was anything I could do. Of course, there wasn't. But what I read made me more scared.

This morning Erica called to say that he had gotten better during the night, that he was moving around and acting like his old self. "And," she said, "he's visual." We're hoping to take him home tomorrow night.