It's four in the morning. Dixie is wandering restlessly through the house in an endless bid to walk away from the pain. She's whimpering, which is breaking my heart, but I've given her some medication so I hope she'll feel relief soon. This wandering is an improvement, I suppose, over her homecoming ten hours ago when she was too groggy from the anaesthesia still to stand long but in too much pain to lie down easily.
Her scar is huge, frighteningly raw at both ends where the drain tubing emerges. The vet found an additional mast cell tumor when they took out the first one, so the surgery was far more invasive than we'd hoped for. I was worried sick when the vet performing the surgery initially phoned to say she couldn't find any tumor at all in the pre-op exam, her tone strongly suggesting we were lunatics. Someone wrote down the wrong side so we got that straightened out quickly, but not before I lost my temper. Once she found the correct side she expressed doubt that there was much there to work on, this time implying we were requesting unnecessary surgery, and I lost my temper again since the initial vet had taken a biopsy and confirmed the recurrance of mast cells. Finally, Dr. Koga took her own biopsy and found them, too. It was not an amusing couple of hours. I had to try to be nice since she was about to cut open my dog. Grrrr.
I've gotten Dixie to lie down again so the pain medication is probably working. John was up with her until midnight; now I'm camped out here in the living room so I can keep an eye on her. The cats were both very wary of Dixie when she came home this evening because she's got a huge plastic Elizabethan-style collar on to keep her from worrying the wound. Natasha seems to have accepted the new situation now, but Keiko's keeping her distance.
Work was a bit rough, what with my worrying calls from the vet and the convergence of two phonecalls and one long-awaited visitor simultaneously (sorry I couldn't talk to you longer, Kymm!), but I was rewarded with a beer from a client who brought it for one of my co-workers. She doesn't drink beer so she gave it to me, and I drank it in the interim between the close of work and the arrival of my train 25 minutes later. Normally, I spend that time browsing the Web or tidying up the mountains of paper on my desk. Instead, I reread one of Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries and let the alcohol smooth out the jagged corners of my mood.
Dixie's definitely asleep again. I think I'll try to get some rest, myself. Thank you very much, everyone who wrote with good wishes. It cheered me immeasurably to receive your emails.
