buggles magee

I sometimes blow things out of proportion. But when last night I saw a thing - a bulge, the kind you'd see even if you weren't looking directly at it - poking out of Bug's side, I thought I might stop breathing.

His hair must just be sticking up.

It wasn't. The bump was round and hard. And the size of a golf ball. A golf ball.

Maybe he swallowed Cricket.

But she was safe, exactly where she should not have been, eating Bug's food.

The mass wasn't there the night before, I repeated to at least three people at the emergency vet, after an I'll-get-you-in-your-carrier-g-dammit wrestling match with Bug which left me covered in silver hairs. I am a good mom. I am a good mom. I rub and hug and love those cats against their every free will. I would have noticed it had it been there this morning.

Right?

Vet people poked and prodded and during a blood draw made my oldest kid howl a cry I had never heard. At one point, the word "amputate" was used in conversation. I cried. Not once, but twice. Just so the office staff could also be privy to my breakdown.

He goes in for emergency surgery tomorrow at 7:30 am. He'll come home with a plastic cone for his head which his mom will mock on the Internets while both he and she take loads of heavy medication.

But for tonight, she will force him to lie on her chest so she can study his sweet markings and hear his loud purr. And she will reluctantly drop him off at the vet first thing in the morning.