Tired...

I just got home from work about 25 minutes ago.
Last night I was on call with Angela, and at about 12:30 this morning Brad called me in. We had to do emergency surgery on a dog with GDV (bloat). We were in surgery for about 2 hours, and I was finally able to go home when others came in at about quarter to 8am. Now I'm just waiting for sleepiness to kick in so I can get some sleep..

Tabby's surgery

So. A couple weeks ago we took Tabby up to the veterinary specialists in Burlington, VT for her surgery consult. The vet told us that the mass was not in the worst possible spot luckily, but that it was still a bad location. He tries to get at least a 2-3cm margin all the way around any tumor, and because Tabby's was right on top of (and possibly attached to) her spine he could only go so deep. If he has to he will remove the spiny processes of her vertebrae as well. I was a little surprised when he told us that we could leave her there and have the surgery done that very day - I had figured they would be booked for at least the next several days! But because we weren't able to discuss it with my Mom we decided to wait and talk with her, and then call back and schedule the appointment. We made it for the next Thursday, November 1st.
So Thursday Nov. 1st arrived and my Dad dropped Tabby off in Burlington. I was able to get the next day off work so that I could talk to the vet about how the surgery went when we picked her up. Before picking her up we went to the University Mall, and I got several things I had had my eye on. :-) Then we headed for the veterinary clinic. The vet said that he felt they had gotten good margins around the tumor, but that we wouldn't know for sure until the histopath results came back. The technician who brought her out said that everyone there loved her, and that she had been purring almost the whole time she was there after waking up. She's such a happy cat. :-)
A couple days later the histopath results came back, and the margins were good, they got all of the tumor! So that's a good sign. I know that fibrosarcoma is not a good cancer and can reoccur, but we are optimistic about it, and of course we hope that it never comes back.

The Break-Up

So I think this has been coming for a while now.
The same weekend that my car's exhaust broke, Matt and I split up. There was a weird feeling in the air the whole weekend, and then finally on Monday on the way back to the apartment (we had been hanging out in Matt's van and he was dropping me off at the apartment so I could go home and have my car fixed - he was planning on going back to work on his van some more) I commented on his flaws that really bother me and that I don't think I could live with. We got into this big 2-hour long discussion with tears and everything, and then in the end we decided to take a break. For months now I had been considering ending it because I wasn't happy, wasn't getting the things I need and deserve in a relationship. I was getting frustrated and depressed. It wasn't just me though, we both have flaws that the other can't stand. His smoking. My indecisiveness. His drinking habits. My lack of motivation. His refusal to do anything that I asked of him. His never having time for me. And so on. Leaving after we broke up was sad of course, but not as awful as it could have been. We hugged and said good-bye, and then we both went on our ways. We are still very good friends, and who knows, we may get back together again at some point. After some changes take place of course. But for now, may it R.I.P. 8/9/05 - 10/15/07.

Car issues.... again

So much has happened in the last several weeks... I'm going to separate the three major things into three separate posts. The first is about my car..

On my way up to the apartment several weeks ago my car's exhaust decided to break. Everything was fine until I stopped at a red light. When I hit the gas to go again I could hear very loud exhaust - I thought to myself "Is that me?!" I let off the gas for a second and sure enough it stopped. I looked in my mirror to see if my muffler had fallen off but I couldn't see anything there (however it was dark so even if it had fallen off I may not have been able to see it..). I will also comment at this time that some people had severely irritated me by tailgating me very closely - when we stopped at the red light they were so close to me that I thought they were gone; I couldn't see their headlights at all! When I looked closer I could see them in the car though. I drove the last 5 minutes to the apartment very carefully and made it there fine. When I looked under my car later I saw that the exhaust under the driver's section of the car had come apart and was hanging down, but not touching the ground. Matt had wanted me to use my car a couple times over the weekend and thank God I didn't. When I went to leave on Monday I didn't even get by the next building and I could hear the exhaust pipe scraping on the ground. A couple people came over to look and a guy broke it off for me so I could manage to get home. The piece must have been almost two feet long. He told me to drive with my windows down so carbon monoxide wouldn't build up in the car - that was one COLD drive home... I wore my hood up the whole way! And might I say it was embarrassing too? People would turn to look as I went by. And I tried to be really careful; if a car was coming I would temporarily let my foot off the gas until I was sure it wasn't a cop. :-P But I made it home and my Dad kindly used the credit card to have the parts replaced the very next day.
Now, however, I'm not sure that the water pump we replaced several weeks before my exhaust problem is the right one.. The guy at the parts store said it wasn't the same pump that was in my car before but that it should fit. But now my car will start to get hot when driving in certain conditions; for example when going slow through the stupid ass construction going on right in front of where I work... It hasn't overheated yet, but it gets pretty close. So we will see how that goes. My dad says that he's getting sick of fixing something in it every few weeks - he thinks I should just go for a new car! Which I might. :-) I set up a carfinder thing on St. J Auto's website to e-mail/call me whenever they get in a Subaru Baja that is 2004 or newer with less than 50k miles on it. So we will see!