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where the fumes from cat urine seemed to concentrate
Wednesday, September 6 2017
Gretchen wasn't doing too badly this morning but it was best if she stayed in bed. So when the rain let up, I took the dogs on their morning walk, going down the Farm Road to the abandoned go-cart track and then back through the woods, parallel (but west of) the Farm Road. The dogs quickly set up a chipmunk mining operation a little south of the go-cart track and were so obsessed with it that they continued digging right through a non-trivial period of rain, ultimately not returning home for four hours. Meanwhile, I must've walked past a yellow jacket nest that some bear had torn apart, because I felt something on my finger and looked down to see a yellow jacket stinging the tip of my left pinky finger. The yellow jacket was stuck in the thick skin of the finger and was having trouble getting away when I brushed her off and ran (in case I was being pursued by others in the colony). Amazingly, the sting didn't hurt, at least not initially. I wondered if perhaps the stinger had failed to puncture my skin. I sucked on the finger, hoping to extract the poison. But that probably had no effect. Within a few minutes, I could feel the poison burning the tip of my finger, though this acute discomfort soon passed and the pain dwindled away to a mild twinge that stayed with me the rest of the day.
I went through my workday as I always do, buffeted by meetings and interviewing yet another candidate for IT Specialist who didn't know enough about Linux. Meanwhile, Gretchen seemed better after last night's crisis. She was even able to drive herself into Kingston to have a consultation with a doctor. Later this evening, her fever spiked again and she was wracked with terrible pain in both her thighs and her lower abdomen. She attributed the abdominal pain to eating painkillers on an empty stomach, though I began to suspect the pain was not related to the digestive system at all. Our friend Nancy had suggested that the problem might be Gretchen's IUD, which has been in her uterus fifteen or sixteen years.
I took a hot bath this evening, and when I got out of the tub, there was so little blood available for my brain that I nearly passed out. I decided to lie down on the floor in the hallway outside the tub, at a level where the fumes from cat urine seemed to concentrate. A hissing gradually rose in my ears (as it always does in these sorts of situations) though it was concentrated mostly in my left ear. Celeste the Cat strolled through and looked at my body, still glistening with bathwater. She didn't seem terribly concerned.
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