Kenzerelli, that's what they call her.

**fair warning... slightly gruesome veterinary details to follow**

Kenzie and I had a not-great day. I took her to the vet this afternoon, after she hadn't moved from under our bed or eaten for three or four days. She's not exactly a trooper about being transported anywhere, and especially not anywhere that results in her getting pinned down to a metal table while a strange man pokes and prods her. It turns out she's had an abscess in her rear-end area, possibly for quite some time, and it's rather large now. Poor kiddo. The dr. sedated her, drained the abscess and inserted a drainage tube. They waited until she woke up and handed her back off to me.

I was pretty scared and upset the whole time, but once we got home and she came out of her kitty carrier covered in blood and looking like an effed-up science experiment, I totally fell apart. Her hip is shaved and she has rubber tubing hanging out in two directions. She is NOT pleased about any of the tubing/suture situation. She's been fiendishly bathing herself, and a moment ago I caught her tugging at the tube with her teeth. It's going to be a long weekend.

Really, it could have all been much worse, I know. She's twelve, and her half-brother (my beloved Boogie) dropped dead of a mysterious "sizeable mass" three years ago (and took a big chunk of my heart with him). She's been rather foul-tempered since her feral kittenhood, and it's hard to say if maybe she's been sick for years and we just chalked it up to being calico-ish. I spent the last 24 hours consumed with dread for a disease diagnosis that would involve dozens of expensive treatments that would add up to her as torture. A treatable abscess, a diagnosis of "She's going to be hurtin' for a little while," accompanied with a disconcerting wink, really, it's almost best case scenario. But I'm still feeling pretty volatile, and think I'd better go start dinner and lose myself in the next Bourne movie before I spend the rest of the night having fearful crying jags.

{The picture above is the first shot of Kenzie taken in our new house. She acclimated astonishingly well and was hanging out with me on the new couch within a few hours of the moving crew leaving. I took this picture with the built-in laptop camera, just to show how cool she was being (while my boys, who I would ordinarily think of as being much braver than Kenzie, were still hunkered down in closet corners, freaking out). I wish we had the scanner hooked up so I could post a picture of Mackenzie as a kitten, because she was absolutely the cutest damn thing, with a pansy face and so much trouble.}