Domenica 13th Dicembre

Strange day today. Dawn woke up early concerned about Melissa the cross dressing cat. She had not been feeding properly for about a week and had started being sick when she ate and generally getting worse and worse. One of her Italian friends knew of a vets that was open so we took the, almost feral, cat to the vets in a box, and waited in line with dogs that had bloodied legs whilst hunting chingiale (wild boar). We got in quite quickly and were seen by the young lady vet. Dawn's Italian was excellent as she went through the symptoms. Dawn thought that maybe the cat had something stuck in it's throat after we gave the cat some awful meat last weekend, but thought that it might be something much worse. We bought this, reasonably expensive, selection of meat, chicken, chingiale sausage, and some other random stuff that looked very nice. We cooked it and it was disgusting. So Dawn gave it to the cat, who started being sick some time after eating it. Don't blame him/her/it - it made me feel sick! The vet looked at her and very quickly identified what looked like a tumour on the back of the tongue. The cat was given some injections and attempted to give her/him/it a drip feed for nutrition. The plan was to take her/him/it back to the vet on Monday to have a biopsy, some bloods to get analysis. Unfortunately, squamous cell carcinomas are quite common on the tongue for cats and it cannot be removed as this would stop the cat from feeding. The future was not looking bright.

When we got home Dawn tried to feed the cat some sugar water with a syringe when something happened - the cat coughed up something from it's throat which turned out to be a huge piece of the rank chicken that we had given it that night that was blocking the throat and looked like the tumour! It was a miracle - personally I am thanking my lucky Buddha that I had unpacked from my shipment yesterday and put at the front door.

So yes - Melissa is fine and dandy, and the Italian vet, despite being very kind and caring misdiagnosed a piece of chicken as a tumour. We live and learn.

The Buddha is an amazing "objet d'art" - I procured it from Hitchin's famous 90p store. It is sat happily outside our door and later in the afternoon it caused some consternation. I happened to be looking outside the door when a family walked to one of the flats. The wife stared at it, the daughter stared at it, the husband stared at it, and the young boy stared at it, incredulously and with not a small amount of fear, as though I was burning the Italian Flag and preparing for, well I don't know what, but the shock was enormous. I will not move Buddha though. He's lucky and indeed has just performed a miracle by turning a tumour into chicken!

In the afternoon I popped to a friend's house and played some computer games including another epic session on Left 4 Dead.