DDO is like Jell-O…

… there’s always room for it.

When real life gets overwhelming, often the first things we cut are the “frivolous” things that make us happy. We drop the things we WANT to do to have more time for the things we HAVE to do.

With one very notable exception and a couple of moderate note, 2016 has been pretty damn sucky for me. Family obligations now take up – well, pretty much any time my family notices I have. I’m short on patience and time and oh yes, sleep.

The past few weeks have been exceptionally bad. Found out my pesky cough was a bit more than pesky; nothing life-threatening but something that will be slow to improve and chronic in nature.

Then my kitty Victoria, who turned 14 in September, got VERY sick. Victoria’s gotten to know Dr. Dave and Dr. Stephanie, her vets, pretty well over the years; she’s had chronic allergies/sinus problems, thyroid issues, and now a tumor on her thyroid that was about the size of a pea six or seven months ago and is now close to golf ball proportions. So when she got very, very sick Tuesday night, I wasn’t optimistic. I said my goodbyes, just in case, and got her to the vet first thing Wednesday morning.

Turned out to be a bad but treatable sinus infection, and I was so relieved that I think I asked Dr. Dave about half a dozen times if I was really going to be able to take her home. So Wednesday was shaping up to be pretty good…

… and then Wednesday night, I was watching TV around 9:30 when my other kitty, Callie, walked through the living room, sat down, and started to pant.

When a cat is panting open-mouthed, something is very wrong. I wasn’t used to that with Callie; in the nearly 13 years since I adopted her, she’d never needed to go to the vet for anything other than routine checkups, vaccinations, and the occasional butt trim (seeing as how she’s made mostly of fur).

All the vets in the area were closed by that hour, and since the next day was Thanksgiving, that was pretty much out too. There’s an emergency vet about 40 minutes from here, but Callie is terrified of car trips – she panicked and hid when I got the carrier out to take Victoria to the vet earlier that day. And the few times I’ve taken a pet there, they basically just told me to see my regular vet in the morning.

So I had to wait until Friday morning to take Callie over. Dr. Dave checked her out and then put his arm around me and said, “Brenda, this is bad. This is REALLY bad.” Her kidneys were failing, and he suspected that she also had a large mass in her chest. Even under the best of circumstances, I’d be lucky if she lasted another week.

I didn’t want to put her through that, so I let her go. It’s been beastly hard. Callie followed me EVERYWHERE. She loved to sit on the arm of my chair, stretch out one paw, and just hold onto my leg.

Suffice to say that Sunday night, I didn’t think I was really feeling up to doing a livestream. I even debated signing on to DDO at all. But I did… and once I was logged in, I thought, hmmm, maybe a livestream would be fun after all.

I’m so glad I did. We did a Flower Sniffin’ run through Portal Opens followed by Murder by Night and The Riddle, even though I completely forgot about updating my overlay so it says we’re running Schemes of the Enemy. While logically sleep may have been a better option, it felt good to be on Reera, swashing and buckling and Coup de Grâce’ing my way through driders and Drow. I was still sad, but the upswing in my mood was considerable. It probably helped at least a bit that I had my calico tressym – named Callie, of course.

If DDO all by itself could make me less sad, imagine what DDO with DANCING DRETCHES could do! I wasn’t super in the mood for questing tonight, but wilderness areas are often good stress relievers. So Reera took a spin through Demonweb (where I managed to find all but five explorers without checking wiki!). She had a wonderful time finding dretches to dance. And c’mon, it’s hard not to smile when you’re watching dretches dance! “Dretch, I’m a dretch-y dretch, and I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance…”

Victoria is doing better. Still kinda sneezy, but definitely much improved in the last few days. She is going to be one VERY spoiled only child. I thought she had lost her appetite at first, because Friday night when I gave her dinner, she turned away and walked over to where Callie’s dish normally was. Turns out she won’t eat from her own dish unless I put it in Callie’s spot. I guess that’s her way of paying her respects to her companion of nearly 13 years.

And just gonna leave this here, because even though I’m grieving, this makes me happy too.