Surgery? No surgery!

Yesterday I managed to watch an extremely routine teeth-cleaning before I had to go to class. There may have been one or more extractions needed -- the X rays were just coming up when I departed -- but if there were, I didn't see them. The skin tag removal and two cat neuters were done later in the day, too.

I did learn quite a bit about running pre-anesthesia blood work, how to enter that data in the computer, how to make up a "crash chart" with all the dosages of all the drugs that would be needed in an emergency, and all the beeping and hissing and plonking and feeping that goes on when an animal is under.

And now we're on a reduced schedule at the clinic for a couple of weeks, probably related somehow to the construction. If I understand it right, there will be no "procedures" for two weeks or so. (On the up side, we're getting outdoor dog run space!)

Duchess-plus-ungood

Glucose curve so far today: 428, 483, 490. I don't even have to run the rest of the curve to know her insulin dose is going up Very Soon Now.

Teeny tiny little additional clues: she's skinny, she drinks like a fish, and she soaks everything within a foot of the litterbox. This is her beleaguered system waving a giant glowing sign saying HELLO, HUMAN. THIS CAT HERE NEEDS SOME MEDICAL ATTENTION. WAKE UP.

(In her case, skinny is bad. A healthy weight does help keep kitty diabetes in check, but Duchess never gets skinny unless her diabetes jumps up and bites her. It does jump up, too. She'll drift into remission, but when she goes diabetic again it's quick. Weight loss is usually my first signal that she needs a glucose curve.)

Two words that don't go together

"Frittata cake."

The recipe itself doesn't look half bad, once I get past the title, but the words frittata and cake simply do not belong together. I do not want to add some chunks of nice rich chocolate cake into a pile of scrambled egg, nor vice versa. CJ-brain says No.

I was collecting a list of word pairs like that, for a while. I can only remember two now: ground failure and clam pancakes. I couldn't just make up pairs; that's way too easy. I had to find them, paired up by someone else, in print, clearly intentionally. Sometimes I'd imagine the writer sitting nearby, watching and suppressing laughter as reader after reader took it seriously.

(It is entirely unnecessary to leave a comment here to the effect that you like clam pancakes. Or scrambled eggs baked inside a cake, for that matter. Truly. There's no need. *shiver*)