Spontaneous stress fracture in my window.

Yesterday, 12/6/12, was one of the strangest, most stressful days I have ever experienced.

It began with a phone call that roused me from a deep sleep at 2:00 am telling me my mother went to the hospital with an ongoing blood pressure issue.

I was on the phone continually seeking information, trying to network and make contact with shelters for the three kittens that are left. I was told over and over again that “we are full.” There was hurricane spillover that affected the shelters and it seems that more and more ferals are being trapped and delivered to these places.My worries included the trapping of the parent cats and the complication due to the mother cat’s pregnancy-and that stresses me even more because I don’t think I could take in animals again; I am exhausted. It is not only the physical work, but it is the possibility of disease spread to humans and pets, let alone the emotional attachment.

Then as I sat at my desk near the kitties I got a strange ocular migraine, something that began occurring within the last few months with more and more frequency. They are indicative of blood vessel spasm in the brain and although the neurologist is not alarmed and many people have these scintillating scotomas, they are scary, affect vision, and are an indicator of something: in my case I believe it is stress although it is light sensitivity related.

All of a sudden there was a loud POP! and one of my casement windows, an Anderson that had been installed in 1991, developed a stress fracture and cracked it’s way into a spider web, in place, and looked me in the eye and said, “girl, if you don’t want this to happen to YOU, you had better cut this stress and take a deep breath.”

Then there were three: Lulu, Baby blue and Teddy Purring away. Possibly their last day here.

But I continued on: called a glazier, called an alarm guy, kept trying to get through to the hospital and each time was inopportune, kept calling shelters and cried on the phone–people working the phones were sorry to turn me away and cried with me, called the hospital, the mail came and I had to attend to a billing mishap on some health statement, back to the hospital. This went on all day.

At about 4:00 I called a vet that once had taken care of my cats and wailed to the receptionist. She gave me the number of a shelter I had not called in Freeport Long Island, an area that should have been washed out by the flood. A lovely young woman told me she had just gotten a call or two and twenty-seven cats were being brought in. I told her how wonderful my kittens were, the whole story, that there were three left, the mother was pregnant again and outside, I have three of my own. I must have sounded like I was speaking in tongues: by that time I was borderline incoherent from all this. The young lady said she would call the director and get back to me. She would see if she could take them. Was I hallucinating?

I was so spun around from all the calls I made and all the people I had spoken to, by all the calls I made and was unable to get through, I had given up.

Nap before we go?

The phone rang. “This is Jackie from All About Cats. We can take your cats as long as they are no more than three pounds.” I blathered and blabbered and said I’d get back to her.

I weighed myself with and without the cats. Baby Blue: three pounds!!  LuLu: Three pounds!!  Teddy: Four pounds. Teddy was always the biggest and looked a month older than the rest, but a whole pound more!

I called the vet’s receptionist back and told her. The response was: “bring him with you.” At first I was going to play the honesty card but you know what? Maybe they will take him. Maybe it will be OK. And if they don’t take him he’s going to come back and stay either until I can find him a home, or this will be his home. It might be the Universe saying: glass shatters like life into many choices and paths. We just have to keep walking the line, hope we are going in the right direction, hope for the best.

Just like the window, there are stress cracks in life, but the pieces are still in place.