Peers at My Eyes

A couple of years ago I had a pee problem.  We were in Greece at the time and I ended up being put through a battery of examinations (and given an all clear), but F was told to make me lose some weight.

I was 6.6 kilograms then.

The first 600grams took over a year to move.  F had reckoned on 100grams per month, but we achieved about half of that.  Still, by the time we were back in England I was a svelte 5.8 kilograms. 

After getting back from the other side of the planet the other week F decided that what she had been thinking before she left was in fact a real thing – that I have lost even more weight.  I have also been drinking a lot of water so on one of her ‘work from home’ days she prepared the Donkey, and we travelled into the village (before work) and visited a V-E-T.

It was not my usual V-E-T, but they all have the same air about them so I knew exactly what we were waiting for: peers at my eyes, looks in my ears, examines my teeth, takes my temperature and listens to my heart, squelches my insides around a bit and then carted me off to shave a bit of my neck and steal some of my blood.  F wasn’t allowed to go with me on the blood test bit.  Tante-Maria (the vet in Greece) always let me hug onto F while the horrible stuff happened.

We have been waiting for test results, but I don’t know what they were testing for.  I did hear a discussion about something that Moki (a reader) mentioned: that is, being switched off for teeth to be cleaned and polished, but I also heard F tell Mr B that if I wasn’t in pain then she was reluctant to have ‘switching off’ administered to a cat of my age.  That all sounded a bit ominous and I am certain that I don’t have any tooth pain; absolutely sure of it.

I ate all my breakfast and all my dinner.

For a change.

Despite all the years that we have lived here I had never before ridden the Donkey into the retail centre of Havant.  I got a whole new look at stuff I had only previously seen from the van.  And the smells. And the traffic.  We have to cross a railway line on a big bridge that carries all the traffic to and from the north part of Havant: cars, vans, buses, trucks, motorbikes and mopeds, cyclists and e-scooters, a tractor pulling a big hay wagon (and trailing all the smells of a barnyard….some urban people are not keen on such rural scented delicacies).

Piraeus definitely had less trammelled streets even if the drivers there were somewhat less inhibited about parking, signalling, and observation of stop signs.  Here, there are no cafes with patrons sitting out to greet me, no interesting cheese shops, butchers, or retails windows with the shop cat sitting in them.  And the people in the petfood shop (where the V-E-T was located) did not greet and treat me like a king.  People did not chat to us from balconies (in fact there were no balconies), and there were no vagrant cats mooching about either.

Sometimes you don’t realize what little things you miss about an old home until you have been away a while and had time to let it sink in. 

This post was drafted nearly a week ago and F refrained from posting it until we got some news.  The news is that I am not diabetic, but there are concerns about my kidney function.  I sense another VET visit coming on.