Plants then pets then kids...

It seems that the totem of responsibilities start with:

If you can keep plants alive, then you can graduate to:

   If you can keep pets alive, then you can graduate to:

      Children!

I've never been a big fan of green stuff so I guess hubby graduated with plants. Mind you, we did kill an orchid a friend gave us as a housewarming gift but that was more because the pets knocked it off the table (I think).

And we've successfully had the pets for 3 years now so we should be ready for kids. This recent emergency that we had this Friday is really making us rethink the whole pet situation though.

Friday night, hubby and I come home from work after grabbing dinner out to find the younger furkid, Kitt, limping and breathing really hard. Hubby brings her in and checks on her leg and finds this big hole on the front right leg. It looks pretty bad so we start looking for a vet that we can take her to.

We end up at a vet that opens until 10pm but because of the hour of the night, they refer us to a emergency vet place 20 minutes from where we are so that they can put her under and do the operation. The vet explains that what they need to ensure is that someone is there to KIV her when she gets up from the anesthetic and they basically finish at 10pm.

So we drive to this other emergency vet place and get her in for a consult. After waiting for about half an hour, the emergency vet has a look at her and says that he thinks it could be due to our older furkid, Sam, but that's not 100% conclusive. He says that its best to get the operation done ASAP as infection can make it worse and that she'll definitely need stitches and possibly an x-ray.

Come the next morning, the vet rings at 8am saying that the operations being done and there was more damage than they had first anticipated. She's got tissue and muscle damage and they had to put in shunts to drain the liquid out and do some extra stitches. Then he says to ring again at about 11am to find out when we can take her home.

Come 9:50am, hubby gets a call from the vet emergency place saying that we need to come pick her up in the next 30 minutes, otherwise they will charge us a late discharge fee. So we drop everything, get Sam to the 'grandparents' place, and head off to pick Kitt up. When we get there, they bring her out (but first they give us this long list of instructions on what needs to happen and her bag of meds) and she's just pulling at the leash, ready to go. The right side of her is shaved with stitches over the wound and this littl' rubber shunt draining any excess fluid out, and her left leg's shaved where the drip was put in. But otherwise, she looked very much alert and very much like herself.

So since then, we've basically been keeping an eye on her to make sure she doesn't pull out the shunt or her stitches and that she doesn't exert herself too much. This also meant sleeping on the couch to make sure that if she needed to go out, she'd come over and lick me awake. Plus if I heard anything that sounded remotely like chewing, I could get her to stop.

While we're pretty sure we've now graduated with the pet phase, what's happened has got us thinking - is it going to be safe for our littl' one given that one of the furkids may have a violent streak? Is it a wise idea to be 'courting' danger? Are they acting up because we've been spending less time with them? Would we give Sam away and if so, who to?

Questions, questions, questions...when will we make a decision on them?