I emerge!

Four weeks ago tomorrow I came home from a great vacation to Washington DC and PA to a house with one less cat. Kikyo, my darling Siamese princess. I've no idea how or why she got out, where she went to, who saw her. I've done everything I can think of to find her or help her find her own way back home. My cats are my children and when my favorite kid went missing, I became a wreck. It's only in the last week that I can look at a picture of her without breaking down.

Some people cannot understand this pain and how someone might react to it, so less than a week after finding Kikyo was gone, I was also going through a very messy breakup of a four month relationship.

I didn't know anything about the animal microchipping process before this. But now my two boys have them. When my youngest, Ben, was at the vet I learned he has a heart murmur. So he went to a cat cardiologist. Ben has a nasty genetic heart disease that is very progressed for being three years old. I have meds for him now, but now I have the problem of how to administer them. I need to find the smelliest food out there, he can smell the small dosage in anything I've given him so far.

Then the icing on the cake, one of my degus has cataracts. The two of them will be 4 this summer. I've heard degus live anywhere from 2-10 years, depending on what site I visit. Other than one having one clouded eye and both being very fat, they seem otherwise very healthy and happy.

All that happened in the first two weeks. How do deal with this much negative emotional stress? I went to a psychologist, but they're mostly the same as writing in a journal, just 30 minutes of me talking out loud. I bought myself a sweet ring, a promise ring to myself. Promise to never give up hope on Kikyo finding her way home. Promise to Ben to take the best care of him I can. His disease will shorten his life so I want to make it the best life he can have. Promise to listen to my brain more in relationships, so I'll see the warning signs and not get too deep into something with the wrong person. I've taken up yoga at home and Tae Kwon Do at a local school. I've started playing World of Warcraft again after seven months off. Basically, I'm doing everything *I* want to do. And it's really making me feel great. Physically and emotionally.