Weirdness

I've had a weird few days. 

First, I developed an extreme sudden (from nothing to extreme within a few hours) pain in my leg, the likes of which I'd never experienced before. I hadn't injured it or fallen or anything. I spent a whole night with it, unable to sleep due to the pain. It was so bad I wondered if I should go to the ER. I even called Ask-a-Nurse and she said to go to the ER. But the following day it got a lot better. 

So I thought I was out of the woods and that whatever it had been, it would be completely gone soon. Oh, but that night...was absolute agony. I again couldn't sleep at all. Finally, in the morning, I limped out to the dog park to let Mojito run around, then I drove myself to the ER, moaning in severe pain the whole time.

The doc said it sounded exactly like a blood clot. So they gave me a couple of oxycodone (bliss: pain scale went from 8 to 1 within an hour) and did an ultrasound. But found no clots. That's apparently good news, but I would've liked some kind of answer. Once the doc saw the ultrasound result, he basically just shrugged and said goodbye and hey, good luck with that. 

Fortunately, he also gave me an Rx for a handful of oxycodones, which got me through the next two nights of pain. (So, basically, I am going to get a bill soon that works out to about a thousand dollars for a total of 9 pills.) It made me too sleepy to take it during the day, so I consumed a lot of ibuprofen. 

And then the pain started to disappear, as mysteriously as it had come. It was nearly gone today. So strange. I've had pulled muscles and stuff before--this felt different. The ache of it was up in my hip joint, all throughout the thigh, in the knee joint, and sometimes radiating down through my lower leg.

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And then there was a mysterious weirdness with Gadjo. The other morning when I got up, he wasn't outside my bedroom door (I can't sleep with the cats, sadly, because they always want to wrestle each other in the wee hours) with the others to greet me, like he always is. And I mean always.

I was instantly concerned, because he's never not been right there, standing up to paw at me and tell me how mad he is that I didn't let him sleep in my room. Yes, he's very vocal when he first sees me.

I called him and started looking around the condo. This is a small condo. There are only so many places he could possibly be. I triple-checked the windows. The screens are still not fixed, so I have the windows cracked only about one or two inches, and they're too heavy for the cats to open further. I looked everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. There wasn't a cat-sized place I didn't peer into. I must've done 30 rounds of the condo. It's just so small. There was nowhere he could be.

I took a shower, had some breakfast, kept calling and looking.

I was late for an appointment to have the car checked over and the oil changed (it was good to get the car in the divorce, but it needs about a thousand dollars' worth of work, unfortunately--the brakes need to be done very soon), so I had to leave. I had the worst sadness during the two hours I was stuck waiting there, envisioning terrible scenarios about Gadjo. I was almost starting to consider alien abduction, a la Fox Mulder. Had someone noticed a purebred in the window, broken in by popping off the screen and simply sliding the window a bit (an unfortunately possible scenario, given the current window situation) and taken him?

I came home from the car dealer to find the usual--cats clamoring at the door when I walked in, wanting attention. But not Gadjo. My heart just sunk at that point. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking and calling again and again, including outside the condo, though I couldn't see any way he could've gotten out. I was strongly regretting never having taught Mojito to "Find ______," like I'd always planned to do with him and the cats.

I took Mojito to the dog park, we did some tennis ball, and we came back again to the condo and I held my breath, hoping against hope to somehow see his little body in the hallway when I opened the door.

And voila. There he was. Covered with a fine layer of lint and dust, perfectly healthy and utterly non-apologetic for making me worry so.

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