Belovedest got Yellface an appointment on Tuesday the 6th, on short notice. Ordinarily Tuesdays are their WFH day, so they have some options to flex time on the not temporally bound things and work early or late, but of course this Tuesday morning they had an obligatory offsite-onsite (onsite-offsite?) item. (School visit, so on site at the school, off the library site.) Therefore they called me twice, first to take my phone off mute, second to wake me up to request the favor of my awake functionality and get Yellface dropped off at the vet. Which I did. She was isolated in the bathroom again, and not in favor of any of this. I knocked over her water bowl while attempting to stuff her in her carrier. So her carrier was damp, and she was damp and sorry for herself the whole way there.

She likes having human voices, even if she doesn't put much stock in them if they're coming from a device, so I had the radio on (https://989kpnw.com/ ) to keep her quiet if I could.

And the phone rang.

I am about to be in for a lot of frankly obnoxious appointments in the coming weeks? months? so I saw wisdom in not letting it go to voicemail. And lo and behold, it was someone from the place I'd been referred to, reaching out to get first contact with me. I conveyed that I was not actually in a place to talk about this, given that I was driving the cat to the vet, and I would probably be free about 11.

Yellface remained sorry for herself the rest of the way to the vet.

Eleven rolled around. I was back home, minus cat, phone in full view. I saw the voicemail pop up. Of course my phone hadn't made a peep. I tried to call back, and got silence instead of the sounds of dialing out. Motherfucker. I rebooted my phone.

I learned, the next day, that the callback number is technically the number for the scheduling team, and not the First Outreach person. And the routing goes perpetually to voicemail; the scheduling team passes along any messages for the outreach person when they get them. I spent the rest of the day in irritated ignorance of this fact, attempting to get through to a live person.

Yellface was released from the vet with a note and a 14 day prescription of antibiotic pills. After bacon grease the first two days was not to her liking, we have switched to butter, which is still no compensation for being made to eat a pill, but she does prefer butter as a high energy thing to eat when she's ravenous and some is left where she can get at it. (This is why the butter is not on the counter, but up in the dish cabinet.) I have therefore flipped the prescription lid to the side that doesn't need push-down-to-turn, and filled the other side with a convenient pat of butter, so we can butter the pills as needed.

(Wednesday, I got a voicemail from the outreach person again when my phone was still on DND; she called back fairly quickly after that and we talked a bit. I'll be getting a packet of information soonish, and then some contact from the scheduling team.)