What Stayed With Me

The Fifth Appointment

We cancelled the first four. No scheduling conflict. No medical hold.

Just two functioning adults discovering, on four separate occasions, that they could not make themselves put a rabbit in a bag and go. The fifth one is the reason I’m writing this.

Seven in the morning on a Monday. Me, my partner, two of our friends, and Bunzy, who was there to be spayed.

Five of us. For one rabbit. I would like it noted that I considered myself a normal person before all of this.

The friends came because we needed them to. That was the strategy. If someone else was showing up, we couldn’t quietly talk ourselves out of it in our own living room again.

So the fifth time, we called for reinforcements. It took two grown-ups to take two other grown-ups to take one Bunzy to the clinic. LOLS. I have no further explanation.

The stupid part is that I know how to do this. As teenagers, my friend and I fostered everything. Squirrels that fell out of trees. Pups. Kittens.

If something small turned up hurt, it came home with us, usually without either set of parents being consulted.

We also gave them away. That’s the part nobody warns you about.

You nurse the thing back, someone adopts it, you hand it over and go home. I did that. Repeatedly. Without incident.

So I walked into this clinic with credentials. Turns out credentials expire.

At fourteen I could hand over a kitten. At thirty-something I cancelled four appointments because I did not want to put a rabbit in a bag.

Nobody mentions that as you grow up you become more of a child, not less.

If you’ve never lived with one: rabbits are prey animals, and they do not forget it for a single second.

Bunzy is frightened of sound. Not loud sound. Sound. A sudden cough will do it. A chair moving. Someone laughing too fast.

Except at home. At home she is a tyrant. There is not one square foot of that house she hasn’t claimed, chewed, sat on, or occupied purely to make a point.

She’ll flop across a doorway like she pays rent. Her courage is a strictly home-turf phenomenon. Outside it, she is a small nervous system in a fur coat.

Now. I need you to understand that of the five beings in that waiting room, I was the most frightened. Comfortably. It wasn’t close.

Bunzy was second, and she is a prey animal with a brain the size of a walnut.

So naturally, three minutes in, one of our friends decided to google rabbit anaesthesia survival rates. Out loud.

She got about six words in before the other one told her to put the phone away, at which point they had a whispered argument about whether looking it up was helpful or evil, while my partner stood between them holding the bag like a man guarding a device.

A dog barked somewhere down the corridor. All four of us flinched.

Bunzy did not.

I heard the number. I want to be clear that I heard it. I chose, in that moment, to walk away with great dignity, file it at the back of my skull, and make a private appointment to think about it properly later.

Then I went to the reception desk, because that is how I cope. I collect information.

How long is the surgery. What’s the anaesthesia protocol. When will she eat again.

What do I watch for. What do I watch for after that. Is there a version of this where I stay in the medical room. (There is not. I asked twice.)

I was mid-question when I turned around. Bunzy had pushed her face out of the bag and was looking straight at me.

Those eyes. Twinkling, which is the only word for it, even though she was terrified.

I cried. Inside, not outside, because I was still speaking to a receptionist. It was so out of proportion.

Routine surgery. Extremely common. Very safe. And I stood there feeling like I was signing off on the single biggest decision of my life.

She’s our baby. That’s the whole explanation. It isn’t much of one.

Then the nurse, going through the pre-op, mentions, casually, the way you’d mention parking validation, that if the blood test doesn’t come back okay, they’ll call us.

And then he giggles. Like it’s funny. Like it’s a bit. Like we’re all in on it.

I smiled. I did the small polite laugh you do when you have understood a joke and would also like to press charges.

Meanwhile the number from the waiting room got up from the back of my skull, walked to the front, and made itself comfortable.

So I turned to my partner. Here is what you need to know about him. He is my rescue. For everything.

Something goes wrong anywhere in my life and I run to him. Six feet of logic and paperwork. A man who reads terms and conditions recreationally, who does not spiral, who says okay, here’s what we do.

I have never once had to be the calm one.

He came over immediately, holding Bunzy, which did not help, leaned in, and said:

“What is he talking about? Is he serious?”

I stood there looking at the most practical person I have ever met, holding a rabbit, asking me to interpret a nurse.

And then I remembered: he does this every time. He is exactly like this when he takes me to the doctor.

Same man, same collapse, same six feet of logic evaporating in a corridor the second the patient is someone he loves. It’s funny what love does to you. It removes the fine print entirely.

Behind him, one friend had quietly gone back to her phone. Which is when it became clear that the reinforcements had not worked.

I had brought three adults with me specifically so that I would not have to be the strong one, and all three of them were now visibly worse off than I was.

Somebody had to hold it together, and the group had, by process of elimination, selected the most frightened person in the building.

So I heard my own voice say:

“She’ll be fine.”

I did not believe a word of it.

But that’s the thing I actually took home that morning. Everyone’s EQ is the same when it comes down to it.

Nobody in the room is better equipped. We’re all just taking turns at being the one who holds it, and that day the rota landed on me.

And here’s the other thing. They were useless. Genuinely, comprehensively useless at the one job I had recruited them for.

They were also the entire reason we were standing there at all.

Four cancelled appointments. Four times two people talked themselves out of it with nobody watching. The only thing different about the fifth was that somebody else was coming.

That’s what they were for. Not calm. Witnesses. And I am so grateful to have them in my life.

Then we both went to office. As if that were a thing a person could do.

I opened a spreadsheet at 9:40 and looked at it until 11. Not worked on it. Looked at it.

I put my phone face-up on the desk. Then face-down, because face-up felt like tempting it. Then face-up again. I checked the ringer. I checked the ringer again eleven minutes later.

Someone asked how my morning was and I said “good” in a voice that clearly indicated otherwise, and they did not follow up, which was the correct decision.

Time did not move. Time crawled, on its stomach, backwards.

I have never done less work on a Monday. I would like to apologise to my employer, and I would also like them to know that I’d do it again.

When the real call came, she was fine.

That evening she was back on the arm of her little sofa, ears up, ruling the house, taking the cone out on a cardboard box. Entirely unaware that five adults had rearranged a Monday around her.

It’s funny what love does to you. She’ll never know any of it.

That’s sort of the whole deal.