I didn't study at all for this exam. I mean, I tried. Really, I did. And I ended up falling asleep on the book. This past week was a real mess, a real mess.

Partly, it has to do with Knightmare. My old guy's been under the weather lately, and it all came to a head on Friday. I'd noticed him slowing down lately, losing weight. It made me paranoid, 'cause of course I thought of Shai. Then on Friday the old guy tries to get up to greet me when I got home and fell right over. Yep, I wasn't having any of it, so I packed him up into the back seat of my car and drove him to the vet. I was a bit impatient because I had to go to work in about an hour; I ended up having to call in. Felix was a little bitch about it, fuck him. Then my vet sent me over to another clinic (never a good sign), because they couldn't see me right away and my dog was really ill. I didn't get out of the other vet's until almost 8 PM. Dr. Zamorano, the vet who saw Knightmare, told me my old guy's really sick. He said it might have to do with old age, and that it's not something I did wrong. Knightmare's got severe anemia, but no parasites, no fever, or bacterial or viral infection. Whenever an animal's (or anyone, I'd assume) gets anemic for no particular reason, and it gets this bad but they don't know where it came from, it probably means bone cancer, Dr. Zamorano said. Dread lurked in the pit of my stomach. Earlier this year, in March, I lost Shai to cancer, probably lymphoma. The reason I say "probably" is because there are no facilities in the area where I live that even diagnose cancer in animals, much less treat it. But from the x-rays and blood tests, everything seemed to point in that direction. Shai had gotten a clean bill of health in November of last year. The cancer ate him up in four months. Now my Knightmare's sick, and it may be the same thing: fuckin' cancer. I was torn up when I had to put Shai down. He was such a good, sweet dog, even after all the abuse he'd been through before he found his way into my family. But Knightmare... Puppers is my baby. I've had him for 12 years, ever since he was a month old. I don't want to lose him. I never even got to take him on a field trip yet (too big to travel long distances in my tiny car).