O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

This year we embarked on getting our first Christmas Tree, or I should say our first full size tree.  In years past we've used this little guy as our main tree.

I'm still using him but I decided after 4.5 years of marriage combined with the fact that we are hosting Christmas, we should have a full size tree in our living room.  I set out online to do some browsing and came across this beauty from the Martha Stewart Living collection at Home Depot.

My head was swimming with visions of how beautiful she would look in my living room.  It was love at first sight!  Unfortunately for me love can be a little blind and those beautiful snow flocked branches...

...were a disaster!  Putting the tree up and fluffing the branches caused snowpocolypse 2011 right in our living room.  Not to mention I'm married to a neat freak so the messiness of the snow was not going over well with him.  But it just looked so beautiful, I was determined to make it work even if that meant vacuuming every day!

That is until this Lil' Bit started chewing on said snow flocked branches and ingesting all the fake snow.

Within a day of the tree being up she started acting very lethargic which is not like her at all!  She is usually into everything and getting into places she should not be (ahem)...

We knew something was up and after a couple of trips to the vet it was determined Phoebe had an obstruction in her stomach that would require exploratory surgery.  She had the surgery on Thursday and they pulled out a very large, congealed hair ball (gross!) from her stomach.  This was the best case scenario of what could have been in there but while they had her open they noticed some of her bowels and pancreas were inflamed which could actually be the cause of her sickness.  They did a biopsy and we should have the results this week.  Either of the inflammatory diseases she possibly has are very treatable which is good news, the bad news is she hasn't been doing so well since the surgery :(  She's had a fever and refuses to eat which puts her at risk for some sort of liver disease.  Lucky for us she is in good hands!  The vet's office has been keeping her on an IV of fluids and antibiotics and they have also been force feeding her (something we would have a hard time doing).  She's been keeping her food down which is good and this afternoon we found out her temp is down a degree!  This is the first day we have not been able to visit her which has been hard because we miss her!

I have a hard time believing the fake snow ingestion is a coincidence although it very well could be.  The vet agreed that the snow could have helped the hair stick together in her stomach and I'm thinking it could cause some inflammation issues.  Needless to say I didn't want to always wonder if it was just a coincidence so the tree in all it's snow flocked glory came down!  A big thank you to my BIL for coming over, taking it apart and boxing it up for me!  AB was out of town and I couldn't even get the top part off by myself!

Maybe we'll find one next year, maybe not, after all Christmas isn't about the tree!