Dancing in the Chaos. Cora-belle and Brittaney

 I sit to write each morning, (save for the surgeries days), to clear the clutter and calm the demons.

Me and Magpie.. morning coffee and cuddles in her windowsill at our home.

The day before is always, without fail, a thunderstorm of chaos set to a troops ballet of orderly bodily swoons. We are a veterinary clinic marred in last minute pleas to be seen, some of these dying, as they rush in the doors, and/or mysterious illnesses clutching the lives in moments of breathless abatements. There is never a quiet day, some are less heartbreaking, but, never-ever is there a day without a euthanasia or a spilling of tears at the delivery of an imminently dire prognosis. It can be jarring, draining and cruel. It is life set to motion on fast forward, condensed into a barely manageable work day as the promulgation of being a part of a community based place for decades. I depart home at 9 am, and I arrive back after 9 pm wondering if I have the strength left to brush my teeth, never mind undress from my bloodied, anal gland spritzed, poop/urine smeared scrubs. I melt into bed unable to unwind, process, or compartmentalize. After all of these days the decompression period I should provide myself with evaporates into unconsciousness. This is the justification based fodder for every social media post veterinarians make in response to a current smear campaign at our expense. We post our reality, the grit of our daily lives as a public service announcement in the hopes one soul with a torch in their hands leading the march to our demise over a case that didn't end in their favor will take pity. Unless you have danced this jig you don't know how hard it can be. I mention all of this as a preamble to today's painful sequence of events, and, for the blog, YouTube videos, and professional life-based pivot point I am about to journey upon. It is important for me, and the rest of the veterinary profession, to share these real-life stories of our days. If we can't be genuine with the everyday joy, pain, the losses and the motivations we need to have to rise up again tomorrow for another ballet of mental, physical and emotional marathons how can we expect the public, our clients who entrust their family, with our care? How can we ask for mercy in the face of animosity reaching hatred proportions?

Cora, face in the sun, with my pups;  Charlie, Storm, and Fripp.

Yesterday I euthanized Cora-belle. She was found standing in the middle of the road at the end of my driveway a decade ago. She most closely resembles Eeyore in every way possible. Short-legged, wide-stanced, stubbornly slow, and exaggerated floor length ears that mop as she saunters. I found her standing frozen straddling the double yellow line as I pulled out onto the road from leaving my house one morning. She was stoic as if given an order. After knowing her all of these years I know that was not the case; she has never taken a order in her life. Some primitive nod to defiance sluggish-sloth style. So, I suspect looking back now that she was simply paralyzed by fear. She was endearing for all of her curiosities. She was the face you loved once you knew her, it wouldn't come naturally. She never learned to walk on a leash. To move her you needed food and a short destination. Or, you carried her wheelbarrow style, pushing via shoving. Cora outlived all of my dogs. Sloth style wins. She was adopted out after a prolonged foster period to a family I now consider my own. They were fellow beagle lovers and their older beagle was at the clinic every other week for her anal gland expression, (another less adorable facet of beagles). Mysteriously, as so many of life's doings are, Cora's new family came home one day, just days after Cora's arrival and shockingly found him deceased. She landed here at my door, to be delivered postscript to them just in time. We all believe that. We know that for as many shortcomings as Cora had her timing was always impeccable and restorative. She dodged death so many times with so many ailments, dental challenges (like soft-serve-snot from both nares, twice, that required emergency dentals with end stage renal failure), impromptu bloodhound sniffing escapades as infrequent as they were frightful. one hour she was there, at your feet snoring, the next, Whoosh! Presto! Gone. It wasn't like she ran away. Ran was never in her vocabulary, short legs and "whoa is me" bravado. Nope, she just caught a whiff, let me nose meander and next thing you know there is a bellowing bay that sets the horizon on alarm. She was easy to find once her nose found its destination. It was her charm. One of her many.  Cora's kidneys were failing her for years. Tiny steps an clues that it was progressing, until a few weeks ago when it was confessed that she was confused more than could be safely managed. Last night, with her whole family present we said goodbye. I held her face, twitching with cloudiness, eyes claimed by cataracts and decayed corneas, and whispered my goodbyes in my typical pet-mom fashion. I said all of the things to her I always had, gave her that reassurance to not be afraid. Silently hoped to myself that she would carry those words back to my dearly missed departed dogs she vacationed with here at my home. That they would all be together happy, peacefully blissfully Beagling above. 

Cora, begging, while Jekyll waits for her to break my will power and distribute treats.

It is the magnitude of this burden, among the chaos of being needed simultaneously in three other exam rooms to help other pets, some with impatient, emotionally burdened, desperate, equally heavy chaotically-fraught-life people. It is this that vets try to excuse as our bad press marches on. 

They know what's coming.

While I was stealing a few pivotal moments with Cora, my colleague, the other vet in the clinic with me, was juggling three concurrent appointments while a family, one of the members a former staff member gathered to say goodbye to their life long family pet, Brittaney. She had a bleeding spleen, leaving her essentially bleeding out internally. Her bloodwork was awful, and she had multiple chest lesions which indicates the cancer causing the bleeding internally had spread everywhere. It is a perfect storm that no veterinarian would ever recommend treating for. I wouldn't have either had it been one of my own. This pup of 14 arrived at 2 pm. As she was discussing her preliminary findings the owner received a call that his mother-in-law just passed away. He left to go be with his spouse while we ran the rest of the pups diagnostics. The whole family returned hours later to say goodbye. Their day reminds me how integral we are to our clients lives and how small this town is. Both grandmother and Brittaney will be cremated together at our local funeral home. Life is like that. Brutal and poignant and bittersweetly wrenching just to remind you that our lives are given to us to feel them. 

Brittney

This is why I write in the morning. The cleaning, the folding the organizing. The baggage of lives, the honorable actions and the frailty of the lives we alter and influence. Veterinarians, me included, get so absorbed in the caring chaos we lose ourselves within the flurried storm. It is a ballet, trying to be a part of something that takes so much, and find our reasons to keep dancing when the music ques again. You will drown if you don't accept it, your part in the lives of others. 

For my dearly departed Cora; I will miss you with us. You were the determined, inconspicuous beagle we always knew existed inside. She was always looking for an opportunity or a couch. She spent all of her days considering one over the other and slowly shuffling, or, rapidly exploding into one or the other. We should all be so lucky to live a life of comfortable options.

For the next chapter of this journey, please follow me here. There are two very important blogs to post. Tomorrow morning is another chance for a new day, and the same ballet to attempt to come cleanly home for.

RIP Cora-belle and Brittaney. I am honored, humbled and grateful to know you and your families. It is a gift. I wonder how many other vets feel this as their greatest motivation to getting dressed in the morning?

Here is Cora's original blog post, so many years ago;

Cora-Belle, The Lucky Beagle

Better Left Undone. When Action Breeds Contrition

 

Everyone else guessed it, I had dismissed it as foolishly foreshadowing. A ruse. A game with no clear odds favoring one or the other. When at face value it was so commonplace, that I should have seen myself as the typical ‘subject’ and counted myself as a loss before leaving the gate. Or, to put it literally, crossing the border out of Ukraine.

It has become my form of PTSD. I can’t leave it, them, or most of what I encountered, behind. It’s become a haunting. It’s been a month since I got back home. Twice as long as I was there, and, still,, I can’t let them go. I can’t let almost any of it go. Worst, most painful of all, the animals. Not their medical stuff. The stuff so routine I dismiss it as collateral damage to pet ownership, domestication of the species. The medical needs of the animals struggling to survive in a war, all look like the medical needs of animals the globe over. No, it’s not those. It has become my lack of belief that they were better off after our acts of intervention. Our pulling them from the home they knew, whether it still stands any longer, or not. I am not sure if my efforts, my time, the efforts of those who are there has helped the pets we intervened upon made a better difference for them. They are now caged, full time, and stuck in purgatory limbo inside Ukraine. There is little hope they can be moved out. Little hope they can be adopted once moved. The numbers of pets in need is so great that the ocean just swallows them and grows a little bigger with each soul it consumes. With that burden, on top of the rest of the burdens, I have given them all names. The names they never had the time to be troubled with before. The designation of belonging when the concept of that left permanence and citizenship. I was a visitor. An overnight guest. They, the animals I was brought over to care for, they were residents. If their parents hadn’t deemed them worthy enough for a collar, a name tag, or even a bus ticket out, why would I give them names? Who was I to claim them? Baggage leads to expectations and I had no plans to stay longer than the pre-purchased round-trip ticket date designated. Ukraine was set up/expected to be, just a brief stay. A substitute teacher venue. Arrive, deliver a little vet-med grub hub style, meet/greet-guh-bye. I’m an expert vacationer, world-traveler, veterinarian on the fly. Surely this wasn’t going to be a big challenge. Nope, not for me. Indoctrination at the Academy lasted two weeks. Those were the longest two weeks of my life. That set the bar. I didn’t quit then. Why would I quit now? Sea year lasted (you got it) a year. Alone on a big cold, ocean for weeks on end. Nope that didn’t wash me away. The Academy, vet school both 4 years. Hard work, lots of grit and very little mercy for weakness and meekness. I know what serving a sentence voluntarily feels like. I can do it, bide my time, count the days, survive a great unknown. I can even make it memorable, dare I say, enjoyable. Ukraine from the outside, at the beginning was an adventure in serving a people whose country was so inconceivably violated. I was going to have my protests heard by volunteering to help their plight, vet-med style.

Four weeks later they have names. Five thousand miles away from me, and I give them names. It's madness. I have slipped in, gone all Rosemary’s Baby and become consumed with faces I will probably never see again.

I’m stuck. I now understand why/how it happens. Being here and feeling you should be there. The people who are there, willingly, volunteering, surrendering their life, the lives of those who love them from their home countries, they don’t get it. They don’t understand the compulsion to go there and the stickiness of wanting to stay. There is no allure to being there. No magical beauty that ties you to Ukraine. No amazing food, culture, architecture, luxurious accommodations, attractions, music, art, visitors Bucket List items for natural, manmade or otherwise wonders of the world. There are indisputably familial ties. Ancestral influences, but for those of us lacking that it is inconceivable anyone would go there wanting/willingly, and even more unfathomable that you would go back.

But, disaster, plight, travesty of any kind serves a void. A place of emptiness that can be filled of one’s own accord. You can become the answer to your own prayers, and fill a need not challenged by candidates en mass. There is a motley crew, and I use that term appropriately of volunteers cycling in and out of Ukraine. A small collective of die-hards who cross in and out with such frequency that the obvious realities of Ukraine have been dissolutioned/diluted away. There is a missing reality to their opinions and observations of living inside Ukraine while it is at war and the rest of our impressions of how that might feel. They have consciously, or, subconsciously decided to overlook it. They are able to let the air raid sirens come and go without pause. They work, live, fulfill purposes inside a country that I think has swallowed their self-preservation skepticism. I say that not as a point of judgement or contention, I say that as a character trait I now understand, identify with and consider re-succumbing to. I am debating what ‘going back” might look like. I am talking, tip-toeing, back into getting closer to that war, again.

There is unfinished work there. Nagging, gnawing, imprisoned memories of stories merely witnessed and not truly improved upon. There is need. That yearning, compulsion, despair in knowing, need is like its own addiction. The secret-shameful kind you cannot rationally explain away to those not bitten by it. The one insane thing that keeps that core group of crew, all running from something unmet at home, into a place full of so much stress and chaos. It is the explanation to too much of the fuels they consume in rabid proportions; Coka-Cola in liter jugs, chocolate, cigarettes, adrenaline. The diet of no sleep, no real meals, no real time off, no slowing in the tidal waves of need/requests/cruelty/neglect/abuse/injuries/devastation is a recipe for suicidal decisions. Why would any of us want to go there? Want to go back there? And not be able to explain it to others? I’m going back someday. Maybe not this month, next month, or (good Lord not while Russkies still traipse about pillaging and plundering), but I now understand the affliction, and the quiet shame in admitting there is a problem with that.

For all of the haunting, the nagging, the pulling apart the insides in silence I thought my one last act to gain some closure might be to get the animals I could back to a place where I could provide a happy ending from the perpetual purgatory. Even that has been met with resistance to the place of impossibility. The CDC won’t have it without lying. The adrenaline junky with the ego so fierce his temper is the only fuel he can’t medicate away, and the vet who wants to work for a paying client at the cost of a caged pet still in purgatory and I am here ruminating. Still. Compartmentalizing to the point of justification in some small, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to quiet the faces and break the bonds of the chains I cannot excuse away as kindness.

I need to stop... although I am not sure that it's not just contrition.. find another task to throw my heart into.. see if I can resurrect a soul I am not sure I left behind in Ukraine. 

For more information on the people and pets of Ukraine please see my previous blogs. To all of those struggling to find answers within the challenges of the places their heart strings lie I hope you find peace there, even if the world around you cannot.