The 33 Parvo Puppies of Ukraine.

It's Wednesday morning. I am drinking coffee like its an Egyptian reincarnation elixir. Smooth, strong, bold. I close my eyes, grip the cup firmly. Sit back and breathe hoping that some magic vapor of it will infuse my body and reignite its desire to go on. There are remnants of the ashes of me left to try to re-assemble into a human being once again. Feel alive. Get up. Just move forward. For just one more day. If I can make it to Thursday I think it will be ok.... I think...  I hope. I breathe. I sip,,,

My mom,, she loved her coffee

It is the same every week. The long, endless days of too many people with too many sick patients and never enough money to allow them passage anywhere else. This is my life now. Arduous and yet so fulfilling I cannot remove myself from the pride shadowing the exhaustion.  Breathe. Sip.

I love mine too

I remember being in the Ukraine. The exhaustion I existed within there. That place, those memories. It is my litmus test for measuring grit, determination, and life. It is my pivot point. The inflection marker. The spot in my timeline that has become the yardstick for everything else. All of life before, and after, can be boiled down and reduced to that. That survival for all you know, and how hard you will fight. How hard you will push your body because your mind is so determined to make this existence not become your life-long reality. Nothing will measure up against Ukraine. Nothing ever could. 

Ukraine. Our compound cat

Ukraine was an ominous, looming feeling more than a place. Equal parts haunting, cruel, and inspiring. Mankind is always at their most impressive when its at its lowest, most desperate place. I remember driving for hours. There is no airport inside. The trains are few and far between. In a war the infrastructure gets hit first. It cripples the country. Cuts them off from the outside. Choke holds are strategic. You see mountains of fortified make-shift guard posts along the roadside. Whole town's blown to pieces. Detritus of shambled foundations with jagged edges and displaced lives beside them. As if still staking claim to a place they used to belong to. Elderly people staring off as if entranced or paralyzed. That despondent despair is pervasive, catatonic, sad married to depressing. People are lost, afraid. The air raids go off all day and night. The constant reminder that Russia has sent another weapon into their home. There are no middle class residents left. They all bailed in the beginning. The teenagers were all drafted via the fast track into soldiers. Alert, swarmed, clustered in groups, heavily armed, chatting like teenagers do, giggling and yet not looking at each other. Always scanning their surroundings in a reverse football huddle. Army green fatigues obviously new to them, but already worn out from the accelerated training they were thrown into. A visual reminder that these kids were forced to grow up too fast. Around them barricades of sandbags 2 stories high. Always smoking. People looking at death within months smoke, and get pregnant. The only place a teenager is not glued to their phone is a war zone. I rarely left the compound, hours deep into the country, but when I did I always traveled with a translator. A Ukrainian resident who made my passage, as limited as it was, safe. I never spoke in public. I never gave myself away. I recorded everything in photos and a journal. It seemed too unreal to be believed later without current proof that it had all happened. The indelibility of it all put to paper and video. Photos of the 500 plus dogs at the Droog shelter hidden away in the middle of a blown apart country.

Droog shelter. 500 dogs crowded and trapped

One of the many byproducts of war

So many things stir inside from that time. The oddity of not seeing my feet for weeks. (You never change your socks if it is cold, wet and you have no access to laundry. As long as my feet were warm and dry I just had to believe the toes still lay beneath). The degree of dirty your hair gets in a dark compound full of dogs and cats and a kerosene heater. The walking the dogs all day, trip after trip. Some mad carousel with no destination. Walking the dogs was my only escape. They loved it more than I did, and I can tell you I cherished it. An abandoned parking lot around some dilapidated warehouses with few areas of grass. The few grassy knolls we could find were littered with broken glass and needles. Another reminder that peace would not come easy. The hardness and grief that sticks and stays. You cannot ever get away from it. It owns you, worse than fear, more suffocating that despair. It is loss, and fear, and mercy, wrapped in hope with shards.

I went to Ukraine for reasons that will never be fully explainable. I have written and admitted to most of these before. 

The reasons I left have not been disclosed. Not fully. 

In the last days of my well-intentioned-visit I realized the full extent of the naivety of the self-inflated avaricious goons, (mostly American, Canadian and Bulgarian), I was housed as a guest with showed its true colors. These chain-smoking tatted hooligans were so broken and medicated that their intentions to rescue and protect the animals stuck in the middle of this war zone were never completely thought out, nor discussed. They went on these secret middle of the night raids to "save" animals and rarely understood, nor planned the consequences of these decisions. They had recruited me to be the vet for these rescues, yet they never asked for their experts perspective or advice on anything. I was a credential expert expected to be quiet and clean excrement. Cleaning cages and commiserating with the caged rescues was at least a purpose. These rescue trip charades, their testosterone fueled mid-night escapades, brought horrors of epic proportions. I was the only one who saw and prepared for the inevitable consequences of pillaging and hoarding animals in a war torn country without rails. I was brought into Ukraine to help the animals. I was recruited into the country by the ringmaster of said gang by urging me that I just wouldn't be any help outside the borders of Ukraine. (He was right about that). Getting anything out of Ukraine was ridiculously muddled and therefore impossible with ever changing policies, people and paperwork. Getting in, well, that was easy. Ukraine took anyone willing to step across three zones of barbed wire, an Army of assault weapons, tanks, and air so stale it felt suffocating. Nothing on this planet can describe the transition zones of a country at war and their geographically free neighbors. They met you at the border with open arms, and a smarmy shadow of lost boys trying to negotiate anything to be permitted the chance at being smuggled out (anyone between 14 and 60 was drafted and required to stay). There is a cafe, just inside Ukraine at the border entrance that stays dimly light, serving never ending cups of rancid coffee, 24/7. It is the gas station you fill up at as you wait the days it might take to get wherever you think you can alive in. This is the dead zone. Dead to those trying to leave. Dead to those weary of wandering in. 12 hours into the country by car the compound with the rescued animals I was supposed to care for sat. A cement barracks so dark you couldn't do anything without a flashlight we were warned to use with caution, or waiting for daybreak. Everything was done while the sun was up. A dozen dogs and cats caged to keep safe for some unknown break in a war so they could resume a life. It was long days and a bleak existence. I might have been recruited to be a veterinarian in a place that needed one desperately, but, I was not permitted to actually practice what I had been trained to do. 

A fridge of vaccines sat quietly hooked to the only generator we had. It was the only thing that was kept cold outside of a cooler used for the long car rides the boys had to go rescue some pet somewhere when the Ghostbuster phone rang.

 It is all a muddled dream of mankind's worst and humanities intentions. All gone awry in between. 

More on Ukraine here

Two weeks in to my stay and the moral in the compound was low. This team existed on the next adrenaline fix and the tank was low. One early morning, (the gang always left after midnight), they took the trucks and rolled out. When they returned that afternoon, the boys showed up with 33 puppies in 5 cages. They marched into the compound full smiles.Lumbering in like Santa with a gravid sack of new presents. They legitimately thought that they had "rescued" them to have them be better off with us. I had witnessed them before buying the animals as some kidnapping meets hijacking ransom. They had paid for the bear, the wolf, the diabetic dog. They had cash from their viral videos and they had no problem buying an animals "freedom." I knew the second that I saw these puppies that they were all likely to die. I still believe that these puppies were props for social media fodder and fundraising. The rest of the volunteers spilled them out like candy. They spent the rest of the day in bouncing, baby, bitey-kissey puppy piles. The kids with their Christmas toys. All new and excited. I left the next day. Over the next weeks all but 3 died. The veterinarian who remained, (also recruited), and two others worked all day and night for 14 days to save them. This is not just the outcome of war, this is the outcome of power plays and idiots deciding how to manage infectious disease. I heard that three of the other older dogs also died. Three of the dozen that the "head vet tech" wouldn't let me vaccinate. I was told I couldn't vaccinate because I wasn't a Ukrainian vet. The dogs and cats didn't care who vaccinated them, but most of them died because no one vaccinated them. I left because I was part of some guys mistaken altruism. I left because I knew I wasn't helping animals I was harboring infectious disease agar. I left because I can help the pets of my community in a real way. There is parvo in my own backyard. There are unvaccinated dogs in my own backyard.

Poe. Our parvo puppy. Story here

This plays out to this day. The local shelter is stuck in a save face powerplay that is just costing pets their lives. Infectious disease is going to find a way to survive in the weakest, smallest and most vulnerable. It is an inherent, omni-present reality of too many lives in too small an enclosed space. It is the cost of mixing populations. Housing the lost, surrendered without previous adequate medical care, and just plain old bad luck fate. I purchased the parvo treatment on my own dime to save the lives here I can try to save. I offered it for free, and any supplies that would be needed, to save the 30 puppies I couldn't in Ukraine. The shelter had an outbreak. These are inevitable in large populations of animals. When it happened I offered care immediately. I was dismissed and the puppies were euthanized without a chance at recovery, and to my knowledge without veterinary oversight. A tragedy yet again, and this time in my own backyard. 

More on our parvo outbreak here. 

There are a lot of layers to this tragedy. A lot of people who are responsible and want to make excuses as to why this is acceptable. I will fight for these three puppies (there were 4 that died in total), and hope that it makes the next outbreak allow some survivors. There is no chance when euthanasia is the only option provided. There HAS TO BE A veterinarian at the forefront of medical cases. There has to be a group effort to save them and not just try to eradicate the disease that they are afflicted with as collateral consequence. The common thread is that you have to have credentialled experts leading the decisions. If you don't it will cost lives. If you don't the responsibility for those lives is on the hands of the leaders behind the decisions. That is called accountability. It's the collateral damage to being in charge.

There is a treatment in a bottle that offers help. As soon as it came on the market I bought it. It stays in the freezer at the clinic with the hope that it might save one puppy I couldn't save in Ukraine. I give it away as some small way to pay it forward. There will always be that vial in my freezer and that hole from those 30 puppies in my heart.

Watching a dog die, always a puppy, from parvovirus is wrenching. Knowing it died when it was preventable, infuriating. If needed I would give that vaccine away too if it meant I never had to endure watching that suffering.

My puppies. Rescued from shelters.

Did we talk about the shelter buying/transporting from high kill states down south puppies for adoption events at the Motor Show at the Baltimore Convention Center? Why bring your own dogs when you can import puppies? More on that soon. (Deja vu, right? except wrong continent). 

The Calls Home. NYT Russian Troops cell Phone Calls in Ukraine

It is a cancer within me. I cant un-see it, un-want it, or banish it. I made it mine and so it is. 

Droog Shelter Alexandria Ukraine late April 2022

I suppose it is a cancer of a conscious that won't let rest. Dismiss it as too far away, and not mine to feel parental guidance for. It's another place, other people and even that isn't a clear enough choice to eradicate it. Preserve the self for the necrotic within.

Triggers. Todays was a full two page list of the collected phone calls tapped by Ukraine as Russian soldiers called home. Will America read them? Will they share my disgust and dismay? Can a cancer have a community of witnesses to grieve as one? Isn't humanity supposed to have kicked in by now. Like sometime in the tweens after AD occurred? 

A street dog in Ukraine. A small act of kindness within a country at war.

How are we still so tolerant of such aggression and egregious acts? I'm going to assume that these phone calls are legit, and I am going to say that I, from the little I saw when I was there, believe them. I just cannot feel much more than shame and empathy. Shame that madmen still walk among us and no one will step up and take down that plane before it hits its target and annihilates another thousand innocent civilians, and empathy that two countries children have to fight, die and witness what war turns people into for that same madman's ego.

Where are you going to fall in the course of history that marks our species? What cancer eats at you?

For more on this see Uproxx

For The New York Times article go here.

For more on my trip to Ukraine please see these previous articles;

The best recap I have on my experience is the podcast with Brendan Howard, The Veterinary Business Success Show. 

Recognition, Resolution and Restitution blog

Better Left Undone

Purgatory

Walking Away

The Faces and The Ghosts, Coming Back from Ukraine

The Compound

My personal note,, to those I left behind,, two and four legged,, I think about you everyday. My heart still beats within Ukraine. I will be back.. there is too much left undone.

Recognition, Resolution, and Restitution

 

One of the few rescues who got out. We brought her to Romania.
She has since found a home.

I had hoped I would be at a different place then here. And yet I am not. I am still stuck. Mucking and muddling through the aftermath of a trip I was so compelled to journey upon. I was hoping to make a difference. Assist a place so fraught with injustice. Throw a fist in the air to provide a whisper of defiance to a place I have never been before, for a people I do not know.

The Ukraine story, my story within theirs, still nags and gnaws on inside of me.

Here’s where I am, and here’s what I didn’t know I needed to start to try get away from it all.

Sandbags and steel barricades. They are everywhere.

Validation. I needed this. It might be shameful to admit. (Heck, if it is I am ok with that). I needed to not feel so alone. It came from two voices today. One, Dr. Sarah, who felt as desperate to go and help as I did. And two, Dr. David who arrived at the group I was with a week after I left, and described it, his experience with them, (not even the Ukraine war debacle) as; “the worst experience of my life.” He has been a veterinarian for 37 years. I found myself apologizing to him. Sorry for what he had been through. Sorry that I couldn’t have helped discourage him from being there. I can feel his weighty regret. He, like me, wanted to go more than our due diligence in trusting commandos with nothing to lose brought us. He, just like I, was content to clean the kennels of the dogs that the egomaniacs who had retrieved them would not do. Silly how we were so easily and eagerly recruited to came care for the animals because there was no one with any veterinary training there to help, only to be trusted with kennel duty. For me, I was more intent on being useful than being disposed. It seemed from day one of my arrival in Ukraine that my two options for being a part of the ramshackle team was clean cages/walk dogs/try to lay low, or, be headed with the engine crew to drive all over Ukraine on a rescue mission. He, like me, feels misappropriated, cheated, and deceived to have come so far to clean kennels, while watching them die of disease and isolation in dark cramped cages. I feel most closely connected to the animals I was so intent upon helping because of the solitary time I spent with them. Regardless of my medical prowess my contentment, despair, and painful burdened heart lies most solely upon walking away from those animals. I am bitter, burdened and speaking out for them. I will not be able to find my answers to the nagging puzzle still in pieces around me, but, now I can share my story with the others who passed through after me. Revenge for the eyes of those needful, displaced souls I can no longer be walking near.

Jeffery. One of the few to get out.

Resolve. There is none of that here. So, I fall back into recognition. I keep finding myself chewing on the days, the quiet with a dog on a leash, walking, walking, walking. And the faces I will never see again. The eyes of those faces that I dream of. Want for, and beckon to.

Mischa, the compound kitty. I loved her, she needed us. I needed her.
I spent much of my days just holding her. 

Today I found a community. It was the first time I could talk about my trip and have it resonate with someone else. I can say that I needed them, and feel great comfort in them also needing me. A community of more than a singular being who still tries to settle for the dust that won’t fall. I have found three other people, (maybe four? Or, even five?) who went just to be helpful. Just like me. They put their lives into a precarious place for the pure humanitarian effort that is so desperately needed. Just like me. Three other people who went because we were silly enough to believe that we were needed just because we were told so. We all asked for references, a call from the one before us to help settle the voices within that we were doing the right thing with the people who shared our view on this preposterous invasion and had the gumption to not only say so, but to do. All of us received the same response. None of us were given each other’s contact info beforehand. We found each other afterwards. After we left. Came home. All of us struggling to come to terms with our time there. All still reeling from the experiences we had. All ostracized by the group we put our lives in the hands of. I can’t express how consoling having this community is. There is something inexplicably horrible about loneliness. Loneliness with a secret no one can digest. A rumination of fear-based failures from a faraway place that isn’t relatable, nor comparable. War is the most atrocious act of mankind. War upon fellow humans just because you believe your might is more than their spines can withstand is unforgivable. The weak, poor and defenseless who get caught in between, that, well that is enough to motivate foreigners to your shores. And yet there is this survivors remorse, this silent pain of abandonment, and the futility that seemed to have come from risking so much.

My husband doesn’t understand. I can’t share this with him. It is still too raw, and my actions too selfish for him to make room for empathy on what that trip cost me, never mind him. He thought it foolish from the start. Empathy with a fool is permission to repeat. He wants me to see the experience in valuations from the economist’s eye. The weight of one life and the cost it requires. “Is one dog from Ukraine worth the thousands of dollars it cost you to care for them? Is it worth it when they still cannot get out? When 25 out of the 30 puppies that were brought to the compound died of parvo simply because they were rounded up, caged together and never vaccinated?” No, the answer is no. I wasn’t brought there to practice 30 years of medicine that I was armed with. I was brought there to be a pawn in a delusionist's collection. I was pled to so that I could be a talking point for more social media fuel. The lives can’t be counted as not valuable, not risk-worthy, not my problem to solve.

The first euthanasia I had in Ukraine. Heart failure.

If grief is part of this recovery I am past the heartbreak of not being able to bring the dogs and cats I helped smuggle into Romania. I am in anger. Anger that I wasted my time, watched those dogs die from sheltering, caging, and followers. Angry that this is the only place I have left to put the pieces. It’s not good enough that the wolf and the grizzly bear are safe and out of Ukraine. It’s not good enough that I came home safely. There is not a place I can shelve this and go on.

Can I continue to carry the stories of the faces I left behind? Can I find the will to put the pieces back into some assemblage of peaceful acceptance, or, am I at the place where restitution is the only resolution?  

Coughing all night. He just coughed all night. Antibiotics, sedation and a full grooming shave down. He was brought to Romania. In a shelter now.

I said once to a fellow, equally fried veterinary colleague, "yeah, I get it. I am so exhausted by the sheer volume of need, and the frustration of my inability to meet the demand that I went off to a war to try to feel better about myself, and my current place within vetmed." Maybe the muck is my own to own, and accept? Maybe there isn't such a thing as a peaceful recognition, nor resolve. And, then again, maybe the restitution only exists within?

rsity doesn't Include Inclusion. The Division In Vet Med That Exists When We Talk About Access To Care, And Vegans

 

The world reminds us to look inward and ask ourselves how we, the little tiny ant of the mound that is this planet, influence the behaviors of the rest. Now, at this time when the pandemic wanes, the invasion of Ukraine dominates the news, and the ever-increasing faces of color peppering the professional rags and conferences reminds us that others should not no longer be marginalized, and the Supreme Court further divides the able from the oppressed, I wonder how far have we really come? For the many in vet med who refuse to recognize the invisible challenges, countless extra steps, and years (if not decades) of extra that are required to be seen, never mind deemed, a ‘colleague” there is no possible way we will convince them of the patterns, biases, and inherent hate that too many above inflict on too many below.

Diversity only happens when one oppresses the other, or a chair is pulled from the table to invite another in peaceful kindness. I don’t see a lot of this in vet med. I have rarely if ever, and 30 years in, I still do not. Even with the diversity we are inheriting amongst us.

For my own journey in getting into veterinary school I know that being white left options others didn’t have. I admit it with humility and shame. I was allowed, or more aptly granted permission, because I was a white woman with an anomaly. I had a path behind me that set me apart. I was already established in a career overwhelmingly dominated by men, and making more money than anyone in my vet school admission interview. That simple fact left me unafraid to break glass ceilings, dig my steel toed boots in, and stand strong face to face challenging them to exclude me. It worked. It worked at the academy I went to college for, the sea life I spent working in for 10 years, and the getting into and out of vet school. It has not, however worked for the life after graduation from vet school. I would still call myself a pariah of this profession. I am not wanted, nor welcomed IF I chose to be true to who I am. I am not alone here, but, we are not big enough, loud enough, or protected by any organized facet of the society we live in. I would most compare it to a religious sect without federal recognition, save for the fact that assigning a religious undertone is equally disgusting.

I wonder if this is the rejection of diversity, or, the lack of inclusion? I wonder how much the division, exclusion, and alienation empowers versus subdues?

I was speaking to a friend affiliated with the profession. He is not a veterinarian. He, like every other human who is not a veterinarian, is flummoxed by the assertive defensiveness that is elicited when I show my face in a veterinary forum. I am not included, often harassed, and I often wonder if it has made me stronger and more contentious about staying within the ranks and file as complicit in our negligence and neglect that so often leads to suffering and death? How often do we look away when a patient needs us but cannot afford our compassion? How often do we deny them of analgesics when all else has been declined, or become too expensive to provide? Why aren’t we charged with the same awful labels we denigrate our negligent, too poor to be privileged with a pet, lacking in responsibility to warrant pet ownership, it’s not a right labels? Why aren’t we taking some of the blame? Why do we still wonder why the public has become so enraged by our lack of compassionate access to affordable care?

In my opinion we have to stop trying to explain why our life is so hard that we cannot be kind and understanding to other people’s struggles. We have to take ownership in the fact that the cost of our care is priced out of much of America’s ability to pay for it. Maybe we should start explaining how $100,000 sign on bonuses aren’t a part of the problem? Maybe we should keep trying to convince heartbroken pet parents that the life saving surgery their pet needs would cost 10-100 times what it does in the human forum. That will settle the angry masses, right? No, it won’t. It doesn’t matter what kind of excuses, deflections, blame and accusations we make, we are creating a profession that increasingly only serves the wealthy, which in this country is still the white and the fortunate. We are not opening our inclusion to anyone; we are increasingly excluding the people and the pets who need us most. We cannot try to become a profession where everyone is welcome just because we all share a love for pets when we alienate so many on both ends of the leash.

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.

purgatory

Purgatory is that place between places. The place where bad outweighs otherness. "The place of temporary suffering," as Webster notes. It is the word I used in Ukraine when the group asked me what my thoughts on being there were? I said "purgatory." When I did I got back puzzled faces? I had to define it for them. They were Romanian, Ukrainian, or long time UK military. It wasn't a word any of them used, knew, or could place in the reference I had given. I had used it because it was the best word my mind could find to express my deep concerns for the plight of the animals I saw there. The animals we were all taking care of.  The animals we were all risking our lives for. But now that I am home I think it defined the whole mass of the entire experience.

I was reading the New York Times, (one of my bucket list items from COVID), and in it I saw that there is a new series by Stanley Tucci (something about food? I think? and Italy?). It caught my eye as I have developed a serious crush on him. On the 10 hour plane ride home from Bucharest to Dulles I watched Supernova. It is an intimate love story between Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth, who are quite possibly the sexiest over 50 duo to land on the big screen. Their story, their ability to capture their characters, draw you within them, and keep you suspended within hopeful curiosity to a story that can't possibly have a "happily ever after" captivates. Watching that film in the dark, seated in 23D, (middle row, who booked this seat for me??!!), was one of the few escapes from purgatory that trip permitted me. It's a story that pits dying within the despair imbued within trying to live through the saying goodbye. It is two men destined for one another and dealing with the end to their love story on their own terms. I got lost in it. I cried. I cried buckets for them and to purge my purgatory sentence. It was the beginning of my onboard movie marathon. The "jump in and drown yourself in tear-jerkers" to see if you can just purge yourself of the ocean you are drowning within. Next up with 2 hours down and 8 to go, was, Land. Robin Wright putting herself in the middle of the harsh, brutal, winter woods of northern Colorado to be mercilessly faced with dying alone at the unmerciful hand of nature she was excessively ill equipped to face solo. It almost appears as if she has a death wish she dares to claim her. It is a bit of a love story with forgiving herself for the life changing, heartbreaking series of horrible losses she has faced. It is also a bit of a finding yourself as you cannot permit suicide based on a promise she made with her only remaining close relative, her sister. It is about accepting loss as you find out who you are and what you are made of. An intervention based on facing survival alone. My favorite quote, "only a person who has never known hunger would chose to die of starvation." Can one outwill themselves from their own purgatory? Robin did. Why can't the rest of us? Specifically at this moment, why can't I?

   

Hour 6 was yet another chick flick meant to wet your face. I rode that horse into running the tear well dry. I had hoped I could cry it all out before I got home. Last move, "Eat, Pray, Love." 'Cause why not watch a movie about another woman with a lost purpose who dumps, runs, journeys far away and tries to find herself within the muddling, meandering, and muck? (Why didn't I just have a Minions marathon? Laugh that crap out? I always feign to my feelings. Do I always choose cry over laugh? Glutton). 

I was shocked to hear an NPR news interview driving to work about how it is believed crossing a large pool of water cleans all your woos. I swear it was true for me to. Something about crossing the Atlantic, crying through three movies, 6 plus hours of tear-jerkers and I felt better. Here's my entry from my journal as we trekked along at 30,000 feet above the great big blue..

"Maybe it is this wretched ocean? The Atlantic Ocean. (I spent a decade sailing this ocean, it's a legitimate adjective in my hands). Where so many years were spent washing away the time. Suspended life while the world still turns and others live theirs. A parallel existence with the same measure of time, and yet, mine was stuck. Away at sea is stuck. A purgatory of its own, with the exception of being so busy with the work at hand you are too tired, too focused on catching rest while you can, that you cannot see the purgatory for the absence of self. Going to sea is an endless cycle of home, push play and begin to live, to pause-pack a seabag and head offshore. Play-pause-play-pause-repeat. The continuum you cannot fit your life into off season. Big gaps of time passing with the currents and tidal changes of the oceans you cross. And now I cross it again, this time headed home, and as I do I just feel better. washed clean. Absolved. Christened. Baptised. Home calls and the ocean absorbs the tears of loss, abandonment of those faces I cannot suppress, nor bury, nor leave behind. Maybe we are square now? You the ocean, and me the lost soul bobbing back to dry land.

Even if I don't feel like I am wearing that cape of despair the Ukraine trip brought me to the same degree, bending under the weight of the pain, suffering, despair and dismal chance of any of that changing anytime soon, that cloak isn't so weighty any longer. The ocean crossing with the movies of other misplaced/lost souls seeking validation/acceptance and inner forgiveness seemed to bring some resolve. But the perception of purgatory now having a place on the map, a feeling of tangible faces with names and unknown, unsettling possible futures, the sights, the smells, the sounds, that kind of purgatory still lives on Ukraine. Defining it is only a matter of finding your place within its borders. Crying your way home to buy your way back into heaven is the cost of a plane ticket without sleep. 

For more on the trip to the Ukraine to help animals displaced by the Russian invasion please see my previous blogs.

If you would like to help the animals of Ukraine please consider adopting a pet in need in your back yard. Or, donate to these amazing organizations;

Sache Foundation in Romania

Big Dog Ranch Rescue

The faces of Ukraine;