The Cost Of Hope

 Hope. When there is everything, and nothing, there is still hope.

Hope, for me in vetmed, is all of those blocked cats who never see a chance at help
because we may it too expensive.

A long time ago there was a girl who was afraid. Of all of the things she was this one thing dominated. It was what propelled her, crippled her, and reminded her. It was the beast she lay victim to for all of the days. It was the affliction her mother had and her mother before her. It was everything and nothing. It was, and it was what she let it be. 

It was like this for a very long time. A lifetime, and then, a lifetime more. 

Mom in her barn for her first antique sale.
She was beamingly happy, can't you tell?

It took a long time to recognize the part of her she didn’t have to be. She knew that there had to be more to this journey. The one she woke up to everyday to repeat the whole pattern again. But when you carry a beast so big, and so heavy, for so long, it is hard to raise your eyes above it. Maybe fear is the antidote to hope? she thought. And, maybe hope was the cure for her fear? And with that it began; the daily ritual of pulling her bootstraps up and raising her chin above the horizon, just to see if maybe out there somewhere there was another option to her fear. Maybe there was a place she could leave it? Just to rest its weary head for a while. Maybe, it was as tired of her as she was of it? Maybe, they could exist without each other? The shell without the cortex. The cure without the disease. Maybe, if she could grow big enough and strong enough, she could outgrow its need for her, and with all things that persist long enough, her need for it? Maybe? Just maybe?

What happens is that time works its magic on you and you grow comfortable with even the most horrible. You get used to each other to a degree that makes it hard to coexist without each other, even when the other half is a cancer stealing you from yourself. A bad marriage arranged on the most horrific of terms. Life is like that. It will kill you if you let it. Leach you to anemia just to see what the reserve tank has in it. Medicine, the art of molecular life in the grips of another life, the host with its many moving parts all required to work in tandem even when they have opposing agendas, is just like this. A dance, a tango set to a music you cannot always chose. You try to lead but you know the tempo might change and there may be feet stepped on as you tip-toe across the floor. 

Isn’t life like this for all of us? The calculations of actions you make silently within to try to make it through life with as little turmoil, pain, and scarring as possible. At what point do we learn that if you don’t have one side of the coin its impossible to know the other. Maybe with age there is wisdom and the ability to excise the fear so you can live with just the hope?

Outer Banks. Duck

Today is Mother’s Day. The day that we all celebrate the origin of our existence on the double X chromosome in our own DNA. For me, 5/14 is the day my mother died. On this day at 4:14 pm in a little stone house not too far from my own, my mom took her last breath. I say this as it marks a date, impermeable, and in-excisable. The pivot point to which the calendar resets, and a life without another starts. I say this because that day changed so much within me. There is a book to write about her, and her impact upon me. A book that sits waiting for the time and the distance to write it without it eating me up. Consuming me like the fear that swallowed her and kept her trapped within.

Today I remind myself that there is life after another life passes on. I cannot call her gone. She is never gone. She is here all around me reminding me to always have hope. To always see the beauty and the joy in the life that exists even if you have a difficult time seeing through the tears. Today I talk about hope.

Today I opened my eyes before the sun came up. The sky crept from black to the darkest of blue. A grey-washed out kind of blue. Smeared in its blurry shadows. Quiet, heavy, and slumbered with a fog that keeps all of the earth’s tiny souls safe in their beds. The first rays of sunshine wake up the world and to this awakening the first chirp can be heard. It is my time to be alone and feel as if the world will remind me that I am never really solitary. One little chirp. Just a call in the almost-darkness to awaken the rest. I turn on my Merlin app, and start to record. I now know that this tiny rooster call is an American Robin. Maybe being afraid, and trying to replace it with hope is about seeing the bravery in the darkest of places and still singing?

The potting shed. Mom and Diedra's boys

I made a video the other week about all of the clients I see who come to me having to lay their pet to rest after disease, and age, and all of the many afflictions that life can wear you down from. They always ask me the same thing, without fail; they ask, “this must be the hardest thing that you have to do as a veterinarian?” And I always reply the same way… “No. You loved your pet so much that you made them a part of your family. They were loved every moment of their lives. How lucky they are for that, and I know they are so grateful to have been yours.” That is the hope in the face of fear. That is the beauty in the face of death. Maybe losing someone you love is about remembering the hope they brought you every day you were together?

With hope springs gratitude eternal. Is there anything we wouldn’t give for that?

Happy Mother’s Day to you all. (regardless of what your chromosomes or current children roster looks like)..

The first icy drink of Summer. A mojito from our mint patch.
Diedra, mom and me.

And P.S. go out and foster, adopt, and live life with someone else… pets count as kids these days,, so we are all moms here. Maybe there is life outside of the one you are living right now where hope springs eternal? And, maybe its time to go look for it? Let’s all look for hope in the love that reminds us we are all mothers. 

P.S. I write about all of the issues that being me brings. I know that I am not alone and I hope (there's that word again), that others hear me and know that they aren't alone either.

The Sensuous Bean

Bollo's

I go to a particular coffee shop a street away from my apartment. It isn’t perfect. Not the perfect replica of the one I have spent the last 20 years trying to replace, but, it’s good enough. I feel a sense of belonging there. Silly, I know to find a sense of belonging in a $3 cup of coffee delivered to me in a tiny chit of a chat to make room for the other paying customers behind me. But it’s enough. Enough to feel warm within. Enough to call me back to every morning. Enough to find solace within, and comfort around. 

Gillies.

Most days it's just that. A large cup of black coffee; strong, dark, bold, intoxicating. I breathe it in. That first hello. Steam from its surface filling my foggy head with wakeful inspiration for the days needful wanting. 

Today, standing in line, I thought I saw her. She is always near. I can always feel her around me. But she has never appeared to me in human form until today. Today she was working far behind the counter in the small staff area half hidden from the line I waited in. Today she was there, standing back toward me, hair down, filling the monster coffee grinders just out of my view. And just for a second, the briefest of seconds, I saw her. I knew as my heart overrode my heads sensibilities that this was her. Her hair was long, straight, just past the shoulders, as it always was, with the tinge of silver her box color couldn’t confiscate. She was standing tall.  Taller than she had been in the last few years when the weight of the painful burden of her bodies betrayal had permitted her. Today she was 50 again. Time had slipped two and a half decades. Oddly, or poetically, this is the same morning our clocks had been pushed forward an hour. She worked quietly. I could only see a part of her from the back. Just enough to tell my heart that she was still among us. She had decided to hide in a coffee shop. She must have known I would settle upon this one. It’s deep, sensuous allure calling me in. The cry of a baby to its mom. It’s how we just sense the other needs us. 

Sensuous Bean

I know she turned around at some point. I know she did, but there was no face my mind could correct itself into seeing. Just the back of her. When it was her. The rest I don't need, and, so, I let her stay. 

No, I countered. It's not her. She never wore black. And yet between the coffee and the crowd I was content and comforted to just know she's near.

I spent the best part of 12 years sitting here studying.
Bollo's. My corner

Hello 2022, Whatcha Got Up Your Sleeve?

It's the dawning of a New Year, and, hope springs eternal, again!

(yada, yada).. as we all try to shake loose of this pandemic. Time to look back as I plan ahead. 

Or, as I feel is more realistic.., what couldn't go right from here?

So, here it goes,, pen to paper, heart on my sleeve, best attempt at optimism to carry me through another year. (Roaring 20's comin' round again?)

I want to open this new year full of old hopes and new dreams.... 

This year I am making some lofty goals. It's a combination of feeling obligated to make resolutions for a brighter future, and, be reminded about the bleak recent past.

Here's the dilemma..

I have this nagging lingering insecurity that I am going to find my dear friend Havahs' fate. She died in 2020 at 47. She was also a veterinarian, and a veterinary practice owner. She had two kids under 10. Or, my mom who died at 74 thinking she still had another 74 years left to get her dress rehearsal right. They both died too young. They both thought they had more time. Turns out life will hand you a shit sandwich and then watch you die trying to accept it. I prefer to not have any of this nonsense. I much prefer to die old, tired, contented and meeting that new book of the afterlife with a smile of gratitude and the look of the cat who swallowed the canary glee on my face. I hope to get away with everything as I accomplish more than imaginable. Maybe that’s not relatable to anyone? Maybe, in your opinion 47, and 74, are ripe old ages and there are too many people on this planet anyway? But, if COVID has driven home one thing it is that life is short, fleeting, unpredictable, and disposable. A bug/virus can rule the world and keep us hostage while it permeates every corner of every human life. Fear shouldn’t be the only motivator, but it makes a damn good coach.

There isn't much that my life is without. I seem to have so much that I wonder where it all belongs at times? It's a comfortable nest of fluff and fodder that I made for myself. Just enough dogs (two, and they are inseparably happy together), three house cats (and they have found a way of avoiding each other just enough to no longer have cat fights), my two clinic cats (Seraphina, she's famous, (see my Jarrettsville Vet Facebook page if you don't believe me) and Oreo, her ever devoted side-kick), and, the amazing group of people who keep the inner soul of the vet clinic burning bright. I seriously fear that way too many vet hospital owners claim success based on the thunderous magic of their worker bees who keep their practices alive. It's tragic and pervasive. I don't subscribe to it. I might pick the paint colors, and pay the mortgage but JVC is the magical kingdom of hope and miracles because of it's people. I have just enough, and yet there is this relentless nagging that I can do more. Maybe not for me, but others. That place where inner calling supersedes personal preferences to the laurels and my nest they lie upon.

I was talking to an old friend who now hosts a podcast on "successful veterinary practices" (of which JVC seemed to qualify based on metrics that remain mysterious to me). He asked me how the pandemic had changed the way I manage the clinic? I told him that I will never be the same on the other side of it. Early on, when the world was closing down to a hide-away halt, I told myself that no matter how bad this pandemic got I was not going to be the person who failed JVC. I am the third owner of a place that has survived and served its community for over 80 years. I have their legacy to carry and preserve. If that meant I would have to sleep on a cot, work any hour of the day needed, answer every call for help regardless of its severity, I would. I was prepared to be the vet of one against the pandemic of all. Whatever it required I would not let this clinic fall or fail. I was not going to succumb to the fear. The virus might claim me, and I might be one of those little ones in the litter of parvo pups where you are the single one who will survive. I had seen infectious disease wipe out populations before. I knew this villain, but, I wasn't hiding and surrendering. At this same time my mother was bedridden at her home battling a demon of her own. She lost her battle to cancer quickly in the beginning months of this world wide quarantine and fear. Her fear wasn't all she had to shoulder, she focused on the worlds of panic, tucked herself away, and gave up without ever fighting. It was the darkest hours of my life, without question.

Through that loss the clinic chugged along. In the beginning we lost some staff due to personal preferences about exposure and family obligations. As our numbers dwindled so to did the demands for routine care. It was a symbiotic relationship that made life manageable. But through these early days I had this burdened heart that was unshakable. Fear. Dread. Despair lurking. I got through it reminding myself that "to each beginning there is an end." One step, one day at a time. Breathe. Be brave. It's all I could do. 2020 took two lives very close to me. 2021 was the mourning dark veil of a still life still frozen in COVID paralysis.

At a vet conference mid Summer 2021, mid pandemic, I met with other female practice owners. We were all grateful for a get-away, and, we were all exhausted. Most of us qualified as 'burnt out,' I was charred. What I wasn't expecting was how much their attitudes about their practices had changed because of COVID. All, and I do mean all, were once (pre-COVID) worried about how the new corporate ownership would affect their staff. Two years prior I would have said that this was the biggest and most significant factor swaying practice owners to not sell to corporate. That concern had evaporated. Their viewpoint now was exactly what the corporate acquisitioners wanted to hear; "I'm too tired, too broken, and too frustrated/fed up to care anymore about anyone else. I just want out."

I never got there, but, I understand how others did. Had I been forced to run the clinic solo I am not sure I wouldn't have crumbled. I know of one veterinarian who lost 9 of her 11 vets in the first few months of COVID. They left for many reasons, but, they also left her largely incapable of meeting the demand. When I asked her how she did it she replied that the techs did everything. She stayed in surgical scrubs all day and the techs did everything else. It was now 9 months later and she was selling. Her team had abandoned her in her darkest hours of need. 

The backside of this pandemic has left me feeling relieved of a burdened heart that couldn't have taken much more. Where early on the demand for services was so great we were stretched thin to meet them, now we are anxious for its departure. COVID vaccines are available to anyone who wants them. Where I had feared people would be putting themselves at significant risk to stay employed with us, they now had options to protect themselves more than the mask and PPE's, (which make medicine inherently more difficult to patients who cannot talk to you), could. If a staff member had gotten exposed at work, brought that home and infected others, and anyone had died along the way the guilt would have crippled me. I was out of that self-imposed fearful scenario by end of 2021. The burden was now solely and singularly on them.  I could go back to being grateful for their help and not burdened by the fear of their presence.

Maybe being able to forge your path from the end is a good way to not be hesitant or afraid of the now? Maybe as I live everyday with such a constant reminder of what we are all going to lose from living through this, is a way to be more free to make huge mistakes, take huge risks, and live without caring about what others judge, call, label or even think about me.

I can say with a full belly of castigation that almost everyone who is anyone in vet med thinks I am an awful person. From the vet side my colleagues hate me. Yep, hate. Such a cruel word. I am not on twitter anymore and I cannot use the Facebook peer pages without at least one veterinarian trying to berate, bully and intimidate me into hiding in shame. I am outspoken. I remain this way. And it compels my every move in vet med. We, this profession, have failed so many pet parents whose lives revolve around their companions. The prices, expectations, and yes, our own interactions with pet parents is decaying. Vets don't seem to care as much as we believe we portray ourselves to the public. Too often in this, my own clinic, if I try to be vegetarian I am faced with the same shaming and ridicule. As if this life choice is insignificant and banal. And this is from people I actually care about. As I try to be kind to all animals I have staff members insulting me and mocking me. That hurts. I remind myself of this as I try, (operative word), try, to be respectful that others have different opinions. Even opinions on COVID vaccinations. I have had to accept that they may get sick, or even die, and it was their choice. I can almost accept this, except for one small thing, that person could infect another person who might not survive. So I try to be respectful of civil liberties and freedoms in the face of vulnerable defenselessness and yet I struggle to elevate them to the place of pride and dependency they hold.

I have done all I can do as a leader in a small town with a vet clinic that has no equal. We are the sum of all of our parts and yet we are still here facing another year of undoubted challenges with unknown obstacles and a big heart on our sleeve which I will be the first to say is our biggest strength for our greatest chances at success.

We survived the pandemic. What has it done to me? I suppose it will take 2022 to see? 

We were so lucky.

That fact has brought me back to being able to set goals. Make wishes. Be at peace.

What had gotten us here? I think it was just being true to who we are. Not being reluctant to be genuine. And staying there for them in both of our darkest hours.

How do these fit into this book of my life? My singular narrative?

I am left with feeling that they are the root of everything in life. 

Here's to all of us finding a new dawn in a new year, and the hopes that dreams are still possible on the other side of gratitude that we are all still here.

Why are we so focused on getting our pets to eat, instead of fixing the reason they don't want to? My dad and Shelby.

This is a story about how perspectives shape and influence decisions. How one small characteristic, a clinical sign, (as a veterinarian would label it), changes the quest of a pet parent and their companions’ journey. This is a story about my dad and his care of my recently deceased mom’s dog; Shelby. Shelby is 15 years old. A rat terrier by mine own expertly amassed breed-i-pedia visual inspection, a mystery by means of the trucking couple who sold her to my parents at a rest stop. 

She is short, squat, compact and spunky. She walks with a high step and a butt wiggle. A tiny stub of a tail to mark her cadence. She has always been stubbornly independent, and loyally devoted, singularly to my mom. My dad, on occasion cuddles her, but she remained the apple of my mom’s eye and the shadowed sidekick to her every move. 

My mom passed away in May. It had been a 5-month journey of surprise, horror and decline. Shelby, like all of the pets who live beside seriously sick, and/or, dying parents got left by the wayside. She was, short of the essentials of eating breakfast and dinner and the obligatory bathroom breaks, forgotten. When life gets reduced to impending imminent death the periphery gets pushed into the corners.

While my mom was struggling with her cancer and our lives were filled with obstacles and medical silent policemen causing you to halt, hinder and ponder, Shelby lost her advocate, parent and support system. She was still with us, but her needs took second place. She was still able to eat, walk, and maintain her bathroom schedule. There wasn’t anything to alert us she needed more, and we had a very sick, incapable and frightened mom to care for.

While my mom declined my sister and I began to increase our focus on Shelby. For all we could no longer do for our mom we refocused our time and attention to Shelby. It was what we knew she would want from us, and, it was most certainly what Shelby needed as my mom could no longer think, call for, or even provide any affection for her. Seeing my mom pull away from all of us, in succession of our ability to provide for her was heartbreaking. Within two weeks of her passing my mom stopped asking about Shelby. Within a week she stopped asking for anyone. As she withdrew, we refocused. It was a tiny way for us to still be taking care of her when she could no longer see anything outside of her immediate ability to breathe or stay comfortable. The moments of dying color you in a way that makes the world a murky vat of misery. There is no sky outside, and there is no future to dream of. We were all a part of the vacuum it created.

The other side of life will find you. There is an after after death. Shelby was on the other side. My dad had a two-week recession. A place he retreated to and couldn’t speak from. We all deal with grief in our own way. Shelby has become the soul we covet. The last piece of a person we all long to find, and resurrect and yet cannot. 

I see her looking for my mom, as I do too. This quest to find the thing you lost, misplaced and yet believe to be hiding. Waiting to be found again. 

Shelby is what I would call the last piece of a life I try to desperately to fan from a smoldering pile of ashes, life back into. She is the last piece of my mom that is alive. The houseplant you over water in desperate hope to grow with additional vigor, only to drown from good intentions. My dad, well, to be honest, I’m not sure how he sees her? An obligation to a promise no one can provide consequence for? A left-over piece to a chapter already finished? A companion when a couple has only one half? A broken piece from an engine with too many accessories? 

He called, texted and complained for weeks before and after my moms passing that “she was getting picky,” or, “wasn’t eating well.” All with a hint of responsibility that I, as the resident family veterinarian, had to fix. That her eating was my fault, my obligation, my responsibility to figure out. I had to have the answer to what the ‘right’ food option would be. He, left on his own, had decided that she ate the high-protein unlabeled dollar store options best. The kind of canned crap, that I seriously call ‘crap’. The stuff with gelatinous goo at both the top and the bottom, as if suspending the only product scantily considered ‘food’ in the middle section. Shelby, as I mentioned at the beginning, is 15 years old. She literally is these days, only as good as what she eats. She was eating sodium suspended protein (from yet to be determined sources) in a can, at the bargain price of 69 cents. No matter how hard I tried to argue about the short-term losses of his small victories of her eating, the long-term costs were further kidney damage. But, in the tragedy of a loved one passing, whose first true sign of demise is food refusal, the small gains are often enough to appease the immediate fears of loss.

The veterinarian inside of me has a problem separating perspectives here. I see all food refusal, “the picky eaters” the “poor eaters,” the pets who just start to eat less, select options with greater care and scrutiny as the beginning whispers for help. For many of my clients, and my dad now, the eating is a frustration met by compromises that delays our abilities to diagnose and treat. Sure, some dogs are given the latitude to become connoisseurs, choosing as a sign of stature and liberty, but, most become inappetant, hyporexic, because disease is telling them to do so. For many clients not eating is a slap in the face sign of failure. People fixate on eating as much as they do on having normal poops. It is, in absence of all other meaningful signs, the most important request from a pet parent. They don’t care why they aren’t eating, or pooping at less than desirable frequency or consistency, they just want it to be normal. Preferably, right now. (The request to the vet is; cause be damned, just fix it!).

In Shelby’s case the cause was not so clear. Shelby had bad teeth, (as every small dog over 8 does). She had needed a dental for about the last two years. Fear kept that from happening. Fear that her heart murmur would result in heart failure under general anesthesia, and death at a time of ombre dying transitions was too much for us to manage. We couldn’t risk Shelby while my mom surrendered. Shelby had her dental about one month after my mom passed away. It was overwhelmingly frightening for me to perform. I knew it would be a long procedure. I knew she wasn’t an ideal surgical candidate, and, I knew it had to be done. I knew that she would require extractions of numerous teeth, yet through the procedure there was this quiet calming peace around me. Peace that she was being watched over. That she would be safe and better on the other side of waking up. For as much as I was petrified to put her under anesthesia, pull all of those rotten teeth, get too cold, stay under just a little too long, and lose her ability to wake up, during the procedure I knew she would be ok. She was carried by mom, and I could feel her all around me, taking care of her, and me in the process to get through this last long surgical procedure to be benefited on the other side. For my dad he firmly believed that the excision of the bad teeth held the answer to her persnickety food denials. 

It turned out that this wasn’t so simple. Shelby woke up from her dental, slept for a few days a little more than she had before, and went back to turning her nose up at the offerings he proposed. Rotisserie chicken was nibbled at for about a week, maybe two. Then sliced turkey was plated, about a week there. To canned cat food, then hamburger or steak, but, only if it was freshly prepared. All the while, all these weeks, my dad texted requests for food options to save her.

Shelby had a thorough exam, a full blood work panel and every other diagnostic I could provide. X-rays, x-ray evaluations, blood, urine, fecal and every possible ancillary test from these. All were normal, or at least very close to perfect for a 15-year-old. There wasn’t a medical explanation for the inappetence. As each test was taken and passed, I tried to remind my dad that there was more to her health than bleeding and numbers. As with so many cases I see people forget, or omit to admit that we are all our own beings. That Shelby is more than a being with a mouth and an ability to urinate and defecate... they the ways in which we measure her, and her abilities are much more than our observations. Shelby was a soul who was confused and now grieving. Her world although still geographically located in the same place was no longer her own in the way that matters to her. It was upside down, inside out and missing its most imperatives pieces. She, just like me, was lost in the searching for the foundation of who defined us. With out my mom we had a tough time realizing who we still are. 

Shelby came to stay at my home for about a week last week. My dad, as he has been consumed with, was so worried about her poor appetite while away from home. Shelby, like all dogs, is resilient. She is capable of so much more than many of us give them credit for. My dad arrived early the morning of his departure with her in hand. He dropped off cans of food, the ones he had most recently had success with, her bed, a leash and her harness. He fretted, as my mom had always done also, about leaving her here, in my pack of three much larger dogs, and the four opinionated and bossy cats. 

“Just put her down dad, she will be fine. She knows where she is.” I said. She had been here for weeks when my dad was in the hospital about 8 months ago. She quickly adapted to our routine. Embedded herself in the pack that is our home. After a few days of adjusting she followed step on the daily walks. She took pride in being fed in her own space on her own time. She did very well with all of the activity a full house brings. 

“She’s suffering from boredom.” My words falling on deaf ears as he sorted through his own grief.

While my dad was away, she fell right back into our routine. Walks, bedtimes, carried to our bedroom to be sleeping next to all of the others. There is life here. She ate full bowls twice a day. Had long walks where she, like the rest, can smell the diet. Process the scents of the world she lives in. there are not the quick ins-and-outs of rushed bathroom breaks. She gets to explore, find questions in her head and answers in her feet, nose and sounds. She gets to be a dog, a family member and a companion again.

Here’s where my dad forgot what the life of a dog is about. 

Shelby, like all of us, needs, and thrives on being acknowledged at every single interaction. Her vision is failing, but she knows there are people around her. We always approach slowly, kindly and with a “hello.” She will lower her ears, bow her head, stand still, and we always (always!) take a moment to stop and pet her. Where she used o fear footsteps, fear being in the way, too close underfoot, she now revels in the affection. 

Your pets want to be your pets. Loved, cherished and acknowledged. 

This has to be the basis for everything that follows. It was the simple reason Shelby isn’t eating. She is bored, she is lonely and she is lost.

 For more information on anything and everything pet related please ask us for free at Pawbly.com.

If you are a pet care provider who is willing to help pets in need with your advice and compassionate words of kindness please consider joining us and adding your pet care experiences and thoughts at Pawbly.com. We are always in need of reputable professionals who can educate and inspire.

For more information on Jarrettsville Veterinary Center please visit our Facebook page, or website; JarrettsvilleVet.com

I am also posting lots of informative videos at my YouTube channel here.

COVID's prisoners. Dying in the age of a pandemic. My moms story.

Vacuuming ants off the table. It’s what I do now. Daily, let me add. They are there not because of the flowers I cut for her yesterday, (as she chooses to believe), but, because there is always food on the table, or, around the table, or, under the table, (found a half an orange there yesterday, desiccated and chewed clear of its pulp). Food lies in small unbitten nibbles everywhere around her make shift hospital bed. All have been placed there sporadically, sprinkled throughout the day. There for encouragement. Should the fancy strike her. Which these days it rarely does. The ants keep her honest at least.

The hyporexic is my mom. She has stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She needs a lot of help these days. The whole COVID crap has made dying a much lonelier event than anticipated. I have become the nurse and the house cleaner. My dad and my husband are the only others on her visitation list. It’s a small tight group. We all know too much about each other. It leads to fighting most of the time.

Hence, I vacuum. Or bide my oversight time cleaning, often.

Like all things in these days nothing is easy. To get to the vacuum I had to beat back the dust around and within the broom closet. To get it to turn on it had to unbury it from the cobwebs that quarantined it. To get to that I had to uncover the post Katrina WHO deposit of stacked bottled water that could serve Flint for the remainder of the year. This is the broom closet of a husband who never had to do housework before his wife fell ill, and, the paranoid couple who refuse to drink tap water after moving from a farm with well water. Trying to convince them that there is at least some oversight on the town water supply versus the farm well that I once saw a dead ground hog floating in is like yelling at the tornado to stop at your doorstep’s threshold. There is a mole hills mountain of poetic justice and politically driven pardons sitting here at my feet these days. I too often have to find the comic relief in the utter aging madness I have fallen into.

Quarantined with a dying person inside their house is a never-ending loop of t.v., feedings, medications, questions about if its ‘time again?” for medications, and self-checking her vital signs. The t.v. is tuned to CNN non-stop. It is her way she will tell you, of “still being a part of the world.” To which I remind her that that’s going to shit too. Maybe don’t turn there for joining society and being a part of the whole we left soo many weeks ago.

At her house I clean, like a mad person. It's my ADD that I cannot apply to CNN and the myriad of measured pills in their clock driven doses. Providing some degree of order, civility and modicum of acceptance that the world will go on around me is placed in sanitizing swipes at cobwebs too distant for her to see never the less attempt to reach.

Food is a battle. Like all aspects of her life now. She’s is wasting away. She is so thin and weak she can no longer stand without metallic wrap around support and hand grips. Shuffling from across the room to the small bathroom she exists between. My mom wants endless hours of all-day small talk. The escape she yearns for outside of the destruction her body is catabolizing. I am not a chatterer. I never have been, and asking me to figure that out for the last inning of the last game is too hard to go back to parochial school for. There is no room for normalcy here. I cannot seem to embed it in the cleaning to provide relief to the endless news cycles. And yet I continue to clean. Keep moving. Try to be productive and helpful as I uncover artifacts from a once functional home. Small items cause major melt downs. A half-eaten pie sitting useless in the fridge is a day long discussion on appropriate resolution. Obsessing on triviality and the time consumption it fills the day with is the reality of four people in too close proximity for too long already and no end in sight.

My mom's painting of Lilly.

“I cannot always be just as you want me to be.” I know it is not what she wants to hear. She wants me to be like the rest of her cheering squad. Professing love, sending her peace and Gods warm embrace. Telling her ‘this too shall pass’ and reminding her of all the beauty that surrounds her. The blissful passivity to all things holy and predetermined. The baking squad sitting on the bench proud to be sitting this one out. Gleeful to let the uniformed players who actually showed up for practice and have a discipline to put the blood sweat and tears in. I am not one of them. I don’t even know if I could become one? A spectator in her last hurrah.

This is the horrible place I am right now. Standing at the intersection of letting go and surrendering the hope I felt I would never unclench. She has stopped trying. I am not sure if it is all exhaustion that caused her to surrender her hope, or, the pain that her fear gave up. But all are gone.

Today was the day I decided I had to come to terms with goodbye being only a few moments away. For as much as we are so similar, my mother and I, I am most assuredly the human of voicing and reasoning while she is the soul of submission and omission. She won’t ever tell you what is right at the tip of her tongue. She will never confess. She will never say she is dying. She won’t give that up. She will only remind you with her every single action that she checked out a long while ago. I can look back now and know exactly when that happened. We were all sitting around her hospital bed when the doctor came in to visit, one week into her hospitalization to manage pain trip, to break the bone scan findings to her. “It is bad…. (long,,,, long pause…..)…. Really bad. She has cancer everywhere.” Yes, these were his exact words. She swallowed the words slowly and lowered her pale worn face and gave up. She had her pass to never doing anything again that she didn’t want to and she has ridden that pony into where we are today.

Cait

That discussion and discovery was over two months ago. At that time it had been over two months since her biopsy came back as cancerous. We now knew she had advanced metastic cancer in all of her bones which no longer allowed her to be candidate for chemo or radiation. They gave up on her as being too late, and she gave up on them as offering too little. She left to go home to try to come to terms with the cards dealt.

Today we are at her monthly oncology check-up. She was wheeled in, after being carried from her home to my car. COVID screening threw a new twist onto today's visit. We were met at a distance by greeting staff to check our temperature with a forehead thermal scan and provided and required to don a mask and gloves and asked a series of questions to try to insure we were not infected, or around anyone who was. Even the hospital is afraid.

4/14/2020, UPMC oncology

Two floors up we were met by the oncology nurses. Check in includes the cursory checklist on the clip board. They took her blood pressure and temp again. We collectively lifted her on to the scale and waited. As a veterinarian the scale is one of the most important diagnostic tools I rely upon. It doesn’t lie and it reveals a wealth of clues if you have been diligent in recording it. When the digital screen came to its stand still even the nurse wouldn’t say the value aloud. It was another long pause in a diagnosis of too many already. She recorded it and moved on. The scale read 76. As in 76 pounds. She is 74 years old. We started this collision course in December of 2019. Five months ago at 106 pounds.

I saw the blue numbers flash, swallowed my silence and gave up. Today I have lost hope for her. That hope for her chance to ever function again in the capacity that I have known her has passed.

It has been months of days that were up for as many times as they were down. She is painful, almost uncontrollably painful. She is on higher doses of opioids than I ever thought were humanly possible, especially for the fact that she barely ever hit a hundred pounds in her whole lifetime. She is not, as her oncologist put it today, “opioid naïve.” I was almost proud of her. It might be the first time she has ever surprised me with a title she didn’t earn from years of perfecting a skill. She is an amazing artist. She has always been an incredibly talented artist. She can sketch, paint, imagine any beauty into a canvas. Her work is all around us. At the vet clinic. Every room of my house, but a hard-core opioid aficionado I never saw destined for her resume. Today she was classified as becoming immune to their affects. Her body was acclimating to them. Starting to blow them off as inferior, paltry, innocuous. Today we carried her out of the house. Wheel chaired her into the hospital. Pushed her in a wheel chair into every room, every exam, and every treatment. She is a skeleton you can push without effort and pick up without exertion. She is bones and an oxygen pump spewing little hiccup-coughs into her nose. Her lifeline to failing lungs. She will need more drugs, at higher doses to get the pain at bay this time. Higher doses, shorter time frequencies and more side effects because of them. They will take away her pain as the collaterally steal her gut function, cognition, and conscious time.

4/3/20

There is nothing left for her to give up. There is only one last designation left to be made. No one wants to call it, although everyone mentions it. Hospice is all that is left for her. We can discuss a 24/7 assisted living home. A place that can help her with the things she can no longer do by herself. Bathe, prepare food, get water, manage stairs to get to her kitchen, her shower, or her bathroom. She is here. She won’t face it. She needs more than her family can give her. Once she lies down and cannot get up, which is likely at 75 pounds, that is the only option next to hospice. We got here so fast I cannot masticate the bitterness and the toughness of it. But the care facilities are all COVID magnets now. Sending her there surely leaves her a defenseless victim to this? Which is worse? I don’t even know?

my moms Easter canvas circa 2015

My dad is seemingly un-phased by the whole thing. The unraveling and the diminished ambulatory, unhappy being she is now. He is short tempered, over-burdened, and oblivious. I don’t know if this is a self-protective measure of avoidance? He goes through the motions and yet he doesn’t see the changes within her. “Hey, have you seen that bump on her back?” he announced yesterday.

“It’s her shoulder blade.” She is misshapen, misaligned due to a lifetime of scoliosis and the aging of osteoporosis. Her spine is “S” shaped and her shoulder has always been left elevated and prominent. She now lacks the 30 pounds to hide it.

The vacuuming leads to laundry. The monotony of never-ending laundry. Put in the dirty, smelly old people funk, and, POOF! Out it comes anew. Refreshed.

“Mom, we have to figure this out?” I implore her. I don’t think she cares to entertain my burdened inquisitive agenda. I think I am just speaking out loud. I think I am being my own therapist. She already has her plan laid out. The analytical doctor used to non-speaking patients hiding their illnesses and masking their diseases is who I am at my best. She is another patient puzzle to solve. I can solve this. It’s a cancer patient like so many I have had before.

D.C.

And yet, we haven’t figured her shit out. Not her treatments, not her desires, not her abilities, Nothing. That’s the truth. She won’t even talk about end of life stuff and I can’t let go of that. Doesn’t everyone plan? The finality exists only for me. I cannot ask her to apply any sense of wishes to an end that looms in front of us both. Her agenda is maximizing time into flowery closing scene experiences.

Ambrose

I’m venting now. I would do it aloud to try to mitigate my cortisol level, but I have to do it silently and furtively. The walker lurks too nearby to allow a release in the open forum of the room we are both imprisoned within.

No, I didn’t dissolution myself to believe this would be easy. But dying under house arrest in a pandemic that seems extra cruel. There is no way out. I could try my dads’ approach, be so caustic the best recourse is silence, and then do whatever I wanted to anyway, but then she would be completely alone. And she’s still dying without any chance of a better tomorrow so I type in hard puncture wound passes.

Easter box painting 4/3/20

There are days that are bad. Days so painfully long and full of so much demanding angst that I want this to end. Days that are full of meaningless errands. Answering a barrage of demands for things I cannot find sense in. Like removing Christmas decorations in April. Always with the same preamble “can you just do me one more favor…?” The red bow on the mantle. It should have gone weeks ago. It drives her crazy, which then in turn, of course, drives me crazy too. I have a home I haven’t vacuumed, cleaned, done laundry in in weeks, and I’m at her house cleaning it.

There is a disconnect between her preferences and her immediate, vital needs. The clock is ticking.

Yesterday was a bad day. The second in as many. It was a day full of moaning, crying, and pleading for the only relief I can give her, short of drug advice, companionship. She is alone too much. The loneliness causes anxiety which manifests into sleepless nights and further exacerbates her fear of pain and loneliness.

She is afraid to fall asleep for fear of not waking up. We should all be so lucky to die so peacefully. Me, I don’t want to wake up in the morning. Find some quiet place to bury my head under the bedclothes, a mummy wrapped for the long voyage to the underworld. She cannot find peace while awake. Her pain refuses to relent, and yet she cannot find salvation in sleep. It is a never ending roller coaster of unfair and unyielding.

It took her 30 minutes to muster the courage to sit up. Shaking, eyes closed, willing herself into moving the tiny rigid structure that used to house her options of freedom and choosing. She is now a prisoner to a broken body breaking down without any reconstructive abilities.

She is melting into nothingness. Evaporating, decaying, just crumbling. She cannot stand up straight. Cannot sit in a chair and face her dinner plate without being bent over and buckled into her own lap.

Oxygen is a commodity she obsesses over. She is hooked into a clear tubing pushing her lungs to accept what they can no longer obtain independently. She has multiple redundant units and miles of spare tubing. She checks her own oxygen levels hourly, half-hourly, obsessively. It is a race she wants to beat herself at. I have decided asking, inquiring about her obsessions merely feeds the monster that dictates them. The questions are met with anxiety ridden hostility. She has no patience for reason any longer. I try to talk about what she does with the information she collects. The nurses regimen of monitoring her own stats? This is another battle with no end point suitable to perpetuate the understanding of her data.

“Is 99 degrees too high?” She wants to be ready to alert the front line should she fall victim to COVID. It's part of her vitals monitoring ritual.

“Do you know what a normal body temperature is?” I ask.

“No,”

“Then you’re fine. Don’t worry.

We spent months trying to identify the source of her pain while we also tried to get it under control. We are back at square one. She has returned to that place where everything is impossible. Moving is too painful to do. We are here this time with 5 medications, three of them opioids, and drugs to chase the side effects of the drugs. “It wasn’t any fun there the first time around. Was it?” She nodded with a dejection of reluctant silent admission. We can’t go back there. Back to that place without answers, suffering met but a struggle to plea for anyone listen, hoping without precedence that one person will stop their busy over burdened life and actually hold her hand and invest their talents, dare even themselves, into her cause. There is an impressive amount of competence and excellence in her doctors, but,, there isn’t much in the way of genuine heart break for her plight. Maybe they have seen too many before her? Made themselves into little fortresses of medical indifference? A short dismissive hello, here’s what we can offer, a keep in touch, and a farewell to another time. The only thing left is to increase the doses of everything. Add an anti-depressant to help her sleep. Make the fear of not waking up a thing forgotten. Sedate her. Medicate and sedate is all that is left. What will that cost her I wonder? It will cost her everything she has left. And she will willingly surrender it. Pain is unacceptable. Pain and fear is her deaths last demand. We gave in to it as I surrendered hope today for anything else.

I can tell you a few things about this journey. I didn’t expect it to be easy. I knew it would be grueling, but I had no idea how alone we would both feel within it. Helpless, well, I haven’t accepted that one yet. We both have some coming to terms with the cards life has dealt us.

For more on my moms journey see the previous blogs here;

Silver Linings Of COVID-19.

The Journey. Missed Pit Stops and The Pile Of Regret Souvenirs.

For more information on me, my vet clinic Jarrettsville Veterinary Center in Jarrettsville MD, or for our Facebook page, or, free pet care help please go to Pawbly.com.

Me and my girl Seraphina, COVID 19 PPE prepared.

Thank you to all of my dear friends and family for helping me through this. I sincerely appreciate everyone's support.

krista

The Silver Linings Of COVID-19. The Life Choices We Surrender To A Virus.

There must be silver linings in the storms that life inevitably delivers. Lately I’m struggling to find them, identify them, and, keep a rosy eyed perspective as I attempt in earnest to magnify them.
It is the middle of March 2020 and the entire globe is focused on the pandemic looming around us called COVID-19. It is the fodder for previously produced thrillers too numerous to mention and the story is actively unfolding a little deeper and gloomier with each passing day. Everything that provides us our day to day normalcy is either under closure for safety reasons, or, threatened to become the next place shut down to ensure self- isolation to attempt to stop the spread of a tiny bug our immune systems won’t recognize and thereby might not respond to appropriately to save its host.

Fear based hysteria is influencing our very scientifically based safety precautions. The world has been our guinea pigs and we should remain thankful that we aren’t Italy, S. Korea, or China. There is some small saving grace in not being first country to start red dots that balloon into whole country-wide zones. You can learn a lot from the first guys mistakes, or misgivings. It isn’t a hoax, and this is our dress rehearsal. Fear is a great motivator and based on the grocery store brawls over toilet paper and sanitizers it can be the seasoning to remind us we have yet to evolve.

The COVID-19 mania is causing whole nations into forced quarantines. Communities are losing swaths of citizens and the novelty of a new big possibly highly virulent disease has scientists reeling over understanding it as fast as is humanly possible. We will have a vaccine for this faster than ever seen before in history. This will happen because we are so motivated to find it, and so practiced in the methods employed to do so. With each great advance comes an ever-increasing expectation. For me this virus is pure novel once in a lifetime science. Biology meets marvelous fragility. You cannot admire the incredible brilliance of microorganisms without conceding to their immense power. Take yourself out of the equation and the scales of survival are all pushed to equality. There is hope in mortality. Where one dies another survives. Without balance there is no beauty and humility. I know it sounds crazy to admire a virus, but we cannot convince ourselves we are so superior we forget to preserve the lives around us, can we? It is the silver lining to the once in a lifetime disease du jour.

Personally, for as much as I want to gawk and pine as the self-proclaimed science geek addicted to COVID-19 melodramas over the real-time emerging information and science of this new disease with the way it so effectively fertilizes its mark on the world, I have to take myself out of 30,000 foot view  and refocus on the other fish I have to fry. I have a hospital to oversee and a real fear that one disease for one species will strangle the ability for us to care for any other species. Every veterinarian I know went into vet medicine because we chose the other species over our own. The silver lining of unconditional love compelled us to serve one and allow the other to pay us for that. You learn fairly quickly that your heart may always lie with your furry patients, but your solidarity lies in the details of disease and its clear killing allegiance to its victims. There are times you must choose to protect the human at your adorable furred patients’ expense. I also have to brace myself for the lunacy of paranoia that people will abandon, or kill, their pets if the fake news starts concocting stories about that one 17 year old Pomeranian, who may, or may not, have or not had, we think it was two or three times tested? from a yet to be deemed credible internist in an otherwise yet to be relied upon country (China) who would rather control the news, their people, and their own reputation as being “powerful” than being honest and transparent. For now, your pets are safe. They won’t give it to you, get it from you, and they are still the best chance any of us will ever have at unconditional love as we are potentially put on house arrest.

My mom has been one of the billions of collateral victims held hostage by COVID-19. She was diagnosed with her stage 4 metastatic breast cancer at about the same time corona made its first victim. Her story of the duel between her body and its terminator started as COVID-19 patient zero found theirs. Her disease story started in December 2019. It has been a many months long process of finding her answers, providing her care, understanding her options with each choice and predicament, and uncovering resources and services to optimize an acceptable end of life plan. Its been a lot of shit to dig through while accepting the losses she never saw coming. For most of January and February she was in a hospital. She was released from that to her rehab facility early March. There was a choice here, but in retrospect it may have been the wrong one. At that time COVID didn’t exist on the radar. The choice was hers and the options were to go home, or, go to physician, nurse and therapist assisted 24/7 care? She wanted to go home. But she knew she couldn’t manage there in her current state. If she went home she had stairs to ascend and descend on her toothpick bones with lungs that wouldn’t propel her and an aluminum walker in her protective arsenal. She was now expected to be an 80-pound pack mule who couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t going to work. We, her family, the hospital staff, the social workers, everyone in her life, convinced her that a “short stay in rehab was her best chance at recovering some lost ground to be able to go home.” I put it plainly, “we are setting you up to fail, again, (this would be the third strike), at home. Your next stop, slip, bad card, etc. is hospice.” (Why I feel so compelled to tell her what no one else wants to say out loud to her has me facing the only regrets about this whole debacle that I expect. Personal notes; What the heck am I supposed to do? Lie? Purse my lips? Just live blissfully with the crowd in denial? I honestly don’t know. I do know that she prefers I shut up and act stupid. Just talk about the happy stuff” she pleads. I’m honestly trying).

My mom was transferred from the last 2-week hospital stay that proved fruitful in both diagnosing her and getting her indexed vocabulary of opioids in order to the rehab facility in Bel Air, MD. She was moved from an hour plus away hospital to a rehab facility within 30 minutes. We were hopeful that with her willing commitment to get a team approach to her muscle weakness, walker and oxygen dependency that she could go home stronger than the hospital bed, massive opioid slumber that pain eradication costs you.  She has nurses who provide a never-ending list of medication options on a daily rotation. She is now an expert on requesting and medicating the pain away. In vet med we caution every patient to find their “lowest effective dose.” That combination and frequency that permits the smallest amount of medications to produce the most tolerable degree of comfort without the sedation, if at all possible. My mom just wants pills delivered and pain eradicated no matter the consequence. There are lots of consequences. Desire to ambulate, breathing, and constipation rank amongst the greatest victors in the exchange. She also has lost the ability to manage these on her own and going home as such is going to be a real challenge.

It is hard for a fighter within me with no white flag in my wardrobe to concede. I cannot find a silver lining with all of her decisions. And yet she is holed away in confinement and I cannot meddle. Maybe that is both of our silver linings?

I call her daily. Dig for little tidbits of information. The interrogator in the room with civil rights and a fifth amendment defense strategy. She knows I dig. She attempts to pull the parent card, I usually remind myself to bow, she has the reaper to bargain with, why waste energy on me? There is her silver lining in having a common enemy and an hour glass with sand slipping away.

When we first went to visit her in the rehab facility I was taken back by the residents all lined up in their wheel chairs in the hallway outside their rooms. Some looked up at you, few smiled, almost none interacted if you said “hello.” They were the institutionalized form of ‘stoopers,’ the term we use in Baltimore City for the people who sit on their front steps and watch the city pass them by. When I was at the Academy we had “fall out.” We would all rush out of our rooms and line up like little soldiers, head bowed, cap covering our eyes (you are only a real person if you have eyes, I think was the point?). Shoulders pressed back, hands plastered to our sides, pushing the wall back into our rooms awaiting the next shouted directive to remind us that we had no place in the world and no one to save us. It was shit. I don’t know why I had no rational cognition of the person I was shaping myself to be under anyone’s command. Yet all these came flooding back to me as I walked those halls the first time all the while thinking, these people must be lifers?

I called her yesterday.
“Hey mom, what are you doing?”

“I’m in the hallway. I couldn’t stay in my room any longer, and I am not going to become one of those bed ridden people.” For her it is a simple step away from her worst-case scenario and not towards mine.

She is there. Locked away. Safe. And I am on the outside trying to not get swept away in the hysteria. Trying to understand all of the implications for all of my actions and decisions and knowing that little ferocious bug has me within my straw house in his favor.

At the finale of every long hard health battle beside the ones you love most there is a feeling of shedding the weight from your shoulders so heavy you couldn’t move out from under it until they passed. After yearlong battles with Jekyll, and before him Savannah, my beloved beagles I spent a year each fighting for and doting over, despite each day just being an accumulation of massive causalities that they gained along the way when they finally lost their battles there was this overwhelming feeling of relief. The burden, both emotional and physical, was now behind me. There was also immense guilt in that, but it was still true none the less. I can’t go see my mom and she can’t make me feel guilty, or neglectful, or even argumentative in my interventions as the over bearing guardian we swapped crowns for. Corona has taken these responsibilities off my plate. I cannot micromanage her, and, she has given up on that influencing her recovery. There is time passing between us that we don’t have. I can’t watch her with my calculating ever scrutinizing analytical medical eye. (As Diedra, my sister would me and say, I always have an agenda.” And she knows she is right). I am supposed to see what others don’t. I am supposed to be one step ahead of her next pitfall and help her side step it. And now remotely, my critiqued questions are blunted, and, or, more aptly ignored.

Her silver lining has been in the prisoners feeling of isolation and the oddly placed security that provides. She has people around her. She finds great comfort in that. Her self-imposed home isolation wouldn’t afford her that luxury. If she was at home she would not be able to have visitors. NOT ONE! She is the worst at risk patient there can be. She has precious limited time and she would be banished to spend those last days in solitude. At her rehab facility she has food delivered at her command, anything she requests, made to order and delivered without a tip required. She has people she can share her story with. For the first time in her 7-decade life she has learned what living with others is like. She never had a dorm, roommates in an apartment, or, anything where she had to share. She has never seen death, suffering, and disease cripple and control. It has been a lesson on humility, humanity, and empathy. She is enjoying exploring new experiences. Ones she would never had exposure too, and, honestly spent a whole lifetime avoiding.

I call her every day, at least twice a day. She is still her firing, pistol self. “So, mom have you met the people around you? Do you know the names of the people in the rooms adjacent to you?” I pick small sentences and direct questions. She is on elephant doses of opioids she can get lost in the sentence if it has too many curves. “Krista! Some of them can’t talk. I don’t have time for that.” And, the empathy recedes as the parent reprimands. I guess I am expecting too much. The vet in me wants to understand these people, and their conditions much more than the talking patients. Maybe that apple rolled too far from that tree?

The house is falling. The pain won’t win, but the body has lost its hope in walking independently. Stairs of any measure greater than one, and a tube in each nostril pushing atmospheric ether into her lungs that can’t muster the strength to tug on the diaphragm anymore. There are weak protests of pleas to let her “conserve her energy” which always sounds like handing the draw to the house. It is not a bluff but a fold.

I want her to know I am still sitting in the bleachers. Still rooting her on, and yet there is only the half-answered phone calls and the locked building that takes care packages at the front door. She is in there. Confined within her fear, and, passing precautions to me in the big scary germ filled freedom.
I know that if things get worse she will only have two options. Forced confinement if she is feared to be exposed or infected, and, home isolation if the bed she resides in gets too precious to permit her to stay in her already terminal state. How could it be worse? Die alone or die alone?

The veterinary clinic is being allowed to remain open, for now. The MD governor has us in his “essential personal” graces. We are rationing provisions, adapting protocols to minimize congregating of people, washing everything as obsessively as possible and trying to allow people, the staff most importantly, to do what they feel is best for them. They are able to take time off, stay home with their kids as all of the kids are out of school, and we will provide as much support as we can. There is no end date for a virus. Just curves charts and accumulated data compared against the previous days and weeks of data.

Life is a roulette game. Chance and luck, fate and frailty, and yet we are tiny specks in a timeline without boundaries. But she is my mom and her silver linings are fleeting locked up for her own good. I really only care how she chooses to spend her time. She has a team rooting for her while I cannot be seen or heard outside of her cell phone tucked away in her wheelchair. Her lifeline to the life she has on hold in the world of germs and equality irrespective of mass or intelligence scales.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more about my moms journey you can find it here.
Human vs Veterinary Medicine. My personal experience in dealing with both.

The Journey and The Pile of Regret Souvenirs.

For more blogs on subjects mentioned above see;

Terminal Mom. Losing my pups.

The Phantom Effect. Grieving the loss of your pet.

My Beloved Jekyll-pup. May you run through the fields forever.

Survivors Remorse.

The Distracted Hearts Recovering. Getting up and moving on after the loss of your pet.

I also host a free pet health network. If you have a pet related question you can find me there Pawbly.com.

I am also on YouTube, Facebook, and our clinic website JarrettsvilleVet.com

Be safe everyone, there is a virus out there.