When I Get Lost.

 

Alvin. A true example of how much we adore our pets. His story here

The most obvious place to start when you are lost is back at the beginning. Therefore, I go here.. Back.. Back to the place I last remembered knowing my way. Having a direction. A footprinted fossil. That old place to call "start here."

It is all I know to do when the map has been lost, the sherpa abandons, and the world reminds you that you are merely a speck. A tidbit of dust. A fleeting, insignificant blip on a timeline too immense to even contemplate comprehension. Me, the bag of aging flesh with so much determined compassion that even this reality is dismissed.

Retracing my steps as I attempt to resurrect my direction, (albeit a direction with accoutrements like “purpose” and “fulfillment”), I remind myself cautiously that I know, admit, publicly, that I have never chosen the easy path and I am fraught with a conscious empathy that propels me. This small character flaw is a burden. At times it has led to compulsion, but along that path I was moving in a  direction I believed in, and with it I had always gotten to somewhere. After a few decades of kinetic acceleration the directions have become more cumbersome. The world seems to close in, and be far less welcoming. Age, has privileges which lessen the compulsion for manners, but, you pay for that in diminishing opportunities. Gravity clutches your intentions and suffocates them into mortality. You can't get to the previously proposed destinations with the same vigor nor timeframe, but you don’t give a damn, so it all balances out in the end. Problem remains there just isn't a calendar with a timer counting down to designate END, so you plug away hoping it isn't aimless, fruitless, and depressing as hell.

Garfield. The reason in everything that I am and who I still dream of being.
His story here.

Maybe it's mid-life? Maybe it's inertia calling my bones to pivot? Maybe it’s the reflection of those around me nesting and preparing for a hibernation I'm not prepared for?

The conundrum remains. I am lost and searching. Fueled by frustration and losing a voice in the mass of bigger fish this world has to fry. My little cause lost in earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, and genocides in Africa, Gaza, and Howler monkeys falling from the skies over global warming induced desiccations. How do these compare with the with blocked cats, pyometras, and nasopharnygeal polyp looksies being fined out of emergency care? I don't know, I lost my map. 

There isn’t a megaphone big enough to hold my tune next to that cacophony of desperation the rest of the world is grieving. Yet, my plight, my purpose and my internal quest for recognition and empathy in animal welfare and companion animal needs remains as steadfast as ever.

The lost part was also my beginning. No one goes to vet school to change the world. It’s a futile fight in a world of humble hardworking blue collars. Purpose exists in heartbeats for utilitarian use. Sure, dogs and cats have gained a bit of status with their handbags, service vests, and bedfellow pampering, but, vet school, is equal parts food and pushing the limits of biology and financial cushions. I went to vet school with an agenda. I went to attain credentials to argue with bigger guns than the fodder could muster. A worldwide awakening of public opinion ripe for disruption. My hope was to be a pioneer on the frontier of acceptance that the pets we call family could earn some status that provided rights and consequences when infringed upon. Cruelty comes in many forms but the worst is the mass cover-up with just how poorly these beasts are treated, and how little value their lives hold for the food supply to remain cheap and domestic. No one likes to see suffering. The Styrofoam and plastic wrap allow it to be bacon versus Babe. Dogs and cats aren’t much better off. They are considered property in the eyes of the law. Replacement value for your four legged furry kid is about $100. Pain and suffering if they are killed or tortured are unlikely in the lobbying world of minimized liability the vetmed profession defends. We, the collective veterinary profession, lure out incredible medical advancements and opportunities out one side of our mouth when we recommend MRI’s, stem cell therapies, cloning, or organ transplants and protect liability with "property" status out the other. It is an unsustainable mixed message against a public so bound to their companions. We provide some pets month long stays in ICU's and chemotherapies with price tags now hovering around $50,000 and up. While others are bred to be mute lab-rat beagles. Compliance their greatest asset, yet doomed to die unnamed. The Auschwitz inhabitants of our day. We offer. We profit, and we refer to our own knowing price tags that begin at 10k lie ahead. We admonish when parents aren't prepared and yet we defer responsibility when heartbreak is delivered. We, the lowly GP's, always offer “economic euthanasia” as a mandatory treatment therapy option. We offer this to make our clients feel empowered and compassionate as the last true gesture of kindness to alleviate suffering we hardly ever have firmly diagnosed, nor been specialized to treat in its maximum effectiveness. We know you will get another pet. We also know it is much cheaper to replace than treat. We did this. We are responsible for that mathematical reality, yet, we judge and castigate when it happens. We are even so egotistically privileged that we feel good about recommending euthanasia as a benefit to our treatable yet priced out of affordable options within the bullet points of acceptable treatment options that we have now made this a lucrative part of the profession. (And people wonder why the profession is plagued by self help via iatrogenic euthanasia?). We kill ourselves as an option to seeking compassionate resolution to unanswerable dilemmas.

Pickles and Geisha. Rescued by a client who cuddles them like they are the most precious lives anyone of us has ever been privileged enough to be entrusted to protect. 

There are veterinarians so fed up with the anger of negotiating between need and availability, options and finances, or the endemic corporate structures of avoiding on call and surgery, they can either head back to training to specialize, expose themselves to most often kind side of medicine; in home euthanasia, where your clients always speak nicely to you and show gratitude or wash out and switch professions.

There is no map for this place. This crossroads of incongruities. This place where we have to be human in places of lost humanity. The place where greed greets celebrity. Kindness is annihilated by power hungry egos. It is dizzying to know where to go at times. It is harsh to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you can dissect the problem  from the solution when you know you live within both as a matter of necessity and survival.  

I'm still fighting. Fighting to refrain from accepting the self protective blank faced indifference that permits clients who can't pay to be turned away with some excuse about everything being “their fault.” Or, the litigious liability paranoia that defends our patients as being replaceable within the big scheme.

Sparky. Rescued within minutes of being euthanized, and hours after his owner surrendered him.
His owner was told he would be given less than a day to be rescued as the shelter did not have enough space to keep him longer than that.
That smile says it all. 

I don't know if I will ever find that yellow brick road. Or, the map I had predicted so long ago that would lead me to tranquility. Or, even my self-proclaimed Utopia of purpose driven bliss. Maybe mankind is so inherently flawed these just aren't possible? But, maybe, just maybe my path lies right here at my feet. The inherent perfection of the pets I call my companions. The wet noses of the patients I know to be my purpose. These beloved companions who love so completely and unconditionally they inspire me to keep marching on.

Lil D. Rescued from an online ad. Transferred to her foster mom in the WalMart parking lot.
22 toes (2 shy of the world record) and now living her best life in a home she confidently calls her own.

Where did I leave that torch and megaphone?

Cooper. Waiting for me to leave

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.