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

Kittens and Rabies, My N=2.

 

Raffles, 4 months old

Twice in one career. Ok, let's put it all out there, twice in under 5 years. It shouldn’t happen. The odds are staggeringly not in my favor, well, at least for anything else. Perhaps in the very high density, over-crowded, collection bins of the shelters, it might happen, but, me, little home town vet me, well, surely it couldn’t happen to me?

And here I am. Just notified that one of the kittens I was taking care of, the second kitten I have ever taken home to spend the weekend in my bathroom, is positive for rabies.

The staff had named him Scrapple. One of three we had been given custody of to try to find homes for. The finder of the litter is a wonderful long time client of ours had humanely trapped, vaccinated and spayed their mom. She had also decided to keep the other little tortoise shell kitten sibling named Kali.  

Scrapple

We do a lot of this. We do a lot of helping out when a client finds themselves with a stray pet (or four) on their property. While I recognize most other vets would simply point to the local shelter for the answer to their "not my problem" dilemma, the shelters are burgeoning with too many unwanted animals already. Further these little ones would be at great risk of euthanasia due to space constraints or acquire a respiratory infection from stress, overcrowding and inability to be vaccinated fully before their arrival. This is a client we have known for decades. If she is willing to step up and help these cats I am happy to assist her. It works like that, a compromise for the sake of the animals involved. Jump in, be compassionate. Make a difference. Live your purpose, all of the things we veterinarians came into vet med to do,, and then conveniently dismiss as "no good deed" comes along.

Scrapples story began as a simple kind gesture for the sake of need and ability. He needed us and we are more than best equipped to help. So we do. Period.

But, Scrapple had a past that preceded us. That past is what the "no good deed" and it's "punishment" brought.

He had been with us at the clinic for about 2 weeks. He and his two bouncing, bigger, buoyantly bubbly calico sisters. The little black Scrapple was always smaller, more subdued and quiet. On Wednesday (2 weeks into his stay with us) he started limping. By Thursday we took an x-ray. He had an old fracture of his femur. It was healing (as all kittens do), but why was he limping now? The fracture must have happened many weeks ago. He was about 2 pounds,, so at around 1 month old? Why would a kitten have an old fractured leg? Probably fell? There were no wounds ever evident on him. 

There are patients who step into our clinic that are so sick, debilitated and distressed that they require 24 hour care. Within a few days of his arrival Scrapple started to look, and act sick. He was too quiet, too small, and not looking like his thriving sisters. In vetmed he would be called "a kitten failing to thrive." In reality he is a kitten with a mysterious disease that would have gone undiagnosed had he not landed here with us. When it became obvious that he was still declining in spite of our sq fluids, antibiotics and TLC we needed to make some decisions. For Scrapple to go to the ER for the degree of care that he needs would be about $1,000 to $2,000 a day. I estimated that if he was going to survive he needed at least 5-10 days of this. So, I took him home for the few days I hoped he would need to get better. He did after all look like this;

Scrapple and his sisters had been dewormed and microchipped at their arrival to us. They had also gotten their first feline FVRCP vaccine. They were too young to have been vaccinated for rabies. Their mom was spayed, dewormed, microchipped and vaccinated for her FVRCP and rabies.

Within two days Scrapple was just lying around. Barely walking, barely eating, and he was separated from his sisters. By Thursday night I was very worried about him. Based on his unknown outside history and rapidly declining status I was worried about him dying, and I was worried about rabies. I took him home to minimize the exposure to the rest of the staff if he declined like the last rabid kitten I took care of did.

The last rabid kitten was Mauna. She had become an angry, exorcist-needy demon over 4 days. It was a Hyde from Jekyll. It was a change so intense and awful that I wish I had captured it on video. In the last two days of her life she only did two things; slept and attacked. When you woke her she used every tiny minutia of energy to kill you. She was a piranha possessed demon just alive to bite you. She was a virus nestled in her brain to pass on her disease. It was almost impossible to kill her. There was no way to euthanize her. There was no kindness or compassion or ethics in what I had to do. I was not able to hold her, restrain her, or be what I inherently am. She bit me twice in the last moments of her life. I had to stand in the room with her watching her violently attack me and ask myself how I was going to be able to euthanize 2 pounds of terror trying to kill me? I had to put her in a pillow case, tie it tight around her, wear thick leather gloves and inject a monumental amount of barbiturate's into whatever part of her lay under the case. I had to repeat it 4 times. I got my second round of post exposure rabies vaccines a few days later when the lab called me to say that she had been positive for rabies. This is a clear example of the "furious" form of rabies. Scrapple, turns out, had the "dumb" form.

Scrapple declined to a comatose state. He was still eating his syringe fed meals like a monster. Turns out that rabies virus is just that.. very convincing to the host to keep it alive, even when the host can no longer carry to its next victim.

It has been over 2 months since Scrapple died. It took a lot out of me to have to put him down. I will tell you that as a veterinarian you often have to separate yourself from your emotions and do rally hard things. You have to have some pretty excruciating internal dialogues about reality, civic duty, compassion and allowing death to be a part of a life you live even when it is absolutely unwelcome. Putting a kitten to sleep that weighs less than 1 pound via a needle into the heart so that you aren't going to be bitten and further jeopardize your own life, and then go to the ER for post exposure rabies injections to the tune of a couple thousand dollars, is a stark reminder as to why the saying still sticks. No good deed can be punished.

When the health department called to notify us that Scrapple was positive they required that the remaining kittens, and their mom all had to be placed in quarantine also. Mom was sentenced to 2 months, and the kittens four months. Our client decided that she wanted to keep her bunch and has them quarantined together in a spare bedroom. The calico kittens had an adopter who decided that they didn't want them, nor to wait four months, so they adopted elsewhere. When the Health Department asked me what we were going to do with the calico's we had I told them I would keep them for as long as they needed me. They were shocked. They had never had another vet do anything other than euthanize and move on. Learn their lesson and let the future kittens in need be someone else's problem.

Birdie and Raffles

They have names, Birdie and Raffles. They live in my spare bedroom at my home. And I love them to pieces. For whatever time we have together there is love, there is kindness, bustling thundering playing above my kitchen, and a reminder that life isn't supposed to be easy, it is supposed to remind you that you have choices to remind yourself who you are, and what you will be remembered by. It is about acta non verba.

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?

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.

Be better than you ever have to be.

What if I told you that the problem was 100% you?

Land mine marker, side of the road driving in Ukraine.

Could you accept it? Or swallow it?

What about start to process and digest it?

How capable are you of rising above and introspection?

Deworming puppies in Ukraine

It's called adulting. You will learn it at some point. Or, die bitter still stuck on the silly, petty, bullshit that takes up the first 40 years of most peoples lives. Move on, chin up, be kind, let it go. It's really never worth the effort. People either love you for who you are, accept you for what you haven't yet mastered, and wish you well regardless of the differences, or, they just don't. How is that your problem? Why does it bother you? Or, matter, at all?

Maybe it is all you? Maybe it is all your responsibility to improve your own life? Maybe, even, just maybe you have the power to improve someone else's along the way too? Maybe you just need to forgive yourself for not being perfect, try to grow kinder, and wish others luck in doing the same? Maybe it's all about perspective, independent self assurance, and living the example that makes the world a better place to be in?

Start there. Be better than you ever have to be. Kinder than you ever imagined anyone could be. And just be happy with that.

The note left with two bunnies abandoned at the clinic this week.
There are always people struggling more than you can see on the outside.

oh,, and go hug your cat.

It is impossible for me to come back from a war where everyone is afraid, suffering and unsure of what tomorrow holds, and see the staff at the clinic fighting, crying, and despairing over clean up duties. I know I am supposed to empathize, talk it all out, and find a calm peaceful resolve to the petty ridiculous juvenile puling,,, but I can't. I just can't. I can't lower my worries to include the bullying being tolerated by empowered, privileged white women who are apparently so immature it is important enough to cry over. 

Maybe I will pay for it down the road? This inability to see problems that manifest out of air from perceptions that aren't worthy of the time it takes to address it? But, then again, it was war. Maybe they all need to set foot on Ukrainian soil to remember what life might look like if you weren't so caught up in the mopping injustices of closing time?

Found in Ukraine. Broken back, poor use of her back legs, and afraid.
After two days of calm, gentle support she melted. She is the sweetest, most grateful girl. 
She is one we could save. 

... I guess the parting thought is that life is full of so many challenges. Think outside of yourself. Remember how lucky you are and how little anyone else's opinion matters.

For more on Ukraine please see my previous blogs.

P.S. I find it implausible that anyone thinks this blog is specific to them.. it is not. It is as much an internal dialogue with myself,, as it is an external discussion with the way I know see things differently. I am not the same person I was before going to Ukraine. I will never be the same. I left grateful for all we have here, all of the incredible wealth, freedoms, and access to,, well, anything here, but I came back not more grateful, but instead less tolerant. Less tolerant to other people's real problems and my ability to empathize with them. I just can't see the little problems as big problems. Isn't life all about perceptions? And isn't the answer to hardship empathy? Why is it then that I don't want them back?