I hauled off for a mini-overnight horse camping trip, even though I shouldn’t have run (limped) headlong away from my duties for the weekend - “I’m so far behind I think I’m in first place!”
Little Bit (Tina Fea) didn’t adapt well to her first camping trip and has gone on a hunger strike. She vomited Saturday afternoon which I blamed on delayed carsickness, but I ran some bloodwork on her yesterday & uncovered some liver issues - great!!! that may be why she’s so skinny & why her owners dumped her (often times owners won’t take on the responsibility of euthanizing a pet with an incurable health problem - I guess they think slow starvation is better??)
I really hate the human race sometimes - but she ate a few bites of a different canned food last night, I got her meds down her even though this morning she didn’t want to eat again. We’ll struggle along for a bit longer, but if I can’t get her to eat consistently I will release her from her suffering. The least I can do is give her a decent end of life - it’s amazing how quickly one gets attached. Aka “you can’t save ‘em all”; of course that’s the lesson that was drilled into me by cold hard experience from my very earliest days working in veterinary medicine…
But speaking of human medicine - we were shorthanded yesterday when Kristy had to go help her dad (staying with her mom while he had his own doctor’s appointment), and I suspect she’ll be out today as well. Kristy had shown me a picture of her mother last week: the poor woman is wasting away, & yesterday she showed Misti & me a candid snap of her parents, who look like the zombie apocalypse - a pair of ragged survivors! Kristy is praying that she is released from her suffering before the end of the year. Last week I went to the visitation for her adoptive grandma - seems like all I do these days is attend funerals and fill out sympathy cards.
But in the meantime we’ll struggle on and try to extract a few grams of joy from the experience - the weather was perfect at Lake Waco; I can’t believe in all these years I have never been to these trails? They are a little bit tricky since there is a single point of access and then many loops of interconnected trails (it’s not a very big park). I’m jealous of my friends who got to stay over for the Veterans Day holiday but look forward to going back to explore it some more.
I’m trying to store up as many good memories as I can for the days when I really can’t do this anymore
"Today is not that day" thank goodness. May those good memories be banked, while you can!
ReplyDeleteOh, so sorry about Little Bit's health troubles. I am sure that like so many vets, you go into the profession because you love critters, and then humans let those critters down. I thank God for the kind veterinarians that have been in my life, who spoke the hard truth to me when it was most needed, who let me "be there" for my Diamond when it was her time to be released.