Where to start...?

I am a Certified Veterinary Technician.
It's not a career I exactly chose, per se. Basically, at 17, it was time to get a job. I'd always been an animal person. An anti-social, overly sensitive and ponderous kid who felt more comfortable in the presence of those with fur, feathers, fins....those without expectation and rules and judgements. Those who did not speak nor require me to speak. Trite, perhaps. But it was (and is) so. So at 17, merely for need of a job, I headed for a local veterinary hospital. It blew my mind to be given money, regularly, for bathing dogs and cleaning cat cages! Ah, the ignorance of youth.
Blah blah blah, FF through meeting a boy, moving clear across the country, marrying boy, being betrayed by boy, finally leaving boy for another boy, and settling into current situation....and here I am nearly 17 years later, still a veterinary technician. I love it. I hate it. I am embarrassed for not being something more highly valued and highly paid. It blows my mind now, not that I am getting paid for this, as before...but that I am getting paid so little for doing so much, while my peers get paid so much for doing so little quite often. Despite or because of my passive "career choice", not sure which, I am not a money person, really. I can spend frivolously with the best of 'em, yes...but I have no taste for fine things in the mainstream sense. I suppose working in scrubs and not having to buy a stylish office wardrobe does offset my salary a bit. And I firmly believe that one of the great Truths of Life is that however much money you make, you will inadvertently spend that much more. So nobody's really any better off than anyone else. Having zero credit card debt and naught but an under $1000 a month mortgage and a Honda payment as debts puts me and R. in a much better place than 90% of the population. So, the fact that I still haven't broken $30K a year in my life is irrelevant. It should be, at least. It does gall me if I stop and think about it.
Especially with what I endure in my current job. The emotional trauma, the spiritual exhaustion, the social responsibility, the shoveling of shit into the tide because some people must undertake the duty. This was a stumbling-into as well.

See, I am an animal shelter vet tech.

The things I see, you couldn't make up. It's not as tidy and black and white as a commercial with Sarah McLaughlin.

It's been exactly three years since I started here. By now, it's not the things I remember that haunt me...not the names and vague faces that I manage to recall. No. It's the ones I have forgotten. The human brain can only hold so much. It's the situations and individuals that have slipped into oblivion that bother me most.

That is what this blog is for...to capture them before they fade away.