Cyrus

We lost another at work today.....

The ones who stay a long time get under people's skin....or maybe it's a specialness of some sort that seems all the more special because Outsiders, the people coming in to browse, don't seem to detect it. You all know there is a gem sitting there, but because of age or breed or looks or not being a Yorkie puppy, it seems to go unrecognized.

I remember the day he came in....a nonchalant girl my age who was "moving" after having him his whole life. He was an eyesore. It looked like raging mange or at best just an infection from skin allergies. My immediate thought, with his age, his breed (Pit- historically unwanted by most adopters), his cropped ears, his hamburger skin, was to spare him right then. Just put him to sleep rather than have him sit and sit and sit and listen to "Ewwww!" from visitors. That skin looked chronic....longterm, likely to recur. Maybe even mange as a secondary to immunosuppression. A medical can of worms. But....with faithful baths by a devoted staff member and oral antibiotics, he cleared up amazingly and then turned out to be one of the best-tempered Pits we'd had in ages. Still he sat. His cork bobbed a bit in the waters of an off-site adoption event recently....some interest. Things were looking up and what seemed inevitable...me and a syringe and him and crying staff in the back room....seemed out of the picture. The fact that I had seemingly underestimated his projected progress gave me Hope. But then....

Today, suddenly, he collapsed after his bath. In a matter of an hour, even after some MASH-style treatment for shock, he became agonal. And what had seemed out of the picture again became inevitable....urgently. I kept thinking of the girl who brought him....would she care? If he was still with her, would she have done anything or would she have let him die in agony? If he was in a home where he was one of one or two instead of with us where he was one of 40 and always alone from 5pm to 8am, could something have been noticed earlier? He bled out in his abdomen from his spleen, likely cancer. There's little to be done, and whatever could be done would be a flimsy band-aid for a grave situation. I've seen the same thing, massive abdominal bleedout, happen to owned dogs in a clinic setting. It ends up the same. Thousands in diagnostics and critical care and a dead dog anyway.

I was sad, of course, but also pragmatic at the time....and I suppose I have too much practice at letting go. Seriously not sure anymore if that is an asset or a liability. But I see my coworkers and their pain and they haven't had as much practice yet, as much terrible practice with it....and I wish I could take some of it for them, or I worry that some may not get past it, and why am I not crying like that? Why didn't I want the collar....I generally don't get to really know the dogs like they do....if I did, I would need a storage unit for all the collars...and it's usually the one who really loved the dog the most who can lay claim to it. And if it was really a knife in a particular person's heart, then they get the ashes-because believe me, the previous "owner" has no right to them after they wipe their hands and drive away and go off to sleep easy at night and dream about a future new puppy. It's the dignity thing again.....at the very least, the animal's remains can be given the respect no one had for the animal in life. I hate to see people I care about grieve like this when the people who should've cared don't have to. And this time it was beyond us and this time there wasn't the pain of collectively having made the decision and carried out the act. But there was a different pain because no good dog, no good dog like him, should have to die in a health crisis, laying on ratty blankets on the concrete floor next to the freezers in the back of an animal shelter. It would've gone down the same or worse at the emergency clinic, were he owned and loved. But that would have been more dignified. Medical heroics would be hugely impractical in a shelter situation...very costly and very futile... but that and an owner would've lent dignity to the situation somehow.

He was valued more in 3 months that he was in 7 years previous. And his body decided...we didn't really, until he simply needed "help" to do what he was obviously trying to do. But it still felt like a failure somehow...like a lost chance. If there is any fairness at all, he's in a better place. And it gets tiring trying to find the positive in these situations..."better place", "he's safe now," "she's not suffering," like some little look-at-the-bright-side exercise. But, that's all you can do...and get up tomorrow and hope for less tragedy.