My house is still very lonely. It makes me sad to come home to no greeting at the door. I'm bad at waking up to my alarm if I don't have to get up for class in the morning. I miss getting a nose in my face looking for food the moment the alarm rang. No one tries to steal 2/3rds of the bed anymore. I haven't properly stretched out in my own bed since last December (it was always about accommodating Lucy to make sure she was comfy!).
My heart is still very heavy. The double edged sword of being a vet student is that all of my friends and classmates have pets, and they all love them as much as I loved Lucy. That means at least 20 times a day, someone posts a video or picture or status about what their silly pet is doing on facebook. It means that I get to continually feel like my nose is being rubbed in the fact that everyone else has their beautiful animals and I don't. Lucy and I didn't deserve this fate. She had an excellent home and a great life. She was young and reasonably healthy (except that she had started peeing on the bed occasionally...). We'd only had each other for 9 months. She got a walk every day and tons of attention. So why her? Why my dog? What if I had come home a little earlier? Why didn't I just take the extra stupid 30 seconds to put the food away?! All I had to do was cross the room! That's it! Such a simple act could have made things so drastically different for us. Rhetorical questions I will never have the answers to.
I am at least starting to not cry every day. Only three out of the seven days for last week. I guess that can be considered progress.
This makes me terribly sad to read. We cannot predict how things will go... you aren't the only one who has made decisions, even tiny ones that don't seem like a big deal, that lead to an animal's death before it's time. One of my cats, whom I rescued from a shelter as a kitten, died at a year old because he ate one of my earrings. I knew that he had a fascination with stealing jewelry, and I still never put it away where he couldn't get to it. I was living with my parents at the time (and was about 16 or 17), and my mom refused to take him in to the vet because all of our animals had a price limit, and surgery would be above that. I had a couple hundred dollars saved up from working odd jobs. I could have driven. I could have taken him in, paid for the surgery to remove the earring from his intestinal tract or wherever it had imbedded itself. I could have given him a chance. But I didn't, and he died. What must not have been a good death. He was a wonderful, loving animal, and he didn't deserve that. And I caused it. 6 years later and I'm still not over it. If anything, once I started to get interested in vet med and realize how much could have been done for him, I have felt even worse. I don't know that I will ever get over it. At least you tried to save Lucy to the best of your ability. You could not have predicted that that day she would have decided to go for the food. There was no way you could have known it. Instead of focusing on what you could have done that day... try to focus on what you did; she loved you, she knew you loved her, you gave her the best 9 months of her life, gave her a home and a bed, friends to play with. You tried to save her every way that you knew how. I'm sure she knew that, and if there is something after this life, Lucy will be waiting for you, your guardian angel.
ReplyDeleteI'll second the sentiment above. I recently lost my 1.5 year old ginger cat to FIP. It was heartbreaking to see him go, and to see him go from a relatively healthy cat to the weak one he became towards the very end. I'm still in shock. Going back over every second that may have helped is not going to change the outcome, it only serves to make you feel more guilty (when you shouldn't). Things happen, unfortunately we can't change them. I keep thinking that maybe if I hadn't had my sister's cat in the house this summer, or maybe if I had disinfected the carrier that may or may not have given him the virus, or if I had just paid better attention to the fact that he lost a bit of weight over the summer...I can't.
ReplyDeleteYou gave her a wonderful life, and you were no doubt a wonderful pet mom, even if you don't feel it at the moment. There will be other wonderful fur-babies for you to love and take care of, and of course none will be Lucy, but they'll become just as special to you. Focus on the love she gave, and not what could have been.