So life goes on but I am changed. I no longer expect to see Murphy, I no longer accidentally fill 5 dinner bowls. function fine in terms of stuff that has to be done. I love my remaining dogs. But the joy has emptied out of everything. I draw animals for people. Drawing for myself no longer has any meaning. I have no interest in it at all. I’ve had the normal issue of sad things happen in my life; emotional losses, struggles, one or two significant episodes of illness which knocked me over one way or another….like everyone gets. Always I wanted to get back up and carry on. This is the first time I truly didn’t want to get back up. The intrusive memories of the 3rd of October have stopped being so vivid or so intrusive, but in their absence is a sense of life being a pointless pursuit devoid of meaning. For the first time in my life I couldn’t wait to take my Christmas tree down. I am probably depressed. It feels appropriate not pathological. I have 4 little lives who entirely depend on me. I feel the responsibility keenly. I would never press the self destruct button, but that damned woman has fucked my life up. This too will pass, eventually.

During Murphy’s botched resuscitation, when I was finally allowed to be with him and still trying to come to terms with his transformation from jumping and excited to dying in advanced heart failure I said to the vet. “But he was running up Elrick Hill yesterday with his ball in his mouth”. She replied, “I find that very difficult to believe”. Like I am a liar?

Now that I am educated about the proper treatment of acute heart failure in a dog, I find her incompetence hard to believe. I think it’s the denial from the clinic that anything untoward happened that is making me so angry. That and the way he and I were treated…..ie shoddily.

When he died, 30 minutes after she gave him an IV slug of butorphanol, which the data sheet says do not give as a fast IV injection and do not give to dogs who are in respiratory difficulty, and which she refused to reverse when she told me she had given it, without my permission, when I was 10 yards away shut in an empty consulting room…..to help his anxiety about not being able to breathe for fluid in his lungs…….she looked astonished. She put her stethoscope on his chest and announced “he’s gone”. He gave 2 more dying gasps and she said to the nurse, “get the pentobarbitone”….like I had asked her to euthanise him, and she had just pronounced him dead…….I told her she’d done quite enough and not to dare touch him. She looked offended.

Senior vet tells me she has a promising career ahead of her. As what?

So many reasons not to cry.

My pain is too small

Too insignificant.

Too immature

Childish

Hardly worth crying about

If my pain isn’t worthy of tears

How can anybody else’s be?

It hurts too much

Bury it deep!

Walk on dry eyed

But with each spade of earth

I choke, am suffocated

Buried alive

Three times I have asked in writing for an account of what happened in the 2 and a half hours Murphy was at the vet clinic with approximate times. Since there were no contemporaneous notes made it would have to be estimates. Each time I have been given a sort of curated summary. In the last one the time taken to achieve his scan was apparently 15 minutes. This differs from the previous one which stated that because he could not tolerate being scanned lying down, the attempts at scanning him standing were more awkward and took longer than a scan normally takes. When I pointed out that the 2 accounts barely matched I was in effect told that the conversation was over.

I had thought I wanted to meet the vet herself and ask her directly. This was encouraged in theory. Then the senior vets in discussion decided that a telephone conversation would be better. I realised I wanted to look into her eyes when I asked her to describe the events. I declined the phone conversation as pointless.

I watched a You tube video of an echo being done on a dog. I can absolutely guarantee that Murphy would have been effectively choked in that position…..bit by the humans, but by his floppy trachea….which I described to the first vet who discovered his murmur. She didn’t think it sufficiently important to pass this information on. Anyway having choked he’d have struggled to stand up and cough. Wouldn’t you? I’m guessing nobody appreciated quite what his struggling was about. When he was allowed to stand up it apparently took him a little while to recover. After that he was stressed every time the vet appoached him with the probe. She tried to get the scan image but when he became blue she gave him “little rests” and then started again.

A significant part of my job as an anaesthetist was allaying fear, minimising distress and avoiding hypoxia….because being blue means you are hypoxic. Apparently vets have a different reality. She wrote me a paragraph explaining why this was fine.

“It is not unusual for animals to be stressed when coming into the practice. In some cases animals can become cyanotic when handling. If a patient improves with a break and rest it is not unusual to make a decision to continue with an examination. Murphy improved initially so his signs were initially interpreted as relating to stress rather than an acute life threatening disease and this is why you were not contacted sooner. “

Good to know when you leave your pet at a clinic…..cyanosis is part of the territory…… If animals could talk and tell tales like humans then cyanosis might be less common and distress might be taken more seriously. You still can’t protect yourself from stupid though.

Is it any wonder I’m struggling to get over this?

On Monday it will be 2 months since the vet killed Murphy. I have yet to have a conversation with her. She comes back from honeymoon this weekend I understand. Senior vet says he will speak to her to set up a meeting with the three of us when she comes to work on Monday. He asked if I would be willing to do it on the phone. I said no.

Meanwhile I am worn out with not being able to sleep properly. Last night I didn’t sleep at all. Thank goodness for the BBC World Service on the radio. Never in 70 years have I had any problem getting off to sleep. Early morning waking, yes, disturbed sleep, sure but I have always slept as soon as my head hit the pillow. No longer.

Sometimes I feel like there must be something wrong with me that this has hit me so hard, but mostly I don’t think that. I feel helpless in the face of a sort of denial that anything bad really happened….senior vet’s approach. In my most paranoid moments this feels like deliberate gaslighting. It’s also deeply hurtful because it trivialised bith Murphy’s unnecessary and unkind death and my distress. I feel imprisoned by the lack of resolution and the lack of willingness to admit fault.

Today I took Timmy to see the other senior vet. The one my dogs have seen almost exclusively for years. Timmy’s infected ear has not resolved so I had to bite the bullet and go. The arrangement is that my dogs now only ever see one of the 2 senior vets. It was not easy to make this decision but I know they are both good and I trust them. There are plenty of poor practices in the city. I don’t want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. I’m seeing if this works anyway.

He was very kind. He is a gentle straightforward man. He had phoned me at home the day Murphy died. I have no memory of what I said during that call. I could see he was really sorry about the whole thing. It was particularly difficult because today he was consulting in the room I was sequestered in while the vet who killed Murphy “worked on him”……and as it turns out she didn’t even get that right…….but that is all for discussion when I meet her. It seems she is on honeymoon at the moment.

I cried a great deal more than I meant to. It’s very disabling when it starts in earnest. It starts in earnest when ever I talk about him. Vet was very gentle with Timmy and with me. We came out with a plan for Timmy. He said I have been such a good friend to the practice for 15 years and he is very grateful that I can continue to trust him. This moved me. I felt cared about. I felt that if he had had a magic want to wave and make it all unhappen he’d have done anything to wave it. He did not want me to leave until I felt okay abut walking back out through reception. He did not flinch when I said I thought that she had trashed Murphy. Senior vet flinches when I say stuff like that. I will feel okay taking the gang to see him. I will feel okay taking them to senior vet too. If they are ever on holiday together I will go to an emergency vet service and say I can’t get an appointment at my usual vet.

I’m rattled inside though. I’m back to shaking and not feeling like eating but that will settle down.

Oh and he shaved the bits of Timmy’s undercarriage that I am not allowed to go near. This led to a bit of ferocious gumming. I reminded vet he had taken all Tim’s teeth out last year. We both smiled. It was an OK moment in a hard 20 minutes.

I wait for an appointment to meet with the vet who killed Murphy and the Senior vet. I have been waiting for some time for this to be convenient. I can wait. While I wait I write down the random thoughts that arrive in my mind.

I have heard about the importance of the way that words are phrased. I didn’t give it too much attention. Now as I reread Murphy’s notes and the senior vet’s summary I realise the passive tense is king.

Nobody writes “I stressed your dog ” They write “he became stressed”. See how the responsibility shifts? I had the nurse hold you in a way that you couldn’t breathe and ….silly boy, you became stressed. Now if you hadn’t gone and got stressed my lovely scan would have been easy and I wouldn’t have needed to keep stressing you until you died. Bad dog.

I notice the power of this simple shift from the active to the passive tense. In one move, worthy of a table magician, the blame passes from the vet to the dog.

He got stressed….bad choice Murphy. (passive tense)

I gave oxygen…..good for me. (active tense…I am proud of this)

I tried again…….active tense because this is for his good after all.

He got stressed and went blue……..silly dog (passive tense).

I gave him little rests until his colour got better…..another great intervention by me (active tense)

He died……..yet another bad choice Murphy. (passive tense). No possibility of writing “I killed him”. funny that. Instead it’s compressed into a short almost throwaway sentance…..”he died, O present”.

Even her grammar is full of shit.

I ask myself why am I still going on about this? It’s a minority voice in my head but it is gaining support. My psyche has most compassionately walled off the remembered experience of the 3rd of October. I am, however aware that it is walled off not gone. It sends messages that it is still there. I find myself with tears on my face when people look at me a second time in the supermarket. I find I can’t reply when I meet someone I haven’t seen since he died and they say how sorry they are. When I want to draw something and instead I go ti the draw with unfinished art, take an armful and put it in the bin. None of it has anything to do with who I seem to have become.

I think about stuff like “what is value?”

Murphy came from the SSPCA. Although obviously pure bred and from really handsome inheritance lines, he was unwanted. He came without a pedigree and neutered…..for very good reasons so that nobody would adopt him for the wrong reasons. He was 12. His “value” was zero. He was, in law, a possession. No value at all.

What about my distress? What value my sleep, my appetite, my intrusive thoughts, the loss of my fundraising art business, the quality of my life…..which is radically changed. Not because he died, but because one individual took it upon herself to stress (distress) him so repeatedly and for so long that when she gave him back to me he looked so knocked off I thought he must have had a cardiac arrest. Apparently that person can walk away and do it again to someone else’s dog/cat/rabbit…..whatever thing of “no value” that holds a huge place in their hearts. Is any litigation going to recognise that the quality of an old woman’s life is of any value?……especially when earnings are not a consideration.

This all seems so wrong that I can’t put it down. I can’t leave the pain walled up in my chest like an abscess. Nor can I see a clear way forward….yet. But I can be very tenacious and very determined when it suits me.

Right now it suits me.

I was mugged once. Grabbed from behind in broad daylight walking beside a busy road in France. Afterwards I was jumpy with nightmares for maybe a week. This is much worse. I am hypervigilant, anxious with intrusive distressing thoughts and images every day. It’s exhausting. I looked up the MIND website. It seems I have what they consider to be the 5 cardinal symptoms of PTSD. For some reason this makes me angry. I’m 70. I’ve had plenty of difficult stuff happen in 70 years. I had reached a peaceful joyful place in my life. Why should someone get to crap all over that and walk away as though nothing of any consequence happened and after all she did nothing wrong? “Sadly he died, O present”….case closed tra la.

I wonder how often this sort of thing does happen.

I don’t want to pathologise my upset. I don’t want it “fixed” either, even if it is disabling and unpleasant. I think it continues because there is unfinished business. She may have closed the case and walked away but I haven’t.

I’m adding stuff I wrote out of order. But since I feel out of order I reckon that’s okay.

It is a month now.

The ache is still there

The feeling of incipient doom and dread is still there. It feels constantly like something really terrible is about to happen. This is the feeling I had all my childhood. It was my emotional wallpaper. I was 30 before someone told me it’s name was anxiety. I assumed everyone felt like that.

But then I remember that the terrible thing DID happen. I walked Murphy into the clinic and carried him out dead and I somehow have to live with that fact, and the panic inside me rises again because I don’t know how I will do that.

All the fear of my childhood rushes back into my throat and fills up the hole that opened up in my solar plexus a month ago. It opened up at the precise moment that she handed me, not the lead of my dog dancing and excited to see me, but a dog who couldn’t stand up, who seemed not to know me, who was blue and gasping……..and as though there was no need to explain this transformation.

That hole on my middle starts inside me but it seems to extend to eternity. The winds of space seem to blow through it. But Murphy seems to have slipped beyond eternity. Beyond my reack.