Five weeks and a day since a vet I never met before killed Murphy. I can eat more, my sleep is still all to pot. I’m awake between about 1 am until maybe 6 am most nights. I’m tired. I have stopped crying uncontrollably. I just leak tears without noticing, like a sort of incontinence. I have yet to get a proper account of what happened during the 2 and a half hours he was there without me. I have more information than the notes gave, but no times, no clinical observations like respiratory rate or blood pressure or heart rate. Did they even measure them? If they measured them did they bin the charts after he died? I have asked but not had a reply. I feel as though the joy had just drained out of everything. I can’t create, apart from portraits from a photograph. People who have lost an animal….I can’t say no to them. Everything is an effort. I keep the routine going for myself as much as the dogs. I wonder if I am being melodramatic about this and the thought brings on a big wave of nausea. I trust my gut more than I trust my head at the moment. My heart is busy crying. It offers no advice. I am, for once, entirely in tune with the bleakness of winter. Bring on the dead vegetation, bring on the dark days. I know lots of kind concerned people would like me to cheer up. I’m more at home in this shell of what was my happy life than I would be in cheerful. It feels more meaningful and more real.

I email my lawyer to say I want to talk to her. I want to explore what realistic options might be. Why should I say oh don’t worry, it doesn’t matter? It would be a big fat lie.

Is not easy but I am gradually finding things. All of them upset me. The drug she gave Murphy without consulting me (I was 10 yards away) should not have been given by rapid intravenous injection…..how she gave it. It can indeed cause respiratory depression. She and senior vet both told me it didn’t. It can be reversed with naloxone. She refused to give naloxone although I begged her to when I heard what she’d given him. Senior vet tells me they do not have naloxone in the clinic. Warnings are specifically listed for old dogs, sick dogs, dogs with fluid in their lungs. Full house.

I then look on You Tube to see if there is a video of the position a dog must be in to get an echocardiogram. This really upsets me. I know that the moment Murphy was put in that position he would get his floppy larynx cough and be unable to breathe. He had to stand up and cough for 20 seconds to get his airway back. So she had the nurse hold him in a position which 100% would have asphyxiated him. A school child would recognise a being being suffocated. She’s a vet. WTF?

I imagine this was the episode she described to me as “a wee bit stressed, a wee bit blue, needing a wee bit of oxygen” I know that seeing this video will **** my sleep up again tonight. It’s worth it. I want every single fact I can gather and I’m going to see my lawyer before I have any conversation with the vet. I have no idea if this is negligent. It is most certainly 100% wrong.

Murphy was kinder than you were

Murphy was gentler than you were

Murphy was more straightforward than you were.

But he was just an old dog so that hardly counts

Does it?

I get home and let the other dogs into the house. I go back to the car for Murphy’s body. The feeling of horror and disbelief which will become a constant companion floods me. I have no idea what to do with him. I put a thick blanket on the sofa and place his body beside me. I touch his face gently and cry. The other dogs come to look. They sniff him. They look at me enquiringly. Teddy becomes excited and upset. He reacts badly to human emotion….a problem that has not gone away with the years with me. I try to stop crying. I realise the others need to be fed. I put 5 bowls out and realise that is one too many. I cry again.

I sit beside his body on the sofa. I don’t know what else to do. At some point in the evening, Kevin, the vet we usually see phones me. I can’t remember what he said. I know he was genuinely upset and wanted to know if I was okay. I just cried into the phone and asked why? Of course he didn’t know why.

I realise it is probably bed time. I can’t dig a grave in the rain in the dark. I carry Murphy up to the bedroom and put him in the bed he liked best. Dogs all go to sleep. I lie awake the entire night. I feel rage starting to expand inside me. I cannot lie still. I go downstairs and start to type an account of what happened and a list of things I want explained. Teddy pretends to be asleep but I see he is really watching me. I do not usually spend half the night downstairs.

I go beck to bed thinking I might sleep now. I do not sleep.

This night time routine continues for 3 nights.

I have been avoiding writing this. I have it walled off inside me like an abscess. I know it’s there but I don’t want to touch it. I can function if I don’t touch it.

I leave Murphy at the clinic with the usual pang of hating to leave a dog there on their own, but not with any worry. What could there be to worry about? He’s getting an ultrasound of his heart without sedation. It should take about half an hour I’m told. I leave him at 11.45 so that he won’t have to wait all morning in a kennel. He’s scheduled to be done at the end of the morning list. I reckon I can walk the others for an hour and be about right for picking him up again. When I drop him off I remind them that he has separation anxiety and a floppy larynx cough (which he’s had for 8 years). It causes him no difficulty as long as he’s allowed to stand up and cough. It lasts maybe 10 seconds and then he’s fine. It happens when he changes position from lying to standing and vice versa.

We walk on the hill near to the clinic. I check my phone. I sit in the parking for half an hour and check my phone. I decide to drive to the Lidl close to the clinic and get bread. I check my phone. By now it’s 2 hours since I left him. I assume they had an emergency. I sit in Lidl’s car park and decide to drive to the clinic and pop in. As I’m driving the clinic calls. I’m almost at the clinic so I drive there and return the call. I can come and collect him. Great, I say, I’m in you car park. This seems to surprise the vet. I come on in. She is full of the results of the scan. He has class 2B mitral valve disease. She has meds for him which should help prevent it deteriorating. Great. She tells me he got a wee bit stressed and had to have some oxygen. I begin to feel queasy. She says she’ll go and get him. Instaed of a dancing Murphy on his lead excited to see me she is carrying a dog whom I barely recognise. He looks dreadful He doesn’t seem to recognise me either. She suggests I take him outside to the car park to see if he “perks up”. All I can think is “what happened?” She looks at me as though this is all normal. I feel my whole reality lurch. I am so shocked that I actually do as she suggests. I walk a couple of yards and pu him down. He can barely stand. He is breathless. In the daylight I can see his toungue is blue. I can hear the crackling of fluid in his lungs….it is so loud you don’t need a stethoscope. I pick him up and run back into the clinic. I shaout at her “he has pulmonary oedema”. She looks at him as though his condition is a surprise. It is the way he was when she put him in my arms. She takes him to the back area where I presume the resuscitation area is. I feel sick. Someone plonks me in a chair in reception. I then hear a voice say it’s getting a bit crowded in here and a vet nurse guides me into an empty consulting room and shuts the door. She asks me if I’d like a cup of tea. I wouldn’t. I’d like to wake up from this nightmare. There is nothing to sit on. I sit on the floor because suddenly standing up is difficult. I have no idea how long it was before the vet returns. She says he isn’t good. I think the woman is a genius. I ask to be with him. She resists and says she’ll have to ask the recovery nurse. I get my ability to walk and talk back and I don’t wait for anyone to be asked. The recovery nurseis lovely. I know her from years of going there. She gives me a hug. I am crying. Murphy is in a kennel having oxygen waved uselessly under his nose. The nurse gives me a mask and I get oxygen into him a bit more efficiently. The vet had inserted a cannula and she gives him 2 doses of frusemide. She tells me she gave him an opiate to “calm him down” I can hardly believe her. I say then please reverse it. She looks puzzled and says we don’t usually do that. It is anyway too late. He rallies briefly and then slumps and dies. She puts her stethoscope on his chest and pronounces him dead. He takes a couple more dying breaths. She asks the vet nurse to get her the pentobarbitone. She asks if she should put him to sleep. She just said he was dead FFS. I shout at her that I think she’s done enough and not to dare to tidy him up in death. My head is in the kennel with him and I’m now howling. Behind me I hear her say in a tone of surprise. “Oh, you must have really loved him”. Truly I cannot believe what has just happened. I cannot believe this woman is real.

I cannot wait to get him out of there even though it’s too late. The nurse gently wraps his body in a blanket carefully covering his head. Then hugging my still warm bundle to my chest I am ushered discreetly out of the side door (the dead dogs door) and into the car park. I can barely find my car. I put his body in the soft crate he liked to sit on top of. I have 4 other dogs in the car and I don’t want him disturbed.

I have no memory at all of the drive home.

Each time we meet, it is on the hill, walking. It was his idea. I could not face coming to the clinic. I could not face opening my home, I certainly didn’t want to meet for coffee. The hill has worked well. I can look straight ahead. I can throw Daisy her ball. The hill is empty and becoming bleak as the bracken fades from golden to dead. Dead suits my mood. I can shout and nobody gets a fright.

This time I have more control of myself. I am still hurting so much that I cry a lot. Again he does not interrupt. Again he tries to guide me away from venom at the vet and towards grieving. Again I am irritated by this. I say so. The conversations have a surreal dimension. Walking for 90 minutes with nothing but the sky and the horizon somehow we also talk about the suicide rate in vets, how it is to have euthanasia as part of your job, …..”people say I couldn’t do your job….but I do it”. He tells me how he thinks he copes…… his strategy for being able to kill and stay okay with himself. Oddly this is something I have often wondered about and never asked. He initiated the topic. Part of me wonders why we are talking about this. In a way it’s a relief from going round and round the hurting place in my chest.

When we return to Murphy the impasse is the same. He wants me to grieve and remember the good times. I want to know what actually happened. He still doesn’t know. He has thoughts about it. None of them add up for me. What is so difficult about providing an account ? He will ask the vet the specific questions I am homing in on.

The business about grieving as a journey is becoming a flash point inside me. I feel like I am hearing phrases from a bereavement course (not that I have ever been on one but they sound like second hand phrases that are supposed to help). Suddenly I feel I am not being heard, I am being managed. I am also weary with being angry. I just want someone to make this all unhappen.

How are you with forgiveness? he asks me as we say goodbye. I’m not Mother fucking Theresa I reply. “Fair enough”, he says. I know I will have to meet this woman sometime and ask my questions directly, but not yet. Absolutely not yet. I do not hate this man. I comprehensively hate the vet who killed Murphy.

I have dogs that would have bitten you. Not Murphy.

Murphy wouldn’t bite a human to save his life……

Ergo.

‘

Grief goes frenzied room to room

Keening and wringing her hands

Until the ghosts and dozing madwomen

are all awake and howling.

After I bury Murphy’s body in the garden I write to the senior vet to ask for Murphys clinical notes. I expect to see an account of what happened in the two and a half hours which transformed him from happy excited dog to disorientated moribund dog. I get his notes very quickly. I am scared to open them because I expect what I read to be upsetting. It is a very brief paragraph.,

At first I cannot understand it. What is an O? Then I realise that the O is me. I feel unreasonably trivialised by this. I am probably hypersensitive at the moment but I can’t shake off the feeling that neither Murphy nor I were very important. A third of the brief report is about the great scan she achieved. My rising bitterness seethes along with my nausea. Great scan, sadly it killed the patient. Great scan though; well done me. I’m now certainly becoming unreasonable but why is there absolutely nothing about what happened until I arrived to pick him up? Did nothing happen? Did he just suddenly decide to die? I think I am supposed to conclude it was an act of God. I don’t conclude any such thing but I am helpless again in the face of a bewildering absence of information. I feel like I’m being gaslighted. I cry a lot more after reading this several times.