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.