by David Balashinsky
On New Year's Day, 2023, my wife received a call from the office manager of the animal hospital where she works as a veterinarian. The day before, after hours, someone had dropped off a sick stray or feral kitten. The kitten had been placed in a cloth carrier and left outside by one of the entrances. (Note to people who dump animals, including Good Samaritans: leaving a sick animal in a
carrier overnight in the dead of winter without food or water is a terrible idea.) Although the hospital was closed for the holiday weekend, by chance, the office manager had gone in to attend to some outstanding clerical work. That is the only reason the kitten was still alive when she found him. By then it was obvious that the kitten needed either urgent veterinary care to save his life or euthanasia to spare him needless suffering. After placing him in a cage with food and water and covering him with towels, the office manager called my wife. When the call came, we were both hunkered down, so we thought, for the rest of the day.
If you have dogs and cats living with you, as we do, one of the fringe benefits of being married to a veterinarian is free house-calls. On the other hand, being married to a vet has imposed obligations on me that I never imagined I would have to assume. For example, I always accompany my wife whenever she goes to the animal hospital on an emergency call in the middle of the night. I do this not only for her safety and to provide moral support but because there are no overnight staff at the hospital. Accordingly, there are times when I have to assume the role of veterinary assistant, also. Once, many years ago, my wife had to go in at about 2:00 in the morning in order to euthanize a hopelessly ill, elderly dog. I had to assist her while she ran the IV and injected the drug. My wife dealt with this almost as if it were nothing. For an experienced vet, this was standard protocol: the dog was beyond hope so euthanizing him was the only humane course of action. I, however, had never even witnessed a euthanasia, let alone having assisted in one. My job was to restrain the dog and apply pressure to one of the veins in his right foreleg while my wife inserted the needle (although he was so docile that it was more like embracing him than restraining him). He was about forty pounds, had grey shaggy fur and large brown eyes. I
will never forget the searing emotional conflict between the pity that I felt for this dog
and the guilt that I felt for my role in ending his life. And I will never forget how trusting, innocent and unknowing of his fate he seemed in his final moments. When it was done, I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
I wonder if the public fully appreciates the toll being a veterinarian can take on someone. What emotional fortitude must it take to end an animal's life, even though euthanasia is almost always the ethical choice (and my wife has a strict policy against performing "convenience" euthanasias). What degree of commitment and self-sacrifice are required to get up at 2:00 in the morning or simply to drop everything on a crappy New Year's day in order to attend to an animal in need. I am reluctant to cheapen these reflections with any mention of money but I also think, in fairness to veterinarians everywhere (and to my wife), that it should not go unacknowledged that, in cases like this, there is no compensation because there is no bill. (Who would it be sent to?) The ministrations with which my wife rang in the new year were performed strictly for the sake of the kitten's welfare.
Here is a picture of him:
These are the most likely and obvious conditions from which, according to my wife, this kitten was suffering. He had an upper respiratory tract infection (the mucus dripping from his nose is visible in the picture above). He had pneumonia. He had fleabite anemia (fleas do not just cause itching and irritation to the skin but feed on their host's blood). He had hypothermia. He was malnourished and emaciated (he weighed under two pounds yet, based upon his likely age, which my wife was able to gauge by his teeth, he should have weighed five or six). He had diarrhea and his gut had likely been colonized by intestinal parasites.
Here are some pictures of my wife attending to him:
My wife quickly got to work providing the emergency treatments that would be needed to save the kitten's life. All I could do, besides petting him and trying my best to comfort him when my wife wasn't working on him, was look on in awe. I felt privileged, although it came at an enormous cost for the kitten, to be a witness to the drama unfolding before me. I was reminded of the enormous admiration I have for my wife's skill and dedication. I allowed myself to hope that she could save the kitten's life and it occurred to me that watching her do it was probably among the best possible ways I could spend New Year's Day. This entire holiday season, after all, is my favorite time of year because I regard it as a time of renewal, rebirth, and new beginnings. I am always on the lookout for the deeper meaning in things and this kitten's struggle to survive and my wife's valiant efforts to save him seemed the ideal source for a homily about what the holiday season really means. I had already begun mentally composing it - the kitten's new lease on life would serve as a metaphor for the new year while my wife, by virtue of her diligence, generosity, and steadiness under trying circumstances, would serve as a paragon of how we ought to approach the new year, and life in general - when the kitten commenced his death throes and suddenly, quickly and quietly expired.
Nature is heartless. Life itself sometimes seems sadistically cruel. What I had hoped would serve as an uplifting story with which to inaugurate 2023 became, instead, like so many other stories, one that ended in defeat and in death. I was ready to forget the whole miserable episode.
But maybe the more important meaning in this is that, although success is never guaranteed, we still have to try. What if the Good Samaritan, misguided as she or he was, had not even bothered to try to rescue the kitten? Its fate would have been sealed. What if my wife had not intervened with emergency measures to try to save his life? It would have ended just the same but without the modicum of comfort that we were able to provide the kitten during its final hours. If 2023 doesn't look all that promising, that only means that we need to muster more resoluteness, more courage and more commitment to ending suffering, saving lives, expanding rights and making the world a better place, even though, sometimes, we will fail. Because, sometimes, we succeed. That's the thought I intend to carry with me into 2023.
