the animals are all settled and sleeping, except for dee..tonight she is leaking tons of urine where ever she lays and she is constantly at the water buckets, drinking them dry. i am going to up her insulin to 10 units twice a day til i get her into the vets for a blood sugar curve. she is distressed by the volume of leaking...it is such a huge amount...she can't NOT notice how much is pouring out....poor girl. unfortunately her previous family was unable to invest financially in helping her to reach good control...so the vets pretty much guessed on a starting dose for her and there has been no further follow up to see if the dose was correct or not. it looks like to me that her vision and kidneys are starting to fail from the poorly controlled disease. and this is so sad and unfortunate because the resulting damage really is totally unnecessary.
there are somethings with aging animals that really need good and consistent vet follow up. diabetes is one of them... you cannot really manage it with guessing....you need the blood sugar curves.
anyway...i have just given her, her third dry bed for the night and right now she is sleeping until she starts leaking again.
this whole rescue thing is such a conflict sometimes..you do it because you want to feel good by helping to improve animals lives but sometimes you just feel more sad or angry or frustrated or frightened than you ever feel good cuz there are so many things to feel sad or angry or frustrated or afraid of.....so what do you do???
i have no idea..sometimes i just close the door on the petty and stupid stuff that always pops up in rescue...sometimes i throw that same door wide open and scream in childish rage. sometimes i try to distract myself from the hard stuff focusing on something a bit easier. sometimes i work hard to make things better...sometimes i take a break to catch my breath. sometimes i get too deep in self reflection and worry myself right down into a deep hole and sometimes i get tired of being down in the hole and turn off my head and pull myself back up.
so tonight i sit on that fence line, trying to decide which way i should go......up, down, right, left, forward, back or just stay where i am at this moment.
if you want to know what is the hardest part of doing rescue? it is simply stumbling along without a road map, without a guide and without a single roadside sign...it is putting one foot in front of the other while always unsure if you are even on the right road..
maybe this isn't just about rescue, maybe this is really about living in general. i want some kind of celestrial guardian angel to fly on down here and tell me to either relax, you are doing just fine or hey little traveller..you might want to consider going this way instead!
do you think any of us will ever know if we travelled the right road? won't it just totally suck to finish our lives either not knowing at all or when it's too late to switch to a better way?
and why do the animals not worry about this...why are they all sleeping so soundly tonight? i want whatever peace or certainty that they have in their heads....plus.... daphne!!! just like dee here...tonight i would really like to come into my room and find a dry bed!
I echo Susan and other comments. Carol - I read your blog regularly and am moved almost daily by the work you do and the gift you give these animals. I would love to be able to physically help more animals but my current life doesn't allow me time for that kind of life. Perhaps at some later point in my life when my young family don't need so much of my time, I will be able to devote more of me to the kind of work you do. You have many, many cheering you on!