[Gpdd] Bridge: Flint

[Carla Martinez]

Dear Lisa:

I feel your pain. I feel your sadness. And that desperation where you
wish you could just go and hug Flint to your chest and take everything
back and start all over. And you can't and it is such a helpless
powerless feeling. 

In the stages of grief some experts say that one stage is anger. I did
not get mad at my vet. I did not really get too angry at myself. But yet
I still feel a little angry in general when I think of what happened to
Snickers, my pig who died in August. It wasn't fair. I took him for a
checkup for lumps, and the vet tried to figure out if they were cancer
and the lab didn't know, so we went ahead and operated and then it
turned out they weren't even cancerous. And then lots of horrible stuff
happened to my beautiful little piglet post-surgery, and whenever I
think about it I either feel so angry or regretful that I wipe it out of
my mind. 

But what I do know, without a doubt, is that everyone involved,
including myself, did their very best for my boy, even if in retrospect
I would do some things differently. I am sure it is the same for you. It
is just a shame and a loss. Whenever I think of what happened to
Snickers I think of the children's poem "All the king's horses and all
the king's men couldn't put Snickers together again."

I really do understand how you feel because I went over everything
constantly in my mind, during his illness and afterwards, trying to
think how to do it right and how to 'read him' moment to moment to
understand what I needed to do, and then later recalling this decision
or that decision and the timing of those decisions. It is stressful and
exhausting but it's okay because you're doing it for someone so special.
And then after awhile it got to where I have gone over it enough and
maybe things will be different next time, but that is the sad thing that
happened that time. I apologized to Snickers many times (I still do) and
I made memorials to him. I looked at an internet pet loss group I found
through the digest. And, well, there is a time for sadness. You don't
need to deny it. And there is a place. I am glad we have the digest and
our "PigFriends", as Dee named us, to understand and make our guinea pig
experience fuller. May you be comforted and may you find Flint at peace.
Take your time. We understand.

Carla, Snickers and Snowball