Did you ever feel you were a traitor?

The times I felt like I was a traitor I knew the feeling was incongruent with what was right and just. I felt like a traitor for doing the right thing. Family ties can choke sometimes.

I was feeling that way just this morning, in regards to one of our patients.

We have a patient, a calico kitty, who may have had a reaction to a bad batch of insulin. She has uncontrollable muscle tremors and no use of her right front leg. She’s also the most charming, loving, and affectionate patient ever.

She’s been hospitalized for 5 days now, and mom is reaching her financial limits. She’s also failed to show significant improvement, so her mom made the very difficult decision to euthanize her this morning.

The thing that we, as veterinary professionals, have to guard against is becoming too involved in our cases. One, a pet owner is just that – an owner. The decision is theirs to make. Secondly, we must respect the process that they’ve gone through to reach this point, and to not make the situation worse by making them doubt themselves or feel judged. And third, no one has unlimited resources or funds – all of us have taken on more than we can truly handle, running up debt and adopting more needy animals than we should probably have. And this in a profession that is undervalued and underpaid.

In this case, I may have stepped over the line. When the owner arrived, I intervened and asked if she was willing to consider giving the pet more time with home care. This action could easily have been seen as intrusive and unprofessional. Happily, mom is willing to take the pet home, realizing that she has a tremendous amount of work ahead of her, that the cat may not improve and that she may be faced with making this decision all over again.

So now I have a situation in which I feel bad, no matter what the outcome. On the one hand, the kitty has a bit more a chance. I’m very happy about that. But I also know that I broke my own rules. I’ve coached the staff about professionalism, about emotional buffering, about respecting the client’s wishes, about not taking on yet another charity case, and now I’ve become a hypocrite.

A lot .. this feeling sucks.

I betrayed a lot of friends [ betrayed their trust ]

@Hibernate Why did you betray them? I’m interested in your motives, not what actually happened.

Since you asked…never. I would hate that.

I once felt like a traitor to myself, at least the self I’d assumed I wanted to be and surely was the best me for so long. As an insult to the memory of a person who hurt me deeply, I went and had an affair with a married person in order to destroy in myself the thing so many people had admired yet failed time and time again to do any justice to. In the end I felt empty, wasteful and destructive.