Wildly Crafty

Finally found out what has been causing my back pain. Apparently I have a congenital defect called Schmorl’s nodes, which are defined as herniations of the intervertebral disc through the vertebral end-plate. Thanks mom and dad! The orthopedic surgeon said that he could do surgery but that I could also try losing a few more pounds and getting more exercise. I’d been curtailing exercise, well, because it hurt and because I was afraid of doing more damage to my back, so now I’m working out again.

The back pain made me quit working as a shelter attendant; instead I’ve been working in the front office entering info into the computer. They have a huge backlog because the computers were down for an extended period, then everyone got in the habit of not entering as they went so even when the computers came back up the paperwork got ignored.

Today I was working on the euthanasia cards. There is this huge stack, so the impact is much larger than if there were only a handful of cards. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the cities don’t want to deal with adopting out pit bulls, which means that much of the stack is cards from pit bulls who were euthanised after their stray hold time ran out. Those make me sad, but the ones that really make me sad are the owner surrenders, and the animals that are put to sleep because the shelter runs out of space.

Personally I can’t think of a single circumstance in which I would ever leave one of my animals at a shelter. And certainly not with some of the lame excuses that they hear everyday, “I just don’t want him/her anymore”, “the kids aren’t taking care of it”, “she got out and got pregnant”, “it meows too much”, “it hides”, and so on and so on…

I can understand the ones who adopt and bring the pet back within a few days because they didn’t realize how much work it was going to be. That’s one reason why I will probably never have a puppy ever again. Re-homed adult dogs are hard enough without having to start the housebreaking from scratch and deal with teething. I can’t understand the ones who own a dog for 9 or 10 years and then decide that because they’re moving they have to get rid of the dog.