"Goodnight, I love you, see you in the morning" It's what I say to every group as I close them in for the night, every single night. I don't know when it started but I've done it for as long as I can remember. The reality is though, some mornings, there is one I don't see in the morning, not alive anyway.
One of the most traumatic things is going to the barn in the morning and finding an animal that has passed away overnight. Some, you see coming. Animals that have been sick or declining. But the worst is closing up the barn at night & everyone is perfectly fine, to in the morning, finding one has passed overnight. It's shocking & traumatic. Your mind races questioning what you missed....coulda, woulda, shoulda. It's a terrible game. In those situations, I know I didn't miss anything, I am hypervigilant about the goats and their health. I know our goats. They always tell me when something is off. But still, my mind races. When we lose one unexpectedly, we typically have our vets necropsy. Sometimes we get answers, sometimes we get theories. It doesn't change the trauma, but we try and learn.
There are countless things etched into my mind that our vets have told me over the years. One of the most memorable is something Dr. P said to me before we had done a necropsy on a goat and I asked, "what if he had X and I missed it, I will never forgive myself." He replied, "Did he tell you he had X?" he obviously wasn't asking in a literal sense, he meant, did he let me know? Did he have clinical signs? The answers to both of those were "no" So Dr. P said, "then you couldn't have known." Turns out it wasn't X and honestly, I can't remember what it was, but that conversation has lived with me since. But still, the coulda, woulda, shoulda game is haunting even when I know we did everything we could. The trauma of loss is woven through every single day here. I have enough experience to know when to worry and when to not although I low key always worry because that is just my nature. Even though I know we have everything we need to help goats in our medical room and in my head and the best vet team minutes away, I worry. We have protocols for recognition, diagnostics and treatments that we develop with our vets based on our herd and what works for our herd. If I suspect pneumonia, I know exactly what to do. Why? We've done necropsies, we know what types of pneumonias we see. We've done testing on samples to see what antibiotics work best. We have prescriptions for those antibiotics. I have the trust of our vets, and they are always a text away if I question myself.
Despite all of those things, sometimes, things just happen. Random, weird, we've never seen it before and will probably never see it again things. They just inevitably build on each other and I know that at any given moment, something catastrophic can happen. It is, as they say, the nature of the beast. It is truly always something. I feel like all the PTSD makes me jump to the worst-case scenario in most situations. I have had to learn to make peace with knowing that we are doing every single thing we can do when things do arise.
We see a lot here. We rescue a lot of animals, and we go above and beyond to help every single animal that comes through our gates. We sometimes push our vets and ourselves beyond what we know to think outside the box. Dr. P is incredibly innovative, Dr. J will deep dive into the science and together, they make a perfect team working on some of our more complicated medical cases. We have wins, we have losses, but we always learn. The losses always come with a cost though. They always leave me with some form of trauma that I have to learn to compartmentalize. I have to, I have so many lives depending on me every single minute of every single day. Grief takes a back seat.
Some days, I manage the paranoia and trauma better than others. Over the years I've gotten better at handling it because I have to. Nature of the beast. It never gets easier, the loss doesn't get easier to handle, you just learn how to handle it. But the trauma, it is always there. It will always be there, it will always come back, it will always leave an impact. But the best thing we can do, is to use it to learn. To learn how to better cope with the inevitable. Things can change in an instant here; we've seen it time and time again. It makes you appreciate the "quiet" days where the trauma and paranoia lay quiet. Around here, those days are rare. Nature of the beast. The never-ending story.