Just venting here, I don't think I'm really prompting any discussion. It's just eating at me like a sonofabitch. It seems that in a matter of not too long -- days? Weeks? -- we'll go from having a house full of critters to an empty house.
We've had a nice cichlid fish tank since my daughter was an infant. As fish age out and die, they get replaced, but we've ALWAYS had fish for nearly 20 years. When we lost power, and our house dropped into the 30s....it wiped them out. All of them. Which was sad, but then, they're fish. It sucked, but it's just a thing.
We're putting our cat down tomorrow. Long-term heart issues, they've gotten worse, and we're on borrowed time. So, we're putting Shiny down before he ends up dying in a painful cardiac event. The boy is going to be crushed, there's no getting around it.
And then, we get to our dog, our black lab. She's had this nagging cough for a couple of months. Nothing huge, but it happens from time to time. Then, about a week ago, she stopped eating her regular food, or at least wouldn't eat as much. Took her in, not a good exam. Ultrasound. Obviously some sort of cancer in her lungs, and fluid build up around them. She's 12. We're not going to put her through surgery, which looks to be the only "treatment" option. So, we're going to talk about ways to make her remaining time more comfortable....and to find out how much time that is. Is it just a few more days? We don't know.
Will she be alive when my daughter comes home in 6 weeks? It's not looking good. She loves her animals, it's one of the things she misses the most when she's away. And now, it looks like every last one of her pets is going to die while she is away this semester.
It's just a lot. And when layered on to all the other ordinary stresses, and the baseline stress of our personal and work lives during a pandemic, it's a whole fucking lot. And I can't sleep. And I can't stop my mind from spinning at 10,000 RPMs.
And this just fucking sucks. It fucking sucks, and I hate that it fucking sucks, and I'm tired of shit that sucks, and fuck this fucking shit.