Salamander
Fire Walking

I’d taken a leave from the cat shelter I volunteer with. Part of the reason was the heavy immunosuppressants I’m on, and part of the reason was the amount of time I’m losing each week to the PUVA treatments. A vet tech from a local pharmaceutical who has been volunteering for the past half year took over the vet check responsibilities for a while, but she’s now pregnant. Mid-April she finished her volunteering with the shelter to complete the rest of her gestation. I began doing vet checks again, but only once a week rather than the twice a week checks I had been doing. Thursday nights are my best night for this, and tonight will be my fourth week back.

I got a mailing this morning from a member of the shelter’s board saying we had a new volunteer to help with vet checks who could only do weekly checks on Thursday afternoon. That means that I will no longer be needed. This same email put a request in for volunteers to perform a treatment on an animal that I had left very specific instructions not to treat (sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease, and this animal was in perfect health; any action would have been for purely aesthetic reasons and could potentially jeopardize the perfect health part of the equation). And I realized I’d had enough.

Nobody reads what I write. Nobody follows instructions. Everybody is a freaking expert on cat health. They don’t need me. They already know it all. I’m in the process of tendering my resignation to the board. I have one more obligation to follow through on this weekend and then I’m pulling way back, if not out entirely. There’s enough stress in my life without this.