The Trauma Of Pet Loss

What a traumatic weekend!  Which culminated this morning with all four of us hugging and crying while the worship team played "I'm desperate for you, I'm lost without you"...... I'm sure anyone standing nearby just assumed we'd been overcome by the Holy Spirit, but sadly, we were mourning the loss of our pet rabbit, Silk.  

Well, the kids were mourning the rabbit, I was mourning the £60 we'd spent at the vets on medicine that clearly hadn't worked!

Poor Silk, she lost her friend, our other pet rabbit Snowball, to a fox last Spring and since that tragic night I'd always felt worried Silk would meet the same fate.  

My husband came home from work on Friday night and chased a cat out of the garden and found her hiding, petrified, he brought her in and could immediately tell not only was she terrified but she was unwell and decided to summon me.

I was watching a film with our youngest two and thought it best we finish the film before we broke the news to them, it was going to be traumatic enough to discover their pet was dying, they didn't need the added trauma of delaying the climax of the film; some kids had been going into unused mine shafts looking for a ghoul who had kidnapped their friends and it was getting to the dark bit where we were sure the ghoul was going to grab one of the main characters and the tension was really building, we wanted to see this ghoul get got!

When we all got up Saturday morning we were amazed to see Silk was still fighting on but obviously not well and although we're not hugely sentimental 'pet people', neither are we heartless, we didn't want to just leave her to get worse and worse so off to the vets we went.

Apparently there was something wrong with her gut and she was in a lot of pain, so an injection for the pain, some medicine for her gut, and £60 thank you very much and she was given a 50/50 chance, turns out they weren't great odds.

Our daughters dutifully attempted to give her her medicine every half hour or so but on our last attempt, she went all floppy while my daughter was holding her, we turned her every way trying to find a heart beat, my daughter wondered how to do CPR and attempted a few chest pumps but we both agreed we weren't going anywhere near mouth to mouth. We both breathed a sigh of relief when we could feel a very faint beat, but it was short lived and she had gone.

Both girls were very brave and although teary, they held themselves together very well, gave her a last cuddle and then we buried her.

I thought they coped with losing their pet extremely well and I had been amazed at how composed they had kept themselves.....until this morning in church.  I'd said to my daughter before we left I was hoping for some really good worship, well we certainly got it because it was singing that song that opened the floodgates for all the emotions to come out!

What Do We Want? A New Voting System!

The country has awoken in uproar (well, mild grumbling) at the electing of a Conservative government - which is odd, because apparently we elected them!

Maybe I should've kept the views I was brought up with and that is 'Christians shouldn't vote' but I didn't, I got involved, I went to the hustings, I emailed candidates, I watched the Trews, and because I invested, I am now upset that the vote I cast wasn't a winning one.

But where are the jubilant voters who have done this to our Country? Not surprisingly, today on Facebook and Twitter a lot of people are upset, in fact I have only come across two voters who are happy with the result: Katy Hopkins, the lady who says drowning people (immigrants) are cockroaches, and a farcebook friend who works in education - unfathomable!  Everyone else who voted Tory is keeping their head well and truly below the parapet.

Of course if my vote had been a winning one, (which it never could be in my constituancy) many others would now be feeling upset and let down by the system, you can't please all of the people all of the time, only some of the people some of the time. (Who said that?)


I went to bed last night praying for change, hoping to wake to something new & exciting, a fresh start....turns out it's still Friday & I have to go to Asda.  Which, incidentally was a lot quieter than usual, perhaps their clientele have assessed the situation and taken their custom to Aldi, which is marginally preferable to a Food bank.

But enough of the doom and gloom, as Christians now, if this was not the result we wanted, we need to rise above it with prayer and petition, with responding to need as we see it, and being thankful that we have a voting system, albeit a pants one.