Unpacking Trauma

What comes to mind when you hear the word “trauma”? For me, I had always associated the term with horrible things that had happened to someone in the past that left a lasting impression or affected their lives long after. And truthfully, I thought I was exempt from trauma. Nothing bad had ever really happened to me that I thought could be counted as trauma. I had a normal childhood with parents who have been together now for 30 years. I thought that being 27 years old, the trauma that would haunt me would have already happened, but there is no age limit to traumatizing experiences. I found that out the hard way this past Labor Day weekend. [Trigger Warning: I’m going into detail on what happened to my puppy in an attempt to heal the trauma this caused me personally, but it’s not a pleasant scene to read.]

On Monday, September 5th, our family’s new puppy Benny woke up exhibiting some strange signs. He was hesitant to eat and was shaking as though he couldn’t control the tremors. As the morning went on it got worse. When my parents woke me up, they were frantically trying to find emergency vet services because his entire tiny body was shaking and he started foaming at the mouth. We knew something was seriously wrong. Because it was the holiday, most places were closed with the only option to drive to Des Moines [which is 2 hours away]. I could feel the panic and fear in the air exuding from each member of my family. Finally, my mom got in contact with a vet in Plainfield who said he could meet us at the clinic, so we all piled into the van to drive the 15 minutes there. Waiting for him to arrive was agony. Benny’s tremors continued to get worse and he was still foaming at the mouth. As we were trying to think back on what could possibly be wrong, I remembered that he had eaten something at the pond and my cousin Lindsay had pulled a green tablet looking thing out of his mouth. My heart sunk as I Googled what I was already suspecting. Most rat poisons are bright green. Just like the tablet that she pulled out of his mouth. Our poor puppy was suffering from the poisonous effects designed to kill mice and rats. We confirmed our worst fears with my aunt who said there was some rat poison in the shed at the pond where we were the day before. I tried my best to maintain a calm presence, whispering everything was going to be okay while I pet him in the seat next to me, but inside I felt like screaming. What could we possibly do at this point? It had been over 24 hours since he ingested the poison and we had no idea how much he actually might have eaten. I was Googling for any answers or indication that things would be okay, but when we narrowed down the exact kind of poison that was there [Bromethalin], we learned there was no antidote. No immediate save available.

As we were waiting for the vet to arrive, Benny got worse. And this is the moment that keeps replaying in my head over and over like a record stuck on the worst moment of my life. He started having seizures, bad ones. When I heard my dad start crying, I somehow knew we were going to lose him. Tears clogged my vision as I yelled, “Mom, what do we do?!” And my mom, who is always the strong one, who keeps it all together for the sake of the rest of us, broke my heart and my hope when she responded, “I don’t know.” What do you do when your mom doesn’t know what to do? Sitting on the lawn outside the closed clinic, with my precious puppy seizing in my arms, I broke down. I felt like I was outside my body watching the events unfold. We were all crying, but I was hysterical. This was my baby. I have never felt a bond as strong as the one I immediately felt when we brought Benny home. I spent every minute of every day with him. He was never not near me, sleeping curled up at my feet or nestled next to me in his spot on the corner of the couch. I have never cried like I did that day. At one point my mom told me to put my hand in his mouth, so he wouldn’t swallow his own tongue. I sobbed the entire time I did it. We thought we lost him when he went still for a moment and my world felt like it was ending. I know that may sound dramatic to some people, but I think any pet owners can understand on some level. It was a feeling I wouldn’t inflict on even the worst people in this world. To feel a living creature “die” in your arms in such a horrific way. It was traumatizing. I still think of how scared he must have been to not know what was going on. He was okay one minute and not the next. I just hope he could feel my love coming through all of that fear. I want to believe he did because I didn’t want to just give up. I kept forcing myself to believe he would be fine once the vet arrived. I was hysterically repeating the mantra that “he’ll be okay” over and over in my mind hoping to manifest it into reality somehow. And when the vet finally did arrive, he calmly brought Benny inside, gave him a sedative to help with the seizures and then put him on a drip that was the only possible treatment for a poison without an antidote. He told us that we’d know if they could get ahead of the brain swelling in the next 12 hours or so. We wouldn’t know if he’d make it until the next morning. And the odds were heavily stacked against us. Poisons like this typically take 36 hours to completely move through the system and we were already at hour 24.

Now it was a waiting game. I couldn’t deal with the purgatory of not knowing, so I mostly slept. I saw all of the signs that I was falling into a major depressive cycle, one that would only get worse, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to be conscious. I didn’t want to think of the possibility that we could lose him. Time went by slower than imaginable, and even though I slept a lot of it away, I was awake all night. I tried reading but couldn’t focus. I sent up prayers to every God and deity I could think of. I performed a Wiccan healing spell that I found on the Internet. I tried visualizing and manifesting a positive outcome, but flashes of my fears kept infiltrating that thought process. Eventually I just scrolled Tik Tok until the sun came up. And when it did, so did the news that Benny had passed in the middle of the night. I let out a gut-wrenching sob that I’m sure the whole house heard. It was unthinkable. He was just being an adorable, silly puppy and sleeping with me on the couch and now he’s gone? After we buried him at my Grandpa’s farm, I went into a catatonic-like state. I had called off my meetings in anticipation of things not going as we’d hoped and took the day off. Luckily my parents had called off as well, otherwise I might have fallen into an even deeper hole of misery. I didn’t want to feel emotions, so I shut them off by sleeping. I slept for hours until my mom forced me to wake up and eat something. Even through her own grief, she had to make sure I was doing the bare minimum to take care of myself as well. I didn’t want to be awake. I had no energy to engage in conversation. My appetite was non-existent. Making the basic motions of being a functional human being was too much. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to see your child drowning in grief like that. Because I was drowning and I had no will to swim. She booked me an IV transfusion to get essential vitamins and fluids into my system [because I wasn’t eating] and distracted me with episodes of The Bachelorette. It was an awful day. But I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have dealt with it alone. 

As I’m writing this over a month later, tears are literally falling down my cheeks because it’s all still so fresh. The wound is torn open. I know time will eventually act like the stitches needed to heal the immense pain I’m in. But right now, all I can afford to manage is a measly bandaid that keeps falling off every time I see a photo or video of Benny in my camera roll. I still flinch when I think about sitting in the backseat of the van where I rode next to him on the way to the vet. The smallest things trigger me. I’ve finally acknowledged the range of emotions that have been plaguing me since we buried him on that Tuesday morning—the devastation, the agony, the anger, the resentment, the guilt, the emptiness—but it’s still difficult for me to talk about. I’ve never been great at verbalizing my emotions; I’ve always been better at writing things down to offload my thoughts and feelings. But this has been particularly hard. I feel like I failed him. He was just a baby and I was supposed to look after him. He depended on me, on us, and when he needed us the most, we were out of our depth. We were too late. It’s a horrible, gut-wrenching feeling. One that I can’t just “get over” and move on from. I don’t even know if I can even look at another puppy without feeling irrationally angry and envious that someone else gets to see their puppy grow up and I don’t. They get to have years with their pet and I only had a couple months. It’s not fair. And I know life isn’t fair because the Boomers of the world repeat those words like a generational tagline, but I am filled with this rage that I was robbed of my time with him. 

It’s hard to imagine this getting easier. To think of Benny and not feel the pressure building behind my eyes threatening to release the floodgates of tears. To talk about him to other people. I don’t know if eventually getting another puppy would help with my healing or just make it worse. It might be too soon for a while. And even though deep down I know my feelings are valid, I tend to keep them hidden away. I’m hoping this outlet will help me come to terms with what happened and start the long healing process of a sudden loss. If you took the time to read this entire post, welcome to some of my most vulnerable thoughts and feelings. You don’t often get a glimpse into my mind like this [especially as an Aquarius]. All I can say to wrap this up is trauma manifests differently for everyone. And if you’ve experienced loss in any form, you’ll understand. Sometimes life just sucks and there’s nothing you can do but try to navigate through the suckiness in whatever way works for you. But it does help to acknowledge your emotions in one way or another. For some, talking about it is easier, but if you’re like me, take pen to paper or nails to keyboard and write it all down. It will feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulder. At least it has somewhat for me.

R.I.P. Benny [May 16, 2022 to Sept. 6, 2022]