If there’s a God, I think that I must have done something to really piss him off. Every time it seems like my life is getting back on track, something happens to derail all my plans, and put me in a worse situation than before.
That’s what happened with teaching. I moved out of the house I’d lived in for five years, and went to live in a shitty, red-neck town in the middle of nowhere because it was the only place I could find a job. I knew it would suck, but I thought it was worth spending a year there to get a career started. Things didn’t work out at all so I moved back to the town I’d been in before, only to find myself living in a shit hole with landlords who never fix anything. Worse still, I came back more in debt than ever before, and with more relationship troubles (my husband couldn’t find a job in the town we lived in, and he resented moving there).
If anything good came out of my aborted teaching career, it was the knowledge that I do not ever want to fucking try to teach again. It’s just not for me. If I hadn’t had that awful experience, I would probably have moved to a different state and tried teaching there, which would have been a huge waste of time, money and energy.
In some ways, I landed on my feet when I arrived back in town. I found a job in a large company which is, as far as these things go, a good, fairly relaxed place to work. I’m currently a contractor, but I will be interviewing soon for a full-time position there and, if I get hired, it will mean, of course, more job stability and a few hundreds more a month. It’s not much but it’s something.
Things were finally starting to look up!
Until last Saturday that is. That was when one of my cats decided it would be a really good idea to jump into my neighbour’s yard where, unbeknownst to her, there were two very large dogs waiting for her on the other side. What were you doing letting your cat out unsupervised, I hear you ask?! Well, ironically, my husband and I were fixing our fence that day to make it harder for the cats to get out. Since we were busy working on the fence, we just didn’t notice the cat leaving our yard. Ha! Also, our cats hardly ever are allowed outside.
Do I really need to tell you what happened to my cat? She’s nine pounds and the two dogs must have been around fifty to sixty pounds each. MM scaled the fence as soon as we heard all the commotion and pitiful screeching sounds coming from my cat while I – to my eternal shame – stood in my yard for a few seconds, not wanting to follow him because I was too scared to imagine what I might see. I eventually went over the fence, and helped my husband get the two dogs off my cat.
Miraculously, she survived but she was pretty fucked up – three broken ribs; punctures wounds to the fat pad on her stomach; internal bruising (although thankfully nothing was punctured) and an open wound on one of her legs. I am now $5000 poorer. Yes, you heard that right – $5000. She was in the cat version of intensive care at an emergency vet for two days, and then she was transferred to a specialty hospital where a vet operated on her stomach to remove flesh that was rapidly becoming necrotic.
I made the mistake of telling my colleagues about my $5000 vet bill, and I could practically smell the judgement pouring off of them, not to mention the ridicule. It’s safe to say that most people wouldn’t spend $5000 on a pet, especially $5000 they don’t have. They think I’m absolutely fucking bat shit crazy. I don’t regret my decision, though. This cat is a member of my family, and what was I going to do? Let her die? I don’t think so. I would never spend lots of money on an animal if all I was doing was prolonging an already miserable, painful life to make myself feel better, but the cat had a good chance of survival, and I just could not put her down.
I’m delighted she’s still alive (way to go, cat! All nine pounds of you took on one hundred pounds of dog!), but I have no idea how I”m going to pay this bill. I’ll be using CareCredit to pay for it initially but this company is such a rip off. I have twelve months of interest free credit for the emergency vet bill of $2000 (so, about $170 per month) and then I have only six months of interest free credit for the specialty clinic bill of $3000 (so, $500 per month). Somehow I have to come up with $670 extra per month. If I don’t, the APR is something ridiculous after the promotional period ends.
Someone recently commented on my furry family (I have eight cats and two dogs) and said that it’s never good to be too extreme in life – whether with religion, politics, drugs/alcohol or animals. He said that if my animals stop me from doing what I want to do in life it’s no good. I guess I agree, on some level, but my animals are my family, and I care for them deeply.
On the other hand, I am now going to have to spend so much time working (whether overtime at my regular job, or escorting) that there’s not going to be any time left over to work on the things I want to to improve my life.
