Will the Ax Fall?

I am waiting again, head resting in place, guillotine ax poised to drop. Ha, now is that over dramatized or what? Here's the thing: the vet I use is extremely affordable, so affordable on spay/neuter that people who take their cats and dogs elsewhere, to their own vet, for routine care, are using my vet as the valley's low cost spay/neuter clinic. It's riling them, I think, rightfully so, too.

So there's talk there, about how they can't make it on spay/neuter alone, if their prices are so low. There's talk of raising prices. When I heard this, my heart starts racing wildly. My job is on the line, as are the spays and neuters of hundreds of cats that, unless I have access to somewhere affordable, won't get fixed. Guillotine sweat out!

Fact is, there is no other place affordable in this valley for spay/neuter. I think most Corvallis vets cost over a hundred dollars to fix even a feral. Some have barn cat prices but that price for the spay of a feral is still over a hundred bucks! Who can pay that? Poppa can't pay high prices like that and, if I lose the one place in this valley where getting a cat fixed is affordable, Poppa's money will move to an area that has such options.

Sure we have the FCCO clinics. Three times a year, with a very small number, relatively speaking, of cats getting fixed through those infrequent visits by the FCCO van.

To actually solve the overpopulation problem, a community must have somewhere affordable people like myself can take cats in high numbers, rounded up, in door to door endeavors, owned and feral, immediately to be fixed. And preferably, the money to pay for the fixes available, either from a nonprofit source or county money and grants, or from private donars, kept on account at the vet clinic to be used only for spays and neuters. Otherwise, the problems will continue and magnify.

I understand my vets dilemma. They're a private business. They can do what they want to survive. In this day and age, without low cost spay/neuter options, some vets, like the Neuterscooter, have seen opportunity. In much of American there is no access to low cost spay neuter, yet poverty in America is widespread.

Poor people get pets. That's the way it is. Often, lack of education or judgement and responsible behavior, can go right along with poverty. Therefore, cats and dogs go unfixed. It's the way is is and communities must address how to solve this issue.

Where some vets feel no need to be part of the solution, others do. And some, see a business opportunity. Like the Neuterscooter vet, who tries to convince vets they can make a good living, meet great people, even travel, pay off student loans, etc, by offering low cost spay neuter. Yes, she's an incredibly hard worker and developed an unbelievably organized procedure flow that augments productivity, from check in through check out. Doesn't mean others, willing to work hard, can't do the same.

I'd like to convince my vet not to do fewer spays and neuters, but to do more! I don't think that will happen, but maybe some other vet out there, will not think of low cost spay neuter as bad business but as business opportunity.

I remember a job I had way back. I was living with my parents after being kicked out of OSU for being a mental case. My shrink talked to OSU and told them school was too stressful for me, so they kicked me out pretty much. He then went on to put me on about 11 drugs, give me labels and ruin my chance at any life. He was a piece of work, if you ask me.

He had told me "a mind is a terrible thing to waste," as he drummed his fingers together and stared at the wall. I know now he was talking to himself. He didn't want to waste the opportunity to make lots of money on my mind and life with lousy practise. I'll never in my life forget those words he spoke. Because they propelled a young woman without self esteem into a nightmare existence and further abuse that lasted decades.

So anyhow, I briefly lived with my parents which was, to be very very minimal----awkwardly horrible.

I had no job, no money. Down in southern Oregon where they lived the old vet retired. A new vet, an Irishman to the core, took over his practise, but the old clients of the old vet, weren't showing up and he was having a tough time. I went there looking for a job. He had no money to hire anyone full time, but he asked if he could hire me two hours a day, three days a week, for one month, to sit there and go through the old files and call the old vets' clients and try to convince them to come to him.

I had no self-esteem. My father had drilled into me how pathetic I was since childhood, and already the mental health system had taken its toll, too, by letting me know how faulty my brain was, how I'd never have a job or be able to do anything. I was drugged to the hilt, by the mental health freaks, and their drugs bloated me out terribly, blurred my vision, slurred my speech, took my balance away and further reduced my ability to live. I took the job anyway. It brought in about $10 a day and I needed even that pittance, to help pay for those stupid drugs I stupidly took because I stupidly believed those freaks.

I got to enjoy talking to people over the phone and because I believed in that vet and his prices and that he was a good and kind fellow, I could honestly "sell" him. He began getting old clients back and soon after that, I lost that job, because that was the point of me being there. My mother had said the father would tell her it wasn't enough money I was bringing in with that job and I knew it wasn't, but I couldn't find anything down there. It was hard to find a job if you were a girl, in a small lumbertown, unless you wanted to bartend or whore. There were not many options for young women ever in that area.

It was my one and only sales job. I believe I would be very good at sales, but only selling something or someone I really believe in. The whole thing with my vet brought up that memory. I routinely "sell" my vet to anyone I come in contact with, with honesty, because I know how people are struggling these days, and I know how affordable this vet is and I've never had a problem with quality of care there.

The next job I got was total loss---clerk at the 7-11. The guy hired me only because I was honest and honest people down there were difficult to find. But the stress of that job was so unbelievable, I couldn't do it, couldn't keep up, was scared at night, after one clerk got robbed at knife point. I was threatened by drunks, vomited on, and I just could not handle it. Lasted only a month.

Same think happened when I tried to work at MacDonalds. I lasted only three days. Couldn't handle it. Those jobs take a whole more people skills than I ever possessed and I salute the low wage earning folk doing those jobs, jobs I can't do.

I then moved to Albany, was briefly homeless, then taken in by someone I'd worked with in Corvallis, when a student. They were a married very very Christian couple. We'd worked together at a nursing home in Corvallis, which was a horror because of the low staffing levels. Often other aides never showed for a shift and so they called the reliables in, and overworked us until the stress was too much. Also the horrors were hard to witness, the cold way in which those poor old people were treated, like commodities, and if you talked to these lonely folks, slowing down your work, you got blasted by a supervisor. Sometimes they had no adult diapers and no laundry worker doing sheets and it was just so horrible to see the suffering of those old folks and how poorly that place was run. But that's where I met this couple.

I moved in with them. The kids latched onto me. Three of them then. Then one night I came home and the husband was there, with his wife's parents and they looked gloomy. The husband's cousin had come to live with them, too. He was an alcoholic and they wanted to help him. Instead, the husbands' cousin and the wife took up in an affair, in her own house. The husband kicked out the cousin when he found out. The wife came and he confronted her with the knowledge of the affair. She packed and followed the cousin back to where he came from. I lived there only briefly after that.

In the end, the wife came back and went on welfare, got a divorce from her husband and custody of the three kids. The husband, after the divorce, ordered himself a bride by mail. And much later, the cousin came back to Oregon and rejoined her, married her and they had three more boys. All five of the boys have ended up in jail. One is now a homeless young adult whom his mother described as a "hoodlum".

Another just was released from the penitentiary, for rape, another, the youngest, whom I knew was gay from the time he was tiny and wanted to do his mother and brother's hair, was arrested for molesting a young child, a boy, and now is in jail I think. They've all had massive problems. So I was surprised when the wife wanted me to help with some cats before they head off to missionary college before leaving to be missionaries on a SW Indian reservation.

That really got to me, to know so much about them, and to know they're going to go push their religion on Indians. It seemed so bullishly hypocritically white Christian arrogant. I just wanted to wretch after hanging up the phone. I guess the reason is, they could stay right here and do missionary work, for their own family, their kids.

After I left that place, I don't remember where I wandered to, maybe back to Alaska. Time frames of the past, at my age, are blurred.

End of the story I know, of course. I'm helping cats. So I guess it turned out ok for me. And I hope very much my vet doesn't raise prices so much that I'll have to start some new chapter because I like this chapter. I like this chapter a whole lot.