Figment of your imagination

Once I visited the sea, and there was a chain of memories moving along the shoreline, and that I was thinking about this sandcastle that I built. It didn’t look like a sandcastle at all, because it looked like a home made cake baked by a home based mother. But as I surmised this unfortunate situation, it didn’t matter at all, because in my mind, I knew that it was a sandcastle. In fact it was the exact sandcastle I had in mind. I formed it out of a memory, and a thought that even I could make a sandcastle possible, and I felt exhilarated from the thought of it.

By and by, I thought, the sandcastle will recede, the soil will go back to the sea, forgotten, forever. I wrote my name in the shore under the cold afternoon haze, and as the soil touched my index finger I felt like I could make more of those, but the sea took it. It disappeared when I looked back. It was when I thought that experiencing it was futile. In a sense, It pointed back to memories I had when I did it from an island hundreds of miles away in Bohol where the sea was undisturbed, seemingly untouched by others’ fingers writing their names.

The sea didn’t care about me, I thought, but I kept on drawing, dreaming. It was like drawing a dream, but the dream faded away because the particles of the soil succumbed to the quiet wrath of the waters in the sea. All the memories recede like the soil, forgotten, forever. One can hear the sound of the waves from afar. They are the hands of the sea. They grab those precious ones you keep.

Time will arrive when you would come back and make sandcastles, write your name again, or perhaps dream about a better one. You will get that this impermanence is something that nourishes, rather than destroys. It makes you want to come back because you want to feel your dream. You want it real. Those dreams sometimes lose their hold on you, but sometimes you hold tighter, and will never be losing it to the vast ocean, you will take them back. No matter what it takes.

This is why we return.

Instead I will be reading and thinking about Ted Bundy’s victims. I wonder where their movies are. I wonder why their names aren’t raised.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Lynda Ann Healy, a 21 year old psychology major about to graduate that semester. Lynda worked with handicapped children and got up early every day to report on the skiing conditions for local radio.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Debra Kent, a 17 year old aspiring social worker who was known for always having change to feed parking meters for strangers.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Susan Curtis. Susan was only 15 years old and was riding her bike to church that day. She was a star on her high school track team.

In a world filled with kind, beautiful people, I wonder why we all know Ted Bundy’s name. I wonder if that isn’t giving him and people like him exactly what he wanted. And frankly I’m sick of hearing people talk about him.

I’d like to talk about 12 year olds Lynette Culver and Kimberly Leach, neither of whom turned 13 because Ted Bundy stole their innocence and their lives from them. Kimberly had just been elected first runner up “Valentine Queen” by her peers and never got to wear that pretty new dress. Do you think her parents still have that dress, hanging in the back of a closet? I bet they do. I bet her dad sits with it in his darkest moments. You ever thought about him when you hear the name Ted Bundy?

Let’s talk about 19 year old Susan Rancourt, who had a 4.0 GPA. 17 year old Laura Aime. 18 year old Georgeann Hawkins. 23 year old Janice Ott. 26 year old Nancy Wilcox. 23 year old Caryn Campbell. 17 year old Melissa Smith. 19 year old Donna Manson, who was an excellent flute player and by all accounts a bit of a goth. 20 year old Kathy Parks. 22 year old Brenda Ball. 20 year old Lisa Levy. 21 year old Margaret Bowman. 25 year old Denise Oliverson, who had just gotten into a spat with her new husband and had gone for a walk to clear her mind. Denise weighed 105 pounds. She was bound, gagged, raped, mutilated and thrown from a fast moving car. Have you ever considered what HIS life has been like since that day? How many hours of his life do you think have been spent on the floor, clutching the ring he had given her, apologizing into thin air?

These stories are real. These people are REAL.

I get that Ted Bundy was handsome and his eyes were very blue but please. Please stop glamorizing him like this. He ended and ruined lives. Nothing about him is cool or worthy of emulation. Ted Bundy raped, tortured, mutilated and strangled over 30 females, including 12 year old girls. None of his victims weighed more than 115 pounds.

Ted Bundy was a pathetic man.

Emulate Lynda. Emulate Debra. Raise their names and their voices to those around you. Honor them. They were very real people with promising lives and futures stretched ahead of them, stolen.

Please don’t elevate or whitewash this kind of rampant violence against women. I assure you the world is harsh enough for us without a new generation thinking Ted Bundy is a cool, fascinating guy.

Thanks.

I’ve been telling everyone I know for YEARS not to buy Blue Buffalo.

This is the short story:

A few years ago I took my sick cat, Ankh, to the vet. The vet and vet tech asked what I fed her. I told them Blue Buffalo. They looked like I had just told them I fed her razor blades and cyanide. They diagnosed her with pancreatitis and said that nearly all of the cats they’d been seeing lately with pancreatitis were being fed Blue Buffalo.  They gave her medicine and sent her home.  Two days later she had a seizure and died right in my arms. 

The day after she died Hannibal started displaying the same symptoms she had so I panicked hard and took him to the vet.  Got the same meds and the same diagnosis.  Luckily Hannibal survived.

I wish Ankh had survived. She was only ten and the best cat I’ve ever had. Literally the best and five years later I still cry when I think about her.

Full cardiac workup plus full PMH and PSH. Trop and 2hr trop negative. EKGs show NSR. Turns out they have an inherited disorder that predisposes them to develop blood clots. They take Coumadin, or rather they’re supposed to take it. The significant other rats then out and says the patient stopped taking it.

So naturally they get a CT scan and guess what? Go ahead. You’ll never guess.

The scan reveals a dissected aortic aneurysm. DISSECTED. AORTIC. ANEURYSM.

Oh. But it gets better. Name two things that don’t go well together. Here, I’ll help: dissected aortic aneurysm and Coumadin. Yeah. Bad. Not good. But remember, this patient stopped taking their Coumadin.

I know what you’re thinking: how is this patient living if their aorta dissected? A clot. This patient had a massive clot sitting at the dissected section of the aorta, preventing them from bleeding out.

And they wanted to go home and follow up with their cardiologist on Monday. To which I replied…

And his SO was like…

“Every Time”

Every time you say vets are money grubbing, or ‘too expensive’ or just in it for the money.

Every time you decline all diagnostics yet demand to know ‘what’s wrong with my pet’

Every time at a social function or other completely inappropriate place you find out that someone is a vet you ask them for free advice about your animal.

Every time you feel justified posting a shitty practice or vet review when everything was done according to the standard of care but your pet died anyway.

Every time YOUR lack of preventative care resulted in your pets early death yet you blame the veterinarian.

Every time she gets in early and stays late and works an 80 hour week because your pet that had been ill for days suddenly becomes an emergency at 5pm on a Friday and you demand to be seen – claiming these heartless vets won’t treat your baby.

Every time someone says ‘why didn’t you become a real doctor?’

Every time someone complains about the cost of veterinary care… comparing human medicine and insurance subsidies to pet ownership (totally voluntary btw).

Every time that someone doesn’t pay their bill and thinks that they are entitled not to because pet ownership is their ‘right’.

Every time someone walks in to a clinic and threatens to ‘sue your ass if you make one mistake with my baby’.

Every time a graduate vet looks at the hundreds of thousands of dollars in crippling debt and listens to clients driving Mercedes and bmws complain about the cost of a spay using good anesthetic care and adequate pain management.

Every time… You are part of the problem.

The problem is suicide in veterinarians. Most of us went to veterinary school because we care. We have a calling to care…. but there is a dark and expensive cost to compassion.

Think before you act or speak.

“Dude, I just handle crazy homo sapiens… you guys handle every other creature and their crazy homo sapiens owners. MUCH RESPECT.”

Parable of the Polygons - an interactive experiment that shows how tiny individual biases can collectively cause segregation on a massive scale.

To Build a Better Ballot - an interactive experiment that shows the alternatives to the voting systems we currently use and how they can be more representative and democratic, along with their faults.

Coming Out Simulator - a short interactive story/novel about coming out, based off of Case’s own experiences. Not one I’ve played myself but still one I can recommend.

Loopy - a very simple but useful tool to show how systems interact with each other and how things can self-propagate.

Reblog if you’ve got 1001 OTPs and root for them to kiss every second and read about prolly a hundred kisses per day in fanfiction and live for the ones that make your heart skip but have never been kissed yourself