This is Rumble Strip. I'm Erica Heilman. I'm sorry. It's been a little while since I finished a show. There are some really good things coming, I hope. Forrest Foster found his truck a few days ago, and I'm going to go up there this weekend and go for a drive with him and record our conversation. But things have been a little grim around here. I just recently lost my

cat, Zuzu. She was just two and a half, and I loved her a lot. And she left her brother, Kenny,

and we're both pretty despondent. So today I'm going to play a story I made for Vermont Public about an end-of-life

veterinarian Erica Brunner. Erica was in general practice for 16 years, but now she focuses on

end-of-life care and she makes house calls to euthanize pets. She meets people and their pets in their homes, in fields, in barns, wherever

they want to be. On the day that I rode around with her and recorded her, we went and we made a

house call in Johnson. Mike was there with his old dog, Kona, and I was planning to wait for

Erica in the car, but Mike invited me in.

So here is Erica Bruner.

It's really sad and hard, of course.

And there's a lot of guilt in there.

You know, on one side there's guilt because sometimes people feel like maybe they've waited too long.

Sometimes people feel guilty because they worry that maybe they haven't waited long enough.

There's this sort of illusion that we have that we could actually figure out the perfect moment

and that we could time this perfectly.

Many times we don't have a specific diagnosis.

Many times, especially with older animals, people don't want to put them through the process of

testing and diagnosis, and yet they often feel guilty because maybe they should be wanting to do that.

People feel bad for having limitations in terms of their ability to care for somebody

or to pay for the care of somebody. And we sort of end up leaving it to the people to say,

oh, well, I don't want that. But I have not ever seen anyone make a euthanasia decision without really deeply considering it.

And the fundamental important thing that I think everyone cares about is the quality of life and comfort of the pet.

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