A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

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A living dog is better than a dead lion, Ecclesiastes IX


Yesterday, my small bichon frise found a (considerably smaller) bird on our front porch, in the same area where several other small birds have landed after flinging their small bodies against the unshuttered window on the back door. I would’ve liked to have taken a picture of Henri lightly prodding the little thing. It was sort of like something out of a Walt Disney movie, but it probably could have gone Tarantino pretty quickly. Luckily, disaster was averted and the bird, able to hop and flap his wings, but doing something with his head that was concerning way probably had some sort of head injury. You could almost see the little Tom and Jerry cartoon concussion stars. And luckily, bless their 501C3 tax status, Wildcare was accepting small patients that day.

Ok, I’m not the sort of person who would wrestle a bird, even a lovely little songbird, from the paws of a coyote. Nature is, after all, nature, and she must do things for her own reasons, or however Faulkner put it, but this wasn’t an act of nature. This was an act of my stupid plate glass window, one that isn’t clean enough for my neighbor’s aesthetic but apparently not dirty enough to prevent small winged animals from smashing into it. A plate glass window is the natural predator of absolutely nobody.

We didn't name the bird. I have no idea what type it was, a sparrow or a songbird or a waxwing. It was a brown bird. There are no ornithologists in my house.

And I guess today I’m overly sensitive, especially towards small and probably dying things. At the risk of disillusioning the many medical insurance companies no doubt clamoring to insure me, I’m going to come out and say what my friends, family, postal service carrier, and Primary and Secondary insurers already know: over the past few months, I have taken anti depressant medication, and today
is my eleventh day of not taking Wellbutrin, prescribed for depression, what with all the infertility and dying over the past two years. Obviously, nobody should put that sort of information on the world wide web. Although, I’m certainly not alone- a pretty non trivial percentage of my demographic will utilize some sort of psychiatric medication intervention. And in my case, while the collective benefits of 300 mg. of Wellbutrin outweighed the side effects, the withdrawal period has sort of thrown me for a loop, or at least that’s the best way I can describe what seems to be going on in my head, the sense of balance turned around and around in a spherical spiral pattern. My equilibrium normalizes and then just as quickly falls away; so far today I have walked head-on into a concrete pole and missed two porch steps. The ability to focus is there, and then it is not. I have two small patches of neuralgia, one on my lower rib cage and one in the exact middle of my spine, and even the brush of my cotton shirt is painful. But mostly I'm more emotional than usual - not on the level of crying while line at Rite Aid, or pulling out old photo albums, but I’m doing what I can to avoid the evening news and have definitely put aside The Lost Dog, None of this is to say that the withdrawals detract from the collective benefit of taking the drug, and no way would I have wanted to go through Wellbutrin withdrawals while dealing with chemically induced menopause, no thank you, psychotropic medication withdrawal and Lupron are, in the parlance of pharmacologic epicure, lattes and pinot noir and altogether bad news in the same sitting.

Now, this was the right decision for me (and, presumably, for the recipients of the 118 million antidepressant prescriptions given to Americans in 2005). It was also my personal decision to avoid getting pregnant while taking that drug. And I’d like to say right here that plenty of women make different decisions, who do take MAOIs and SSRIs while pregnant, and the literature is not conclusive on this. My own psychiatrist believes that outside of the precious first trimester organ formation period there is negligible harm done with certain anti depressants. Although this recent Medscape article sort of disputes that. I’m not saying that another person couldn’t have gotten through a similar experience with prayer, or yoga, or meditation, dowsing, interpretive dance, whatever. I won’t interrogate the subject further.

Instead, I'll settle for being the living dog.

Addendum: the intake worker at San Rafael's Wildcare reports that the small brown bird of the morning is a Thrush