I dread those telephone calls. But they are inevitable. Who else does she have to share her problems with other than her mother? Friends come and go, but mothers are always there, ready to listen, to sympathize, to offer a voice of comfort.

She is a single mother. She has surrounded herself on her rural property, lovely as it is, with quite an assortment of dependents. She takes in abused animals to provide them with some relief from an animal-unfriendly world. And she fosters rescue dogs, restoring some semblance of behavioural balance to them so they can be adopted by people willing to give them another opportunity at normalcy in a companion-pet-to-person relationship. All of this emotionally draining, time-consuming, energy-demanding - and costly, but to her compelling. Her way, she says, to 'give something back'. It constrains her lifestyle to living in a country setting with all the difficulties of that situation for a single woman with an emerging-adult child.

When she called early yesterday morning I was just preparing to leave for a relatively nearby medical building for a scheduled fasting blood-cholesterol test. After speaking with her, trying to calm her down from her agitated and fearful state, I felt myself agitated and upset. One of her dogs, one of the most difficult of the pack to deal with requiring specialized and single-focus attention because of the dreadful physical abuse it had suffered had an encounter with a porcupine. She had tried to remove the quills but there were too many, too embedded, and the dog, a boxer, was in much pain, and difficult to control, certainly for one person.

She had to take it into the nearest-located veterinarian to have it looked after. A prospect that was daunting to her given that she is without employment and must carefully decide where her scant resources will be placed - but this was an emergency.

In the end, the day proceeded as it must do. I got through the inconvenience of the blood withdrawal and got on with my day. And she retrieved her dog from the veterinarian who, being in a rural practise, sees multiple such incidents on a regular basis, and who sympathetically charged my daughter a modest fee, just over $100, having had to anaesthetize the boxer and probe for well entrenched quills on its snout, lips, muzzle.