I’m not sure it says anything but I will confess to receiving the news with some degree of alarm. Itchmo’s been blogging heavy since last year’s pet food recall. It earned itself a high profile among pet bloggers and devoted readers with scrupulous attention to the details of the news during those weeks of high anxiety.

And now it’s gone. Well, not completely. Its forums are still active and its readers still in the wings waiting for the Huh’s (the couple behind the curtain) to make a reappearance at some future date.

Not unreasonably, they’ve decided it’s time for some attention to the demands of real life and day jobs.

So you know, few bloggers do so for cash or acclaim. If I’m in any way exemplary, blogging starts off as a fun challenge and morphs into an obsession. For some, that degree of addiction is difficult to maintain. It’s bloodsuckingly stressful at times. It cuts into your life like, well…like a scalpel through fat, trimming away the fiddlesome down-time but leaving you less in reserve for real life emergencies.

WARNING! What follows is blatantly autobiographical and borderline smarmy:

For me, it so happens that blogging has come to serve my day job more than anything else has ever done. More than any coursework or personal pet crusade, blogging has actually transformed how I practice medicine.

“Hyperbole!” you may well cry. But it’s the God’s honest truth.

I’d reached a lull in my career after ten years in the biz. I’d been disappointed by the client misbehavior and borderline animal cruelty I’d been exposed to daily. I was no longer reading my journals as diligently. The stack would pile up until I’d guiltily flip through a half-dozen every other Sunday. Not a good sign.

“Burnout” is the appropriate psychological term, I think. I’d go to work, enjoying my positive client interactions and rail nightly against the freaks and the abusers I’d come across.

I’d always wanted to write so my therapist insisted I begin writing therapeutically to curb my stress. (Yes, I’m crazy. I have a therapist but I prefer to think of her as my “life coach.”) Lo and behold Dolittler emerged and a whole new universe of stress reached out and grabbed me—and hasn’t let go since.

There’s good stress and bad stress, though. And Dolittler’s the good kind.

My day job’s more fun and less taxing. I don’t freak out over the sickos and warped ones—not so much, anyhow. And I’m a better vet for it—so say my colleagues, who’ve known me since I was just out of diapers (that’s a picture). I write better. I sleep better. I get gigs on TV (every Tuesday morning as of today on Telemundo, ladies and gentlemen). Life is good.

So here’s hoping the Huh’s will be back—maybe even if just because they can’t get used to life sans Itchmo. Perhaps my exposing little sketch will help win ‘em over. If not, I promise we’ll understand.