Archive for the ‘Chronicle’ Category
Growing Bones
We made it through that holiday. With Marie and Elysa taking on the majority of kitchen responsibilities, we succeeded in holding Cyndie to a moderate amount of upright activity. Seated on a chair with her leg propped up, she partnered with Elysa to sculpt a precious turkey cheese ball appetizer.
Nobody wanted to be the first to start deconstructing the little gobbler. Looked too good to eat.
It was pointed out that the injury we are nursing on Mix is her right leg, just like Cyndie’s. Coincidence?
I’ve been given permission to show what her ankle is looking like so far.
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At our appointment last Monday, the surgeon decided to leave the stitches for another week because the residual swelling was still putting pressure on the wounds. That swelling has come down nicely in the days since. He anticipated that the numbness Cyndie was experiencing would diminish as the nerve root-like structures that were disrupted grow back.
Hopefully, a turkey dinner with all the fixin’s helps to grow both bones and nerves.
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Another Drama
What is it with all the issues coming our way lately? It’s as if the universe is seeking to exercise the limits of my ability to cope with stress.
It’s getting exhausting, I tell ya.
Yesterday afternoon, while serving up pans of feed for the horses, I noticed blood on Mix’s leg.
I took pictures to send to Cyndie up at the house. While I was waiting for her to acknowledge, a little intimidation from Swings caused Mix to attempt a hasty retreat that almost failed because of the way she tried to avoid using that wounded leg. I knew this would require inspection by someone who knows much more about horses than me.
Cyndie made some calls and shared the images. Because it looked like it could be a puncture wound and the location was near a joint, it was deemed worth contacting a veterinarian.
I moved horses around and closed gates to isolate Mix from all three of the others so she wouldn’t need to do any hasty retreating. The vet finally arrived long after dark, but he quickly analyzed the wound and administered meds. I drove Cyndie down to the barn and she used crutches to come in and observe.
The vet strongly suggested we confine Mix to just the space under her half of the overhang and gave us two medications that I will need to give her with her food.
If she stops eating because I put medicines in her food, I will lose my mind.
I strung some fence tape between posts to constrain Mix to the overhang. Having her pinned in there also required me to provide her with a bucket for water.
The cause of her wound remains a mystery. I will need to look for a possible loose screw or nail that she might have come up against.
On the bright side, there aren’t many more things left that I need to fill in for Cyndie’s expertise around here. I’ve already grappled with a majority of them at this point. All this drama is helping me to appreciate how wonderful my life was a month ago before all the illnesses and accidents made their way into our routine.
On Monday we met with Cyndie’s trauma surgeon again and he decided to leave the stitches in her ankle for one more week. Otherwise, he said the foot and ankle look good. Not that I’m counting, but only seven more weeks until she can walk on it.
That will be a little drama that I am looking forward to seeing.
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Not Better
If something is not getting better, does that mean it is getting worse? Not necessarily, but possibly. We continue to face the parallel issues of Cyndie’s recuperation after breaking her ankle and Delilah’s mystery illness that is looking more and more like what may be the end of her life. Cyndie and I are striving to be positive and calming alongside the obvious sadness we are experiencing.
The main evidence we are getting from Delilah is that she has stopped eating. Short of further expensive veterinary options, we are left with that clear X-ray and good blood results as the only reference for ruling out easily resolved causes. There are a variety of other afflictions that may be triggering Delilah’s shutting down but at ten years old, putting her through the trauma to learn more won’t necessarily provide much in the way of extending quality years for her.
Since kitty treats were the only thing she would accept (her ignoring scrambled eggs this morning was a real gut punch), we figured she could enjoy those yesterday and get a little more than zero calories.
That just resulted in a return of her vomiting this morning.
I’ve shortened her walks to just long enough to pee and/or poo if she has it in her to do. I told Cyndie this morning Delilah’s poop was rather cat-sized. I guess that’s what you get on a diet exclusively of kitty treats.
She mostly lays at Cyndie’s feet but still occasionally pops up to bark at something outside that neither of us can identify. Delilah shows no signs of pain or discomfort so we are left with witnessing her slow down between glimpses of her old spark.
If she continues to refuse to drink water or broth or eat anything we offer, it will be a matter of days before we will need to make that final decision which is never easy to make.
Not much else beyond keeping Delilah comfortable seems very important to us at this point.
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Food Issues
How strange it is to have our Belgian Tervuren Shepherd becoming finicky about eating. In our attempts to treat her for what was becoming chronic vomiting, she seems to have lost trust that we are offering nutrition in good faith. We tried hiding her two prescription pills in every possible enticing morsel. She ate the first one or two and ever after has successfully separated the pills from whatever we hid them in.
Now Delilah is refusing the prescribed diet offerings and even turning away from servings of her regular food. The only thing she still gladly chomps are kitty treats left over from our days with Pequenita.
Maybe she misses her kitty sister.
Honestly, I think Delilah won’t get back to normal until Cyndie is back to normal, too.
This morning I heard Cyndie report to someone over the phone that she was off the prescription pain meds, so she is continuing to make good progress. The biggest burden she is struggling with is not that her ankle surgery is only one week old, but the fact that Delilah is not doing well.
I continue refining my technique for serving the horses their three feed sessions. Since half of them are supposed to receive larger portions, I can’t just leave them on their own or the bolder ones will move in and push away the two who should get the larger servings.
When I am successful in splitting them into groups by serving size, I can care less about who is stealing whose portion.
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Light is notorious for wanting to get in Swings’ space, yet Swings is the primarily dominant mare of the herd. Why Swings tolerates the intrusions from Light is beyond me. Is Swings peacefully sharing or is Light perniciously seeking control?
I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter to me since they both receive the same serving size. They both eat together until the servings are gone, so neither is getting short-changed.
Now if Delilah would resume eating until her servings are fully consumed and keep them down long enough to digest them fully, that would be great.
I need to go feed Cyndie. She seems to be having no problems eating food.
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Status Update
One week down, seven to go before Cyndie can hope to be allowed to put weight on her right leg. Not that I’m counting. I’m noticing promising progress in her pain control as she is reducing narcotics and replacing them with over-the-counter alternatives.
I wish we could say Delilah is showing as much improvement. Even though she is no longer throwing up like she had been, her energy has dropped and she’s totally rejecting the vet-prescribed food and meds that are intended to help her. We’ve been throwing money at the problem and have learned there is no blockage visible by X-ray and her blood levels all fall within a healthy range.
Taking Delilah for a walk has become an exercise of my patience. Instead of pulling me down the trail like usual, she now trails behind as far as the leash reaches. At one point, as she stood foraging for grass to chew, I hooked her leash to a fence post and continued on to feed horses without her.
Normally, she would bark and bark if we left her behind. This time, she didn’t seem to mind one bit.
I think Cyndie and Delilah are unconsciously in a contest to see who gets better first.
Between my tending to each of them, I have continued to chip away at tasks we had hoped to take care of before snow arrived. Yesterday, I finally retrieved Cyndie’s prized “door-table” that she sets up on two plastic sawhorses in the woods under a big tree. It’s a novelty that she loves having, but it sees little if any use throughout the summer. It is now stored in the barn for winter.
I also pulled out the ATV snowplow from the back of the garage and installed it on the Grizzly. In the morning, it seemed like I was going to have snow to scrape off the driveway but by the time I was ready to plow, the snow had again melted from the pavement.
It looks like we installed heating in the asphalt. I’m pretty sure that residual ground warmth is fading fast. Our temperatures are due to drop for a few days, swinging us from unseasonably warm to colder than normal for mid-November.
Eventually, I will need to plow the driveway. For now, I am more than happy to wait.
It feels strange to walk the snowy trails without Cyndie. Winter will be half over by the time she gets to join me again.
It challenges one’s ability to live in the moment when you can’t put weight on a leg for two months and the immediate moment involves uncomfortable surgery pain. It’s safe to say that both Cyndie and I are setting our sights on a day that is weeks away. For now, that’s the moment we are living in.
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My Workplace
I don’t mean to boast, but for those of you who are forced to work under harsh fluorescent lighting, walk on static-generating commercial-grade carpet, or stand on cold tile or hard concrete floors surrounded by dreary walls, my experience is worlds away from yours. My workplace is the great outdoors with all the sights, sounds, and smells that come with that.
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Problem Postponed
My concerns about clearing the snow off our driveway were unwarranted. The warmth still in the ground was slowly melting the snow from below. Upon first light yesterday morning, I could see that plowing would be unnecessary. As the day wore on, the surface of the driveway just continued to lose snow cover, even though light snowfall continued off and on all day.
It wasn’t enough new snow to overcome the dark, wet driveway surface. Sure looks like a new layer of asphalt, doesn’t it?
Being new, it lacks the texture of the old, worn pavement we replaced. Sure, the old surface was breaking apart, but it provided traction! As a result, the new driveway threatens to be much more slippery than we are used to. I hunted down an empty bucket and started putting in a variety of sand and gravel so we will have something to throw down on bad sections after the residual ground warmth completely fades.
By then, I will be less concerned about driving the ATV along the shoulders when plowing because they will be frozen, too. The postponed problem will no longer be a problem at all.
Here’s hoping… Look at me, wishing for it to get freezing cold. That’s not usually the kind of desire an old man professes. Must be my inner child talking.
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Worst Combination
I’ve been dreading this possibility for months. The worst combination of plowable amounts of snow falling before the ground is thoroughly frozen played out yesterday right before our eyes. The unfinished shoulders of our new driveway are too soft to support driving on them, let alone scraping them with a plow blade.
Since we didn’t receive a huge amount of snow by the end of the day yesterday, I’m contemplating just pushing what snow there is to the edge of the asphalt to create small snow banks over the existing shoulder. Before the banks freeze too hard, I might try flattening them enough to create a base layer over which I could drive and plow after future snowfalls.
In the beginning moments of accumulation yesterday morning, I headed outside to clean leaves off the pavement in front of the shop. It’s a job I intended to do a week ago but a certain person’s emergency and follow-up surgery have disrupted a lot of the before-snow plans we had hoped to fulfill.
Nothing like raking leaves that are already getting covered by snow. By the end of the day, the area in the picture became a parking spot for my car. I moved my car out of the garage so I could put Marie’s car under a roof. If the snow lets up today or tomorrow, it will save me from needing to scrape windows if she decides to brave the winter driving back to her place in Minnesota.
With the two of us watching over Cyndie, the metal-jointed woman has been making pretty good progress managing her pain and healing her incisions. With Marie running the kitchen, I have been freed up to take the dog outside and to keep the horses well-fed.
And now, I’m adding the role of chief snow shoveler to my other primary duties.
🎶 It’s beginning to feel a lot like… winter.
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Relative Something 