Posts Tagged ‘healing’
Looking Close
I woke early yesterday and snuck out the door in the dark while Asher was still in his overnight crate. My destination was the Subaru Dealership in the Cities where I bought my 2019 Crosstrek. It’s headed for the 80K mile mark soon and still had the original tires, or what was left of ‘em, anyway.
Today it has fresh tires, brakes, oil, and an air filter. It’s almost like a brand-new car.
Cyndie called in one of our pet sitters to take care of the dog and horses in my absence. It was like having a day off for me. Well, half a day. Upon my arrival home, Asher instantly wanted to rough-house and battle for his squeaky ball. Eventually, we headed out to feed the horses.
The barn was in perfect order. The only difference between the way I do things in the morning and the way our helper left it was a closed door where we usually leave the top half open during the day.
I found myself taking close-up photos while waiting for the horses to eat everything in their feed pans.
The wind was whipping up some ripples on the surface of the waterer.
Close inspection of some of the hay that was delivered to us last season reveals a lot of woody stems and a very bleached coloring. We’ve been mixing it with partial flakes from 30 bales we received from a different supplier. I’m guessing the difference is first-cut versus second or third-cut.
The horses are very skilled at not eating any hay they don’t like.
It’s a lot more like straw than hay. The horses just let it drop to the ground.
This morning, Asher gets a car ride to Hudson for a day of play with other canines. It’ll almost be like another day off for me, except I’ll be picking up Cyndie’s grocery order and hauling it into the house.
The latest update on Cyndie’s convalescence is all good one week after surgery. Maybe even ahead of schedule for what she was originally expecting. The swelling is under control and she is already moving around using only one crutch while controlling pain with nothing but over-the-counter acetaminophen.
She is doing well to keep herself at rest and icing and elevating her ankle regularly.
I’m hoping she will be able to get back in the action by the playoffs. Whoops. I mixed her surgery up with all the injuries happening in the NFL. Between concussions and ruptured Achilles, it seems like there is a risk of teams not being able to field enough backup players.
Here’s hoping Asher doesn’t pull a muscle racing around with other dogs on his play date today.
.
.
Plates Removed
Thank you to everyone who offered good vibes for Cyndie’s surgery yesterday. I am happy to report that everything went according to plan. We made it in and out without any complications.
Getting one of the first surgeries of the day was a blessing. A year ago, her appointment was in the afternoon and after she was prepped, we had to wait almost two extra hours due to an emergency procedure that got inserted before hers.
I snapped a photo of Cyndie in the recovery bay post-surgery.
Those aren’t her real eyes. The photo has been enhanced to preserve her dignity. She came out of the anesthesia very slowly and was not yet in control of all her faculties when they brought me back to keep her company.
Instead of having a problem with pain, this time she endured a fair amount of feeling nauseous as the drugs were wearing off. Once I got her home and she got a chance to eat a little chicken soup, her gut settled down considerably.
It became obvious very quickly that recovery from this surgery would be a lot less onerous than a year ago. The key difference is that she wasn’t able to put ANY weight on that foot for 8 weeks while the bones were healing. This time the bones are good to go. She can stand on it as soon as she feels able.
The surgeon offered to give her the hardware if she wanted it (after they cleaned it up), but we forgot about that in the excitement of leaving and they never produced the goods. We’ll have to take his word on whether he actually removed it all or not, until the next x-ray.
Speaking of cleaning things up, the doc mentioned he took a little snip of the previous scar and added an extra stitch at the bottom to improve on the look he left her with last time.
When everything heals up Cyndie’s ankle will feel better and look better, too!
.
.
What Priorities
Looking at the topic of mass shootings from this perspective really struck me this morning.
Sorry. We’re all out of mental health care.
Ouch.
Back up from the point a person is in need of professional health care and consider the years that led up to it. Every little action and experience contributes to our future selves. Day after day after day. We make our future by how we choose to behave today. Parents, you are molding your children’s future health.
What are our priorities?
Imagine a world where we focused our resources on education and family health, working to reduce poverty and inequalities for all people.
Sending love to all who are struggling or in crisis. There is no quick fix but if a person spends whatever limited energy they can muster on choosing a healthy option instead of an unhealthy one this day and then does so every day after that, improvement is made possible.
Maybe that will buy the 90-week wait time for access to talking with a professional.
Or not. Where are your priorities?
I vote we seek to enable a better world.
Prioritize HEALth! Love yourself enough to show yourself love. Loving ourselves is the first step to loving all others.
.
.
Baking Therapy
After surgery, most people opt for physical therapy to aid in healing and recovery. This weekend Cyndie appeared to be working on reclaiming her former knee strength by way of baking Christmas cookies of almost every variety. With the COVID-19 pandemic decimating innumerable facets of what we consider normalcy this year, I am awestruck over Cyndie’s motivation to carry on her massive holiday baking tradition without the usual support staff of friends or extended family.
To do it all alone is wildly impressive. To do it alone on a painful wounded knee is rather beyond the call of duty if I do say so myself.
The sum total of my assistance involved taking full responsibility for animal chores, which I was doing anyway so she wouldn’t have to walk more than she already does around the house.
I couldn’t even maintain my reputation as a taste-tester. The batches were coming out of the oven too fast to keep up. I think I exceeded my self-inflicted strict ration of ingested sugar simply by breathing in the smell of fresh warm cookies all day long.
I just didn’t have the gastrointestinal stamina to pound that many test tastes in such a short span of time.
I am curious to find out how the baking therapy worked out for her knee on the day after. She has a follow-up appointment today with the surgeon to check on progress. I wonder if he might suggest eating fresh-baked holiday cookies to help her deal with the residual pain of the excavated bone behind her knee.
It would, at the very least, be easier than working upright in the kitchen all day…
.
.
Sleep Interrupted
I was sleeping so soundly, Cyndie couldn’t rouse me on her first try Sunday night. Her pain and concern were growing as the night went on and she wasn’t getting any rest. She re-read the information sent home after the knee surgery to confirm instructions if she suddenly experienced pain in her chest.
At midnight, she successfully woke me. We would be making a visit to the emergency room to find out if there might be a blood clot that made its way to her lung.
Despite our somewhat rural location, our health services are only 10-minutes from our home. We quickly received a blunt introduction to the strict COVID-19 protocols in place. Segregation, isolation, socially distanced to the extreme. We couldn’t even get in the door until Cyndie located the phone on which she was grilled with a 20-question virus threat interrogation, the result of which turned me around and sent me back to wait in the car.
In the cold.
By myself.
Why is this all about me? Only because testing confirmed there was no blood clot and Cyndie was discharged a couple hours later to wait out the pain at home. Two possible causes were “compressed tissue” from duration of anesthetization slowly uncompressing or muscle pain from distorted sleeping position during her two-days of narcotic couching it.
Let’s get back to my plight. It was the middle of the night before a Monday workday and I was stuck in a cold car in a deserted parking lot. ‘Just sleep while I wait’ was the logical choice. How hard can that be? Don’t allow yourself to start wondering if it actually was a blood clot.
When the voice on the phone finally gave Cyndie permission to enter and the double doors swung open, I stood and watched her limp down the long deserted hallway alone and thought of all the coronavirus patients who take a similar walk alone and never see their family again.
Biding my time alone in my car, I had the opportunity to practice, over and over, returning my mind to the present moment and recognizing I was just fine and Cyndie was in the care of trained professionals.
Thankfully, upon returning home somewhere after 2:00 a.m., I was able to quickly fall asleep in the comfy warmth of our bed and reclaim the wee latter portion of a healthy night’s sleep, aided by the knowledge that Cyndie’s pain wasn’t caused by a blood clot.
By bedtime last night, I’m happy to report, the pain was becoming more tolerable and her spirits were improving accordingly. That afforded us both a much better and well-deserved full night’s sleep.
.
.
Frosty Start
After an initial scare of Cyndie’s foot not working for a day after her knee surgery, she has regained the ability to wiggle her toes and walk like normal. She is playing the good patient and raising and icing her knee while otherwise resting to allow for maximum healing. That leaves the walking of our dog solely up to me at the crack of dawn. It’s the least I could do for her since she has been gifting me the pleasure of waking up slowly in bed on weekends on a regular basis.
Delilah’s body clock does not like to sleep in.
This weekend I am getting a fresh dose of starting the day in the crisp pre-dawn frost of snowless December days.
The pandemic is contributing to a mind-numbing distortion of normalcy with a bizarre mix of isolation combined with displays on television and the internet attempting to make it seem like everything is just fine and Christmas will be the same as always. Advertisers can attempt to make us believe that, but beyond wishing it were so, I don’t think anyone is buying that ruse.
There are plenty of people who are investing energy toward making the best of a bad situation, and I appreciate that greatly, but believe it should be done without discounting the harsh reality of overwhelmed hospitals and high death tolls raging concurrently.
Without checking the authenticity of the reports, I am saddened this morning to see a change of data for the U.S. recording another death every minute to now happening every 33 seconds. (Graphic posted on CBS This Morning broadcast.)
This brings a glaring awareness to how privileged we are to live isolated from congested populations and to have our land and animals where we can get outside to breathe the country air.
.
.
Can’t Breathe
Anger boiling over in the form of roiling balls of flame with no visible public servants on hand to contain the rage as daytime turns into night makes for a disturbing meditation in the moments before nodding off to sleep.
It is hard to breathe through our masks.
It is hard to breathe through the smoke.
It is hard to breathe when being choked.
It is hard to contend with the fact that all I was going to do was breathe in our forest air yesterday and beam love to the world, yet the Pentagon needed to put military police on alert as protesters ignored curfew orders and ignited numerous new fires.
Morning turns the tide and reasonable people emerge with brooms and trash bags to pick up debris in an attempt to hasten the healing of the damage done overnight.
It’s an interesting dynamic to watch the venting of angst built up over multiple generations and centuries of time followed by the immediate effort to clean up the present damage which will actually require generations of repair to remedy.
How many years of treating people of color (and women and LGBTQ and homeless and impoverished and mentally impaired human beings) with equal respect to their white counterparts will be needed to complete healing that is the dream of healthy well-meaning communities of enlightened citizens of the world?
I’m not sure I can breathe that long.
.
.
Relative Sadness
There is an aspect of grief that I visualize as wrestling an octopus. You can be engaged in the action for an immeasurable amount of time without ever having a clue if you’ve come close to pinning his shoulders to the mat.
Where the heck are octopus shoulders, anyway?
I’d love for nothing more than to have an official slapping their hand down to declare the match complete, or at least to call time on the end of a round. The clock never runs out though, and the round goes on endlessly while grief and I just keep wrestling and wrestling.
It occurred to me yesterday that I was somewhat unconsciously avoiding going out to the barn since last Sunday when Legacy’s life ended there. It’s a struggle, because I normally find great comfort in standing among the horses, but there is currently a profound disturbance of energy here. I’m feeling little capacity toward consoling our other horses and even less confidence in my ability to contain my own sorrow while in their midst.
Between the understandable waves of tearful sadness, there remain the troughs of intangible gloom. I recognize that space well.
It defined the bulk of my adolescent and early adult life, which was shrouded by dysthymia.
At least now I am armed with much greater knowledge and understanding of the dynamics of these mental squalls, and I recognize the current grief casting a pall over our lives is completely situational. There is unending love cradling our sorrow and it is nurturing our healing and growth.
After Cyndie and I walked Delilah around the property yesterday afternoon, we all ventured to the barn to look in on the horses.
I worry they might be feeling neglected after the intense attention paid to Legacy, and then his sudden departure followed by this incredible void.
They seem to me to be in a state of shock. All we can do for each other is vibrate our energy of sorrow and loss.
I’m not crying; you’re crying.
Dezirea actually stepped away from me, as if she couldn’t handle my grief. Hunter and Cayenne tolerated my attempts to give them some loving scratches, but I didn’t get a sense that either of the three of us felt much solace out of the exchange.
Cyndie spent a little more time with Dezirea. I think Dezi seems particularly sad. I am wondering if she is feeling some stress over the possibility she will inherit the ultimate responsibility of a leadership role, being the elder mare. It could just as easily be filled by any one of them, or maybe they will devise a perfect balance of power across all three.
It’s just that the four horses that were organized into a little herd over five years ago worked out so tremendously. They were a band. An ever-shifting combination of two sets of two. It was incredibly, preciously perfect.
Beyond our ability to fully appreciate when they first arrived.
Now they’ll never be able to get the band back together again…
.
Aww, here comes another slippery hold from that octopus, dagnabbit.
.
.
.
Feeling Love
In my lifetime, the art of feeling love has been a struggle to fully achieve. Luckily, I have had plenty of opportunity to practice. Most precious of all has been having Cynthia Ann Friswold around to repeatedly offer her guidance.
Quite frankly, some of that guidance comes across in a disguise that deftly pushes buttons that I’d rather not have pushed, but that’s part of the secret. Love isn’t always rainbows, flowers, and chocolate. True love is much more complex than that.
As a depressed person, I was distracted from being able to fully love. A combination of treatment for depression and couples therapy for our relationship was key to opening my eyes and my heart to love’s true potential.
Adding animals to our family has expanded my understanding of love to even greater depths.
Last evening, as I was holding our Buff Orpington hen while Cyndie worked diligently to remove globs of dried poop from the chicken’s tail feathers, I silently conveyed our love to the bird imprisoned by my grasp. Between a few isolated moments of flinching in discomfort, she generally rested her head against me and waited out the task.
We can hope she was able to tell our motives were pure.
Cyndie wanted me to offer the hen a red raspberry treat in reward for her patience of enduring the awkward procedure, but the Buff showed no interest. She just gave it the eye, with total detachment.
I had no idea that owning chickens might involve needing to bring them in out of the cold in the winter to wash and dry their butts. It’s a good thing they have gotten us to fall in love with them.
Owning horses is a whole ‘nother level of love.
Before our four Arabians had even arrived, back when we were having paddock fencing installed, a water line being buried, and a hay shed being built, the excavator arrived in his giant dump truck and chatted out his window with me at our first meeting. He asked what this project was about, and I told him my wife wants to get horses.
In a high-pitched voice of alarm, he exclaimed, “HORSES!?! It would be cheaper to get a new wife!”
Yes, there are costs to owning horses, but the rewards are pretty much immeasurable.
How do you measure love?
All I know for sure is, I’m feeling an awful lot of it in this latest phase of my life.
.
.
At Last
After too many days of no improvement, we are finally seeing glimmers of the old Delilah we knew and were often irritated by. Funny, how perspectives change, and behaviors that came across as a nuisance when she was overflowing with canine energy can become a celebration after a long series of days of droopy, pained existence.
Delilah has regained a little spring in her step, and has flashed moments of youthful yearning to playfully bite and romp, quickly curtailed with reasonable restraint.
Just hearing her let loose with a full-body shake that flops her ears in the rapid tremolo pounding against her own head is of significance when the sound has been absent for so long.
It is like a fresh ray of sunshine after a long period of rain, which is also an apt description of the day we have been blessed with today.
Hello, fall colors!
.
.
Relative Something 