PAISLEY

The paisley scarf is wrapped tight around her head; a beautiful mix of blues and purples, but it is the shape that fascinates me. It makes the back of her head look like a giant light bulb. I am still looking for a fleecy little cap with horses on it; that is exactly what she told me she wants and I intend to find one. Light weight and warm to protect her newly balding head.

Cancer leaves people looking like alien beings, recently arrived from some place out of this world. Well, it is not the cancer; I know that. It is the chemotherapy poison that they inject into her body every two weeks.

With one sentence her entire life changed, and through friendship, so did mine.  Cancer has made her wonder who she will be next week. Where will she be next year? It is my (our) job to remind her that she will still be the woman we love. We will gather and celebrate next year with renewed verve. She is scared that she has no choices. It is my job to remind her that every moment is a choice. She can keep those things which are dear to her ~ and examine and discard those that no longer serve her. The choice is always hers. And choices can be transmuted, rejected, or revised any time she chooses.

Fighting, Dancing, Having cancer has become a full time occupation.  Everything looks and feels different to her and to me. Getting ready, receiving instead of giving, planning a new way of eating, a new wardrobe to wear, a new time of day to visit the grocer when the crowds are gone, arranging drivers to and from appointments ... it feels endless.

Every “thing” is simultaneously precious and unimportant.  It is alien.

A new view of every day life ... a new …. anew  … Anew !!

You can stop Dancing NOW ~ the Rains have Come !!

I attempt to sit here at my computer and work, but I, like many residences of front range counties in Colorado, am in a state of heightened alert. This morning I fed all of my critters, trying to find a decent place to drop hay as my north pasture has turned into two lakes, Lake Louise and Lake Annette.

Still in my muck boots and raingear, I decided to gas up my pick-up truck. After making an emergency run to Black Forest one evening to pick a hopeful nurse mare for an orphaned foal,  my truck was still on empty. Not much use if I were to need it quickly. Plugging in the electric to my horse trailer I notice that I don’t have head lights on the truck.  Humm, when did that happen?  Is it because of the rain?

Back at home I walked the perimeter of my little house and check my roof drains.  We have had approximately 5 to 6 inches of rain in the last two days and I need this water to move as far away from my foundation as possible. They are calling for four to six more inches of rain in the next two days.  Everything is looking good. When I came inside and pulled off my boots  I popped down to the basement to make sure it was still dry (it is) and to hit the “Rain Delay” button for my lawn sprinkler system.  Certainly not going to need that for a while.

I sat in silence for a minute and said a prayer for all of us. I imagined sunny days and how wonderful the next cutting of grass hay was going to be. I “see” my barn full of sweet smelling hay = green gold.

I am supposed to have lunch in Boulder with my old study group and our teacher who is in town from Namaste Retreat Center in Wisconsin. At this point in the early morning, I doubt if that is going to happen but I decide to take a quick shower and be ready for whatever happens next.  My radio beeps again … the National Weather Service alert is saying to stay away from Boulder ~ schools and businesses are closed, roads are flooding, at least one bridge has washed away, and they are evacuating residential areas around Boulder Creek. Well, at least my hair looks nice!!

I just came in from feeding a lunch snack. I pulled out a couple of flakes of good grass hay and careful put it in metal tubs that I had dumped the rain water out of.  It is disheartening to watch my horses reach in and flick it out with their noses where it will land on the mud and poo muck ~ they will probably not eat it now.  Really? I work hard to secure good feed for you guys and this is how you treat it? They look at me innocently and I wish that I could bring them all into my house and we could read books, sip tea and eat crackers and cheese.

They say, “Don’t worry about it, we are fine. It is all gonna be okay. “

I let their confidence seep into my bones and I know they are right.

I’m Back !!!

WOW ~ is time flying by for you as well?

I intended to offer my paper, Expressions of Horses as Healers, one piece at a time; breaking it down into small segments.  I scheduled Parts 1 through 6, and my goal was to present the entire paper without interruption.

And then life happened.
 
And life has been "interesting."  I use that word a lot these days in place of difficult, overwhelming, hard or scary.  "Interesting" carries a different energy ~ and that appears to be the main lesson. As my friend BB said recently, "The energies of these times are proving to be intense, chaotic and uprooting as we move more fully into the Age of Aquarius."  I am learning how to handle the not so subtle energy fluctuations that are being beamed to earth at this time.  My teachers said they were coming and science now says that it is happening.  Some days are better than others.
 
So, now I wish to finish the series offering Parts 7 - 10 in, hopefully, short easy-to-read segments. This will allow me to move on, free of my self-imposed decision to offer the whole paper in its entirety before scurrying off in new and exciting directions.

I hope you find it interesting! 

Check out my new adventure and website,
www.healinghorseregistryinternational.com

BENDING NEEDLES.

I didn’t notice my mouth was dry until I tried to swallow.  “I need to drink a glass of water as soon I get this done,” I thought to myself as I opened the large blue tote and rummaged through it quickly.  I found a huge 20 mm syringe and I was looking for the green color-coded needle.  I looked over several glass bottles with rubber topped closures and found the one named Flunazine.  I set my phone to the speaker setting so that Nikki could walk me though the set-up. We had gone through the whole routine last fall, but in the months that followed the knowledge had left my noggin.

I set everything gently on the table in front of me and examined each component as she told me again how they were going to fit together.  We had decided that I was going to give the medicine orally because if given IM (intramuscularly) it could, on a rare occasion, cause a deep infection.  Nikki wasn’t going to be home for three or four more days and I was not at all prepared to handle that scenario. 

“Do you feel at all comfortable trying to hit a vein? “ she asked me.

“Absolutely not” I chortled, “I would rather try and give her an enema. “  Might as well bring a bit of humor to the situation.

 “If you want to call Dr. Tim I am fine with that” she said again.

“No, No, I think that I can do this. I am right here, she needs it quickly. I want to give it a try.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.

My patient was Ruthie, an 1800 pound white mule. She is to Nikki what Lakota is to me. I had to get this right.  “Listen, I am going to go now and put this all together. I’ll call you back when I ‘m done.”  All of the shots I had ever given before were pre-made, all you had to do was point and shoot so to speak.

I fit the needle onto the syringe and then inserted it into the rubber gasket on top of the bottle. Holding the bottle upside down with one hand I tried to pull out the plunger.  Geez, why does this have to be so difficult? I felt really clumsy and it was taking a lot more strength than I thought was necessary. But I kept at it gently so I wouldn’t make a mess of anything.  Humm, is the top of the plunger  10mm, or is it marked by the bottom of the grey piece. I decided more was better than less, we are talking about a big girl out there and she might spit some out. 

Okay, that was almost fun; now I have to take the needle out so that I can shoot this into her mouth. The needle looked scary - it was huge, built for a rhinoceros or something.  Does it pull out or twist out? I tried it with my fingers and nothing moved. I took it upstairs and pulled out two pair of pliers. I had a sterile needle here which I really wasn’t going to use but still I wrapped it in a paper towel before I grabbed it with the pliers. Nothing moved. Well, actually it did, the needle was now bent at approximately a 65 degree angle, which I promptly capped and discarded.

Humm, I surveyed the whole set-up again and decided that even if the needle had came out of the hard plastic it was embedded in, the aperture would be too small to squirt the liquid in as fast as I was planning to.

As I walked out to the pasture I prayed to Ruthie’s angels as well as mine. “Please be with us and let this go smoothly.”  I took a deep breath as Ruthie came into view.  She was still laying down which is what caught my eye in the first place. I didn’t want to spook her so I did not walk straight at her, but aimed for a few feet behind her tail. It would be much easier for me if I could give her the medicine while she lying down – did I mention that she was a big girl? Oh yeah.

She raised her head and looked at me, and thought for a second about standing up, but then she didn’t.   I reached out and rubbed her neck and told her I was going to give her some medicine as gently as I could. I kneeled beside her giant neck and moved slowly and deliberately, careful not to tip the syringe because I didn’t want her to get a taste of what was coming before I was ready. Her lips were clinched but I worked the tube in as far as I thought necessary and then I hit that plunger hard, probably faster than I needed to - but got the job done.  I stroked her neck and thanked her for being still.  She pulled back her front lip and curled her head in the air. 

“Hey,” I told her, “I had to take red root tincture myself yesterday, three times, and that stuff tastes wicked too. You can handle this.” 

I stood up and moved away from her. I suddenly realized I had forgotten to put on the halter that I carried out. Oh well, we hadn’t needed it after all. I reached for my phone to call Nikki and let her know that it had gone well. Whew. We discussed what I should do for the next twenty minutes and I could hear her relief.  We had both been worried that Ruthie would put up a fuss and it could have gone badly, but it didn’t. I suddenly realized that I still needed water. I walked back to the house feeling a lot better than when I walked out to the pasture.  Everything is going to be fine, I just know it!