Catch your breath or the hunt for paracetamol.
I love Autumn. Of all the seasons in the year, I find it the most optimistic and uplifting. I love the tail end of Summer, when we are still revelling in the abundance and energetic heat of the sun, and at the same time noticing the first touch of copper and gold on the trees. I love walking to the horses when the mists are rising off the fields and the sky is pale blue above, heralding heat later, but not now.
Some mornings are cool enough now. Today the ponies emerged gently from the mist. Ernie first, his black and white patches breaking through the grey. Gemma takes longer; her speckle grey-white coat blends perfectly with the misty landscape, mysterious, ethereal. A horse from mythology. They breathe like dragons and I find my hands under their muzzles revelling in the grass scented warmth of their breath. The phrase, catch your breath, flits through my mind and I’m tempted to wrap my fingers around the smoke coming from the ponies’ nostrils as if I could catch it, bottle it and breath it whenever I need.
These are the moments I find to catch my breath, on Autumn mornings, in the field with the ponies, leaving life concerns at the yard gate.
Fast forward two days. Mr H is home from hospital, weak, tired but without serious complications. Surgery was longer and more involved than we realised, and I suspect the road to recovery will be longer than we thought too. We have morphine, codeine, paracetamol and anti-coagulation injections. I’ve vacated my side of the bed so there is plenty of space and the books and journals on my bedside table have been replaced by a chemist’s bag of drugs and a sharps bin. Despite all of that, I’m cautiously optimistic that histology will be clear. I am not sure why. I just have a sense of it.
I needed to call the vet to Ernie yesterday. He didn’t come to me in the field as he usually would. He whinnied and tried to move across when he saw his bucket. Going to his stable was an effort. Huffing and puffing in pain, he could barely walk. It seems that his arthritis has now spread from his front legs to the hocks in both back legs. Ernie is not an old horse, just twelve, has never been in hard work and the speed the disease is progressing suggests that his condition is rheumatoid not osteo-arthritis. The vet, one of the team at our practice, had not herself seen Ernie for a year and was visibly shocked how quickly his joints had deteriorated.
Rheumatoid Arthritis is an autoimmune disease where the body mistakes its own levels of protein for foreign protein and tries to eliminate them, attacking cartilage around joints. This causes joint swelling and irritates the synovial membrane. Steroid joint injections can slow the progresssion of arthritis but are not suitable when so many joints are affected, plus they can cause unhelpful weight gain. There is no cure. This means that all we can do now for Ernie is manage his pain. Ernie is already on the maximum levels of danilon, one of the ‘go to’ pain relievers for horses. We are now looking at poly-pharmacy, stacking one drug on top of another by adding in paracetamol. Forty a day.
I’ll be able to access his actual prescription on Monday but until then we’re on make do and mend. In the UK paracetamol is highly regulated and you can only buy small amounts at a time. So I have friends, family and even my yoga students, out and about, slipping extra packets of the drug in their weekly shops. I feel like a paracetamol street dealer with my network of suppliers. I’m getting increasingly sore thumbs from popping pills out of the bubble packs, and I’m intrigued to see whether I can claim the resultant repetitive strain injury as some kind of industrial or carers injury!
But in reality, setting the rather hilarious drug running to one side, I know that this is the beginning of the end for Ernie. When he was first diagnosed, I was told that he would be lucky to manage his pain for a year. That was three years ago. Since then I have tried everything you can throw at horses joints: complex joint supplements, herbal remedies, devil’s claw, turmeric and black pepper,magnetic knee boots, pharmacological pain relief, weight management, field rest and a super quiet life. He, we, have done well and who knows we may have a few years to go yet, or maybe just a few months. I had forgotten that his condition would be life limiting, yesterday was a stark reminder.
Right now, the horse field feels sad. It is hard to linger there without thinking about Ernie’s physical mortality. I know that I love the very depths of him and that his soul will continue whatever the journey of his physical body. I also know that Gemma and I will miss him, and that it will take me a few more days of processing the news before the horse field is where I go to renew and restore myself.
I’m looking at an old photo that I have of Ernie on my desk. It was taken around three years ago just before his diagnosis. It is autumn, the trees form a beautiful, golden back drop. He is resting his muzzle in my hands, whilst I kiss his forehead. It still makes me catch my breath.
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