The Riding/Training - Elvis Has an Abscess

Elvis Has and Abscess

So, Elvis was acting like a turkey a couple of Saturdays ago.  My husband had been complaining about the fact that he would stand perfectly still until he got the halter about halfway on and then he would spin around and run away with his tail in the air.  If he could have said,  "Nanny, nanny, boo, boo!", he would have.  I hadn't done outdoor chores for several days.  It was a warm Saturday morning and I offered to do the feeding.   I went down to the barn and put Prima in the little corral, took her gazing muzzle off and gave her some hay.  There could be no confusion on anyone's part about what I was doing.  I was feeding.  I put Gus in his little eating area.  When it was Elvis's turn, I got his halter about halfway on and he spun around and took off.  I was ready.  I had closed the corral gate before I attempted to catch him.  

I used the lead rope, twizzling at my side, to drive him around and around the corral.  The rationale was that if he wouldn't stand still for me, then he would have to run around for me.  It was a dominance / submission issue.  He would have to run around until he was ready to stamnd still.  He was feeling pretty stubborn, so this went on for a few minutes.  PJ, the only other horse in the corral, came into the center with me and watched with big eyes for a while.  Then, thinking it looked like fun, she started biting and kicking and driving poor Elvis around and around with me.  This is what tipped the scale in Elvis's brain in my favor.  He decided that submitting to me was preferable to being beaten up by a little girl.   He stood quietly and I haltered him and led him out to the hitching post where he always got his grain.  I had watched carefully as I ran him around, because it was muddy and I did not want him to get hurt.  He did not fall or even stumble.  He was sound as could be as he went around.  And sound when I led him out for his grain.  I put hay out in the big corral for

everyone but Prima, let them all loose in there and went about feeding the poultry and getting my own breakfast.  

After breakfast I was having a second cup of tea and looking out over the front pasture when I noticed that Elvis wasn't eating.  This was very uncharacteristic for him.  There was something in his attitude that didn't look quite right.  Then I noticed he was standing on three legs and he wasn't moving at all.  I ran down to the corral, put on his halter and tried to lead him.  He wouldn't budge.  When I finally got him to move forward, it was terrible to see.  He hopped painfully without putting any weight whatsoever on the left hind.  I was horrified.  I thought, for sure, I had really broken him.

I hosed the leg and foot.  I could find no sign of an injury.  There was no heat, no swelling.  But he would not put any weight on it.  Something hurt.  I put him in a stall, with Gus across the aisle for company, and called my neighbor/trainer.  I put a call in to the vet.  My neighbor came over, took a look at him, but could find nothing.  I told her my whole guilty story.  She said that she thought it had to be an abscess because it was so acute and came on so suddenly.  I was sure it was something I had done.  We started him on bute and cimetidine for ulcers.  Sensitive Elvis always gets ulcer-y when he has to stay in a stall.  I waited to talk to the vet.  

When the vet called me back he said it was probably an abscess.  I was sure it wasn't.  I was sure I had caused it somehow.  He said he would be down the next morning.    When he arrived poor Elvis was no better.  He was obviously in excruciating pain.  He checked him over carefully and said it was an abscess, probably right under the frog and that I should start soaking in Epsom salts and wrap it up to keep it clean.  Elvis was in so much pain that he actually shook while we were soaking his foot that first day.  I carefully applied a poultice and wrapped the whole foot in vet wrap and duct tape.  

The next morning Elvis was almost totally sound.  He walked and happily pivoted on the foot.   I unwrapped it and sure enough: it had drained profusely into the bandage.  I soaked and re-wrapped it.  This was repeated daily for three more days.  Then there were four more days of stall rest, and out he
went into the snow with his buddies.  When a horse pulls up acutely lame you hope that it is an abscess.  It presents as terrible but it is relatively easy to treat and recovery is usually total.  I had never had a horse with an abscess until last winter.  Between them, Prima and Elvis had four.  My farrier thinks it is because we live on n old farm and in the winter and spring all sorts of old junk percolates to the top of the mud just waiting to puncture or bruise their feet.  I guess it is the price you pay for the charm of an older place. 

Four days later he pulled the shoe off of that foot.  Now we are waiting on the Farrier.

The Animals - The Best Therapy

The Best Therapy

2013 hasn't been the best year so far for me.  I had the flu. Twice.  That took from New Years Eve until early February.  Then I got a back spasm, probably because I had been lying around for a month getting fat and out of shape.  That led to pain medication, and acupuncture, and therapeutic massages, and stretching exercises and TENS  and more pain medication and visiting the spine specialist.  That led to a fight with our new insurance provider and eventually an MRI and steroid injections will be coming up this Thursday.

I mention all this because I haven't been able to post anything about riding, or training, or eventually gardening, or even cooking.   In the end, I can barely walk, sit or stand for more than a few minutes at a time.   I am taking so much medication that all I feel like doing is sleeping.  Which may be what I'm supposed to do until I get the injections.  I don't know!

These times of being an impatient patient are always educational for me in some way or other, though.  So far I have learned that my husband really can do it all himself, except the clean dishes sometimes have a little food on them.  Riding can't fix everything.  The animals we live with are empathic beyond all my expectations.  People have and maintain deep connections beyond what is generally accepted or talked about.  Mind and spirit facilitate healing. 

As I have become less and less able bodied, my husband has quietly stepped up and done dishes and laundry and vacuuming.  He has done all the chores, inside and out. He has cooked and straightened the house.  It has been seamless.  But he looks tired.  It's time for me to start pulling my weight again.

Usually when my back acts up, riding makes it feel better.  Not this time.

The day I woke up with the back spasm, I was crooked.  I went down to the barn and Elvis came up to me and wrapped his neck around me and gave me a big old horse hug.  He was very careful.  He is not a demonstrative guy.  He doesn't hold with frivolous displays of emotion.  I swear he knew I was hurting and he was trying to comfort me.

A couple of days ago I was having trouble getting started in the morning and I lay down on the couch for a session with the TENS machine.   There are only two in the picture above, but on that morning all four animals that live in the house were right there with me.  Jasmine was under my chin, Jasper was behind my knees, Gwynnie had her chin on my feet and Genji was stretched out on the floor next to the couch. 

A woman I roomed with for one sememster, freshman year, at Bennington College in1967 contacted me last Friday.  She is a long-time practioner of Kototama Life Therapy, and she lives in Santa Fe.  I haven't spoken with her for, probably, forty three years.  We talked on the phone for a bit last night and she did a remote, or telepathic session for me and my back this morning.  I feel better.  I have less pain and I have been able to be up and about for  several hours at a time, instead of only several minutes. 

I have no explanation for most of these things.  Skeptics will say that I anthropomorphize the animals and the remote healing was nothing but the placebo effect.  I have had many experiences, over the years, with the so-called placebo effect.  It is my doctors' best friend: always makes them look good. 

The Buildings - Winter Light

Winter Light

The Food - Greek Chicken and a Spring Blizzard Salad

Greek Chicken and a Spring Blizzard Salad

The problem with starting a food post and not finishing it in one sitting is that if I don't get back to it in a timely manner, I forget how I made the dish.  This is one of those occasions.  To make matters worse, I didn't have a recipe.  I saw one of the hosts make this dish on the TV show The Chew. ( I often watch it while I eat my lunch when I am at home.)  But I didn't go online to get the recipe - I just tried to remember it.  This was a great dinner to have during a spring blizzard.  It is lighter than the fare we crave during a mid-winter blizzard and lacks the rich root vegetables and squash  we have in the fall. 

Greek Chicken

1 chicken, cut up as if for frying

Olive oil

2 jars of artichoke hearts packed it water

1 bunch of fresh parsley

1 carton of sliced mushrooms

1 onion, chopped

1 lemon sliced

3 cups chicken broth
1 jar of pitted green olives

In a dutch oven, brown the chicken well on all sides in about a 1/2 inch of olive oil.  Drain and set aside.  Then, also in the dutch oven, sautée the onions, mushrooms, and sliced lemon.  Deglaze the pan with some of the chicken broth.  Add the browned chicken and the rest of the chicken broth to the Dutch oven.  Simmer, covered,  over low heat for about 45 minutes or until the chicken is done.  For the last five minutes add the bunch of fresh parsley, chopped, and the drained artichoke hearts, and the green olives, drained.  (I could only find pitted green olives that were stuffed with garlic or jalopenos.  I got the ones with peppers and removed them.  There was still enough heat in the olives to spice up the dish a bit.)  Salt and pepper to taste.  Serve over couscous.

Salad

Spinach
Swiss chard, sliced thin

Mango, diced

Craisins

Nuts (I used cashews)

Gramma Mac's salad dressing ( one part vinegar, two parts sugar, three parts oil, plus salt, pepper and paprika blended in a small bowl with a fork).

The Buildings - The Sauna is Ready to Use

The Sauna is Ready to Use

 

Just a few more degrees of heat and a few less points of humidity, and the room will be ready to sauna!  I just finished polishing the pan that holds the rocks, so we won't actually take a sauna today, but the room is ready and the stove gets it hot enough.  As the heat goes up, the humidity seems to go down.  (I suppose it might take a few more firings for the wood to be all dried out.)

 



The Grass/Land - How We Found Our Place

 

Above is an aerial photo of the farm that was taken before we bought it.  The realtor gave it to us.

 

 



How We Found Our Place

Someone recently asked how we came to be living in this remote place.  It is a good story and I have decided to tell it here.

About ten years ago, we were longing for a place to get out of the city and away from civilization for weekends and holidays.  We did a lot of hiking and camping and canoeing on public lands, but it had long been a dream to have a place of our own.  We began taking weekends to look for our refuge.  We looked in the mountains and we looked on the prairie.  The prairie captivated us, because it reminded us of the  mid-west in some ways, and because it was realtively unpeopled, and the traffic coming and going on weekends was not so terrible.   We saw an ad in the Denver newspaper for open plots of land, some large, some small, and some with primitive cabins on a large ranch that was being subdivided in Huerfano County in southeastern Colorado.  We went to look.  It was the weekend of our wedding anniversary and the solstice.  We fell in love with a parcel and asked if we could camp out on it before making a final decision.  The next morning we closed the deal.  The story of this place is being told at http://www.apishipawash.blogspot.com .  I mention it here because it was a catalist for our move to the farm as well.

Because it became our aim to build a home and eventually retire on our new land, and because all that open range just begged to be explored on horseback, we bought a couple of horses, boarded them, and began to ride.  For me it was a re-learning process.  For my husband it was a new endeavor.  This was better started in our fifties than in our sixties, we reckoned.  As the years passed, boarding the horses became more and more expensive and as I relearned/remembered what I had known about horse care, the standard of care offered at the places we could afford seemed less and less adequate.  So one day my husband said, "These boarding fees are like a second mortgage.  What would you say to looking for a horse property, bringing them home, and paying ourselves the mortgage payment?"   I was thrilled with the idea and ready to retire from my full-time teaching job anyway.  So we determined to look for a place, thinking it would take months, perhaps years, to find the right one. 

We contacted a realtor in Elbert County, because that was far enough from Denver that we might be able to afford property there.  He gave us a stack of listings to drive around and look at, with the idea that we would ask for a showing of anything we liked.   It was a rainy October Saturday morning when we started out on our search.  We drove for miles, and hours on muddy paved roads and even muddier dirt ones.  We saw many, many pieces of bare land with double wides or other temporary housing, loafing sheds and round pens.  There were a couple that had real barns, and outdoor arenas, but all seemed minimal and a little sad.  It was around three oclock in the afternoon.  We had not had any lunch.  My husband was getting that grey-around-the-gills look that he gets when his blood sugar is low.  It was raining hard now. We had been on this one dirt road for quite a while, Elbert County 17/21, and we came to a crossroads.  It was foggy.  We could not see any mountains and we were not sure which direction we were going.   He said, "I can't do this anymore.  It's too depressing."  I started to turn the car around in the intersection.  He looked up the hill to the west and said, "Now if we could find a place that looked like that, I be all over it in a heart beat!"  I looked in the direction of his gaze.  There, on top of the hill, was a little white house and a big red barn. 

It looked like a Minnesota farmstead, like the ones his grandparents and great aunts and uncles had lived on and worked, around Walnut Grove.  There was a grove, and a couple of other buildings, and that signature red barn.  "It looks empty." I said, "Let's drive up there and see."  It was empty, and down in the tall grass there was a little hand painted For Sale sign.  We hopped over the fence and looked around.  We peeked in the windows of the house and looked in the barn and sheds.  It was old and run down and had definitely seen better days, but it had real possibilities.  This was before we had cell phones, so we hopped back in the car, took down the phone number on the sign, and headed back to Denver, stopping only for gas and  hot dogs at the Franktown service station.  

When we got home, my husband called the number from the sign.  It was a realtor in the town of Elbert.  She said the place was sold, it was under contract and the closing was the following Thursday.  He asked that she keep our number in case anything went wrong at the closing. 

And something did go wrong at the closing.  They had to relist it for 48 hours.  During that time, we got a proper showing and made an offer that was a few dollars over the asking price.  The place was bank owned and priced as if it were bare land.  The bank that owned it was in Kansas and they figured from the photographs that whoever bought it would scrape the buildings and start over.  They hadn't met us!

 

 

When we went back for the showing it was a sunny day and we realized that it had this amazing three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Pike's Peak, and the Bijou.   The whole thing seemed like it was meant to be.

The Riding/Training - Elvis and Sleeping in the Barn

Elvis and Sleeping in the Barn

 

Elvis gets loose stools every time he stays in a stall for any length of time, or tailers anywhere, or stresses about anything.  It has been suggested that he might have ulcers.  I have treated him for sand and he gets pro-biotics every day, so I guess the next step is to treat for ulcers and see  if it helps.  I have a call in to the vet to get him a prescription.