Monday, June 11, 2007, 07:30
My Lucky Day. . .
Friday evening we baled hay over at my brother's place. It was just a few loads that were ready. Beautiful hay. Lovely June evening. A perfect June evening with a clear blue sky and a cool breeze. When we were finished, we brought one load home with us.
Saturday morning we unloaded the hay and stacked it in our barn. Before we unloaded the hay, Randy picked up the tin on the south side that we have been stacking the hay on for years. The tin doesn't work very well because air can't get under it. Plus, the tin was rather unstable. One winter a few years ago, the stack of hay shifted in that part of the barn while I was trying to get a bale down. I landed on my back on the floor. My back gave me quite a bit of trouble for months and months after that.
Last fall, we got some wooden pallets from my brother. Randy put the pallets down in the barn Saturday morning, and we unloaded the hay onto the pallets.
For the record, first crop hay isn't that much fun to stack in our barn. First crop always produces some heavy bales of hay. The hay was dry when it was baled. But first crop has denser, heavier stems on the hay, so even though there's still the same amount of hay in the bale, it is heavier than second crop. I was glad I had tied a bandana around my head to keep the sweat from running in my eyes.
It was a while later, when I was cleaning up what was left of the big round bale we had gotten for the horses to put it on the garden for mulch that I saw something red lying in the garden.
I bent down to pick it up. It was my pocket knife! The one that I used for cutting open hay bales. The one that I dropped in the barn while I was cutting open a hay bale. The pocket knife that I lost a couple of years ago. . .
When Randy was raking up hay chaff that had been under the old tin, he must have, unbeknownst to him, raked up the knife and then tossed it out on the garden.
That was the first lucky occurrence on Saturday -- finding a knife that I figured I would never see again.
Shortly after that, Randy changed oil on his truck and then changed oil on my truck. He had finished changing the oil and was going to grease the front end when he discovered that his air-compressor powered grease gun was not squirting out grease. I knelt on the ground beside him while he tried to figure out what was wrong with the grease gun.
As I looked down on the ground -- where I just happened to be sitting in a patch of white clover -- and I saw, of all things, a five-leafed clover.
I didn't find just one five-leafed clover, though. I found three all together. Not to mention that I found a four-leaf clover.
"This must be my lucky day," I said to Randy. "I've found three five-leafed clovers, a four-leaf clover. And I found my pocket knife."
As it turned out, Saturday was not actually my lucky day. Or maybe it was. Later in the afternoon while I was mowing behind the barn, Randy came running back there, yelling at the top of his lungs.
"Isabelle is in the fence. Isabelle is caught in the fence."
I abandoned the mower and ran around the side of the barn.
"You keep her calm," Randy said. "I'll get the wire cutters."
Keep her calm? What was *he* talking about? Isabelle's foot was caught in the fence, and she was struggling with all her might to pull it free. She was already in panic mode, and there was nothing I could do to calm her down.
As I watched, the horse struggled frantically, pulling backward and rearing up, trying to free her leg. First one part of the smooth high-tensile wire broke. Then another part. Finally she was free.
At just that moment, Randy brought the wire cutters.
Also at that moment, the neighbor from across the road came running down the driveway. In her bare feet.
"What's wrong?" she said. "What's wrong? I heard Randy yelling -- and I thought he was caught in some machinery."
Only a little while earlier, Randy had the plow and the tractor down in the old pasture, trying to break up some sod.
"Isabelle was caught in the fence," I said.
"I heard yelling. And then it dawned on me. That's Randy," she said.
When the neighbor realized no one was seriously injured, she turned and limped down the driveway for home. The road from our place to their place is now covered with broken up blacktop and very rough river gravel. Not small pieces of gravel, but some pieces of stone the size of a small fist.
Randy and I spent a few minutes trying to catch Isabelle. She was still panicked and did not feel like letting anyone get close to her. When we finally got the halter on her, I could see she was shaking. While Randy held her, I went the house for a bucket of cold water and a cloth.
I held the cold cloth on her leg for a minutes, hoping to maybe keep the swelling down. She had scraped the hair off her leg in one place and had bloodied herself by her other foot. She probably kicked herself while she was trying to break free from the fence.
From just looking at her, I was hoping the joint wasn't injured.
I doctored the scrapes with fura-oinment, and then we let her go. When we fed the horses a while later, we gave her some aspirin to help for the swelling.
High tensile wire, even though it's smooth, is very strong. All in all, I think Isabelle was lucky she didn't break her leg trying to get free from the fence. She had caught her foot in the diagonal piece of wire that's twisted tight to act as a brace in the corner.
While we were feeding the horses, Randy decided he wanted to rebuild the corner and replace the wire with boards. Isabelle doesn't bother the fence anywhere else, but she likes to stand in the corner. We will never know what happened. She might have been stomping at a fly while she was standing close to the fence and her foot slipped through the loop of the brace. She might have been pawing at the fence, although I haven't seen her doing that before.
We tried to get Isabelle to come up to the corner so she would see nothing was going to hurt her, but she didn't want a thing to do with it.
Later on, just before I went to bed, I went out to check on the horses. Isabelle came walking up for her little bit of grain that I give the horses at night. I was glad to see she was walking. When she finished her grain, she sniffed the length of the board Randy had nailed on diagonally across the corner section to help hold the fence. After Isabelle broke off the brace wire, the fence was pretty loose. Randy has taken a few days off from work this week. He was wondering what he was going to do with his time off. He now knows that he is going to spend at least part of it rebuilding the fence.
While I watched Saturday night, Isabelle sniffed the board for a while.Then she casually turned around, backed up to the board and started to sway back and forth. She was scratching her rear end. Obviously, she had decided that the corner was no longer an evil place where things grabbed her leg and held onto it.
Sunday morning, Isabelle's ankle was fairly swollen. But at least it wasn't as puffed up as much as I thought it might be. We gave her some more aspirin to help for the pain and the swelling. She doesn't want me to touch her leg, but that's understandable. She's walking around on all four, though, and that's a good thing.
Maybe the clover I found brought good luck after all. Like I said, at least Isabelle didn't break her leg. It remains to be seen, however, if she develops joint problems.
Sunday was a busy day around here, too. We hauled a couple of hundred bales of hay from my brother's over to a friend's house and stacked them in her lean-to for her horses. We mowed the lawn later Sunday afternoon.
Well, at least my brother's hay is done. And our friend has hay for her horses. We won't bale our hay over here for a few weeks yet. I'm hoping the timothy will grow some more before we cut it. Even though we've gotten some rain lately, it's still pretty dry. Not much moisture down in the soil. So I don't know how much more the timothy is going to grow.
Perhaps my lucky clovers will bring us the rain we need.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Thursday, June 07, 2007, 22:02
One Thing After Another. . .
I was on my way down to the barn at around 9 p.m. Wednesday evening and Randy was on his way down to the garden to pull out the burn barrel so he could burn some paper. It was just starting to get dark. It had rained during the afternoon, and the grass was wet.
I was half way to the barn when I heard Randy let out a yell.
"What's wrong?" I said.
"I cut my hand," he said. "On some barbed wire."
A few years back, we took down a wire gate that had been in the lane. We put up the gate the first time Kajun foundered so we could shut him up by the barn and keep him away from the grass. When we took the gate down, Randy rolled up the wire and laid it by the box elder tree near the garden. I haven't been able to mow there because of the wire. And of course, neither of us has gotten around to picking up the wire. It's been relegated to one of those things to do when we have absolutely positively nothing else to do.
"Get a towel," Randy said.
I turned around and headed back to the house for a roll of paper towel. As Randy got closer to the house, I could see blood all over his hand and dripping off the ends of his fingers.
"Jeepers," I said, laying some paper towel on the back of his hand. The paper towel was immediately soaked with blood.
When the blood had been wiped away, I could see a tiny pinprick in the back of Randy's hand. I could also see that the back of his hand was already swollen. It looked like a bubble under the skin -- and the bubble was purple.
"I think you hit the vein," I said.
I went in the house and called the emergency room. The triage nurse said that sometimes when they put in an IV, they will "blow" the vein, and that's what she thought Randy had done to his hand. Her biggest concern, she said, was that he should get a tetanus shot.
I told Randy what the nurse had said. We debated whether he should go to the emergency room right away for the tetanus shot, but then he decided to take some of his sick time in the morning and go to the clinic in town. We'll have to watch his hand closely to make sure he doesn't develop an infection.
That was my second spurt of adrenalin for the day on Wednesday.
The first dose of adrenaline came in the afternoon.
One of my older kitty cats, Guinevere, who is Winifred's sister, has a sinus infection. It all started about 10 days ago when all of the kitties were sneezing. I'm not sure what the sneezing was. I thought it might be an allergic reaction at first. But it went from one cat to the next to the next. Guinevere developed a sinus infection as a result. And Snowflake has not been feeling very well, either. They are all house cats, so I don't know what they could have been exposed to.
Anyway, Guinevere has been quite ill. She was really sick for a while. Didn't want to move. Didn't want to eat. Was not her normal, cheerful self. About a week ago, I got some amoxicillan for her. I got some amoxicillan for Snowflake Tuesday.
Guinevere is almost through the amoxicillan, but her face remains swollen and her eyes are watering and she still isn't herself. I called the vet clinic Wednesday morning to see if I should get some more amoxicillan or whether I should bring her in. The vet was quite concerned about the swollen face. Seeing as I had a court case to cover Wednesday afternoon for the newspaper, the vet said if I could get Guinevere in to the clinic at around 3:30, she'd have time to look at her. She couldn't go later than that, though, because she had to leave at 4 p.m.
At 3:10, the court case finally adjourned. It is a 20 to 30 minute drive home, depending on traffic. And a 10 minute drive to town. When I finally got home, I ran into the house, found Guinevere, stuffed her into the kitty carrier, called the vet clinic to say I was on my way, and took off for town. I got to the clinic at 3:40.
When the vet saw Guinevere, she was really concerned about the swelling. Apparently, cats don't usually get swelling in the face from a sinus infection. People do. But cats don't.
The long and short of it is -- the vet is worried that Guinevere has a cancerous tumor in her sinuses, especially since the cat is 16 years old.
She gave me a different antibiotic for Guinevere, and she gave Guinevere a shot of cortisone to see if that would help for the swelling. If the antibiotic and the cortisone don't help, the vet thinks she should do a bone biopsy.
Guinevere is feeling better than she was before I started the amoxicillan. So all I can do now is give her the other antibiotic and see if it helps. Snowflake still isn't herself, either, so I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I've got three cats on antibiotics right now -- and none of them are very good about taking their medicine.
The good news out of all of this is that Winifred ate several snacks Wednesday -- and that she is feeling well enough that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the medicine down her throat.
For quite some time, now, I've been saying that the universe must be off-kilter somehow because all of these little things keep happening. A few weeks ago, Randy cut his knee all to pieces when he slipped in the woods while he was helping a friend check the fences for his beef cows. He figures he sliced his knee open on a thorn or a small, sharp twig. Part of that cut left a gaping wound in Randy's skin. At the time, I wondered if it would be a candidate for a few sutures, but he put antibiotic ointment on it and kept it wrapped, and it actually started healing quite quickly.
In addition to Randy's cut knee and his punctured hand and Winifred's emergency surgery for her tooth a week ago Wednesday and Guinevere and Snowflake being sick, my truck hasn't been running all that great. And one day, the windshield wipers stopped working all together while I was driving into town. Eventually the windshield wipers started working again, but now I'm afraid every time I turn them on that they won't work.
And, oh yes, then there's the telephone. We got a new V-tech handheld a while back, and only after a few months, the buttons stopped working. Randy got another V-tech through his place of employment, and this time, the buttons stopped working in two weeks. We've got General Electric handhelds now, but I don't think they work all that well with the answering machine, and I have reason to believe that people have called and thought they left a message when in fact, they did not leave a message.
And then, too, there's the fact that I got stung in the neck by a wasp on Thursday afternoon.
As for Snowflake, Thursday morning her nose was more stuffed up than it was before I started the amoxicillan. So for the fourth time this week, I stopped by the vet clinic. I've got clindamycin for Snowflake now.
Also, we had a severe thunderstorm with torrential rain go through Thursday afternoon along with a tornado warning. It only rained hard for 10 minutes or so. But it looked bad for a while. And the national weather service said some areas near here might have gotten 60 mile an hour winds and baseball sized hail.
As for Randy's hand, by Thursday morning the swelling and purple knot had pretty much gone away. He stopped at the clinic on his way to work for tetanus shot.
All I can is --- I hope that whatever is out of whack in the universe will right itself someday soon. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph