Chosen by a Horse (14 page)

While we waited for the shot to take effect, Dr. Grice set up her equipment. The ultrasound machine was a metal cube, half the size of a briefcase, with a long cord attached to a smooth wand on the end. There was a second small box
attached to the first. This was the printer that would print out the image of Lay Me Down’s eye. No waiting. In a few minutes we’d know why this eye protruded.

We knew the tranquilizer had taken effect when Lay Me Down let her head drop a foot or so closer to the floor. She blinked slowly, sighed slowly, and she’d forgotten she had a tail. It hung off her rump as limp as laundry. I stood to the left of her head, holding her halter so Dr. Grice had access to the eye on the right. I would have liked a little of whatever was in Lay Me Down’s shot.

“Can you lift her head?” Dr. Grice asked.

“Come on, Lay Me Down,” I said, cradling her head in my arms and urging it upward an inch or two. Her head was heavy, she was sleepy. I liked having the giant head in my arms. Under normal conditions, it would never have been possible to snuggle a horse like that.

“Right there,” Dr. Grice said when the eye was at our shoulder level. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and squeezed some clear gel onto her fingers. She held Lay Me Down’s sleepy eye open with one hand, and, with the other, spread the gel all over it. Lay Me Down didn’t blink at all. When the eye was coated, Dr. Grice’s assistant handed her the wand, and, right away, Dr. Grice started moving the smooth, round end over the surface of the slippery eye.

It seemed to take no time at all, less than five minutes, before the little printer began chattering. It printed out several separate images. From where I stood, they looked like
dirty smudges. Dr. Grice finished and handed the wand to her assistant.

“Let me take a look at the printouts before we put her back in the stall,” she said. “If they’re not clear, we may need to repeat some.”

She took off her gloves and knelt by the printer. The barn was so quiet. The only sounds were the horses eating hay and the swallows scolding us in high-pitched cries as they swooped in and out, tending their nests, one in every stall, right on top of the light fixture. A swallow roommate for each horse. Sometimes I wondered if they got the same roommates year after year. I worried about fire but couldn’t bring myself to destroy the nests. Mostly they were made of mud, but tendrils of horse tail and straw hung down, forming little lamp shades of debris around the bare bulbs.

“You can put Lay Me Down back in her stall,” Dr. Grice said. “The pictures are nice and clear.”

I knew something was wrong because of what Dr. Grice didn’t say. She didn’t say,
Everything’s OK
. Wobbly-kneed with anxiety, I led Lay Me Down back to her stall slowly. She was too sedated to go any faster. I slipped off her halter with shaky hands, gave her a pat, and left her dozing until the drug wore off.

Dr. Grice and her assistant were standing in the barn entry where the light was good, studying the sonograms. I joined them, looking over Dr. Grice’s shoulder at the lines and smears on the the piece of paper in her hand. She started to talk
about the eye, pointing at the different blotches and telling me what they were, what they did, how an eye worked. I was listening but I wasn’t, partly because no matter what she pointed at, I saw nothing recognizable. The smudges and lines weren’t even in the shape of an eye. They were scattered across the paper in no pattern meaningful to me.

The other reason I wasn’t attending was because I was really only listening for one word. The one word in all the medical jargon that I’d understand, that would communicate to me exactly what we were in for. Not just in the medical sense, maybe least of all in the medical sense. Were we climbing or falling? Was there a way out or not?

She started to say words I understood. Not the word I was looking for, but close cousins. Tumor. Mass. Growth. Then she said the word. She said
cancer
. She said it might or it might not be cancer. She said it wasn’t someplace we could biopsy. It was too dangerous, too many blood vessels and optic nerves. There was no telling how deep it was, how far into her brain it might already be. She kept referring to the printout, to different parts of the smudge, but I wasn’t really looking. Not even when she pointed right to the mass, to the tumor, and said, “See, it’s this whole area. The readout is very clear.”

What was clear to me was we were falling. I didn’t know how fast but we were falling. And what I wanted to know was, what did the way down look like.

“Well,” Dr. Grice said, chosing her words carefully, “I don’t know. She could have a month, six months, a year,
even two. Depends how fast this grows and what parts of the brain it affects.”

There were sure to be neurological horrors I had never considered. There might be seizures, for instance, a thousand pounds of twitching, thrashing horse. There might be dementia, frenzy, paralysis. My mother died blind, paralyzed, and wasted. I didn’t remember it but I had seen her, I had been there. The memory was in me somewhere. It came out here, in this barn with Dr. Grice, as I learned how sick this horse was, what might happen, and realized how scared I was and how helpless.

Dr. Grice would send the sonogram results to the veterinary hospital at Cornell for a second opinion, to a vet there who specialized in eye tumors. Maybe he’d suggest a treatment protocol other than wait and see. I asked her for a copy of the printouts to send to a homeopathic vet in Florida I used sometimes. I didn’t know what he would say about the tumor but his treatment approach was nontraditional, noninvasive, and holistic. I’d never met him but had had several lengthy phone consultations with him over the past ten years. In the back of my mind I was thinking about pain management.

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to have something pressing against my eye hard enough to make it protrude. “Does her eye hurt?” I asked. Did horses get headaches?

Dr. Grice didn’t think she was in pain. Lay Me Down might have felt some pressure but not pain, not yet. However,
there would be signs to watch for, signs of discomfort: if she held her head at a strange angle, rubbed her eye or forehead against her leg, didn’t eat, swung her head from side to side, any behavior that was outside the norm for this horse, anything at all.

“Could this have been caused by the way she was treated?” I asked as I walked Dr. Grice out to her truck. “From being hit around the eyes and head?” Even as I asked, I realized it made no difference. It wouldn’t help us to save her.

“We don’t know what causes these eye tumors,” she said as she washed her hands. Her assistant was pulling out drawers and cabinets, putting away the sonogram machine and printer and emptying the contents of the stainless-steel bucket they had carried into the barn. Then she pulled out a flat aluminum box that held medical forms and also acted as a writing desk and began writing up my bill.

One of the reasons Dr. Grice was so well liked was that she always left you with hope. Not insincere, pie-in-the-sky hope, but real hope. She did it now.

“The eye cavity is big. It could be a long time before she can’t shut her eye. Until then, she should feel OK.”

“What do we do when she can’t shut her eye?” A horse had to be able to blink to keep its eyes moist.

“Let’s see what Dr. Rebhun at Cornell says. This is his area of expertise.” Dr. Grice was sitting sideways in the cab of her truck, her knees facing out with the writing desk on her lap that Donna had passed to her so Dr. Grice could finish writing up the bill. As she talked, she was sketching a
horse head and an eye. Then she drew a circle to show where the tumor was.

In a few minutes she’d pull out of my driveway, leaving me behind with the terrible question that would confront me every morning. What would the eye look like today? How it looked would determine everything else. It would tell us if she was in pain, how fast we were falling, if we’d hit bottom. I felt like tugging at Dr. Grice’s pant leg and saying, “Wait a minute, let me find a grown-up, somebody to be in charge.”

It was the way I had felt as a new social worker the first time a patient told me he wanted to commit suicide. I wanted to run out of the room and get help, find the person who would know what to do, tell Mommy.

Facing my frightened, helpless self was the hardest part about a crisis, especially a medical one. Before I did anything else, I had to grapple with overwhelming feelings of self-doubt and denial. Maybe everyone has to deal with those feelings, I don’t know. I just know that I did not feel well equipped for what I was facing now. My first instinct when Dr. Grice started talking had been to put my hands over my ears and yell,
Stop!
Then when she mentioned the word
tumor
, a voice in my brain immediately said,
Maybe she’s never done a sonogram, maybe she’s reading it upside down
. Then when I finally absorbed what she had told me, when I was no longer questioning or blaming the messenger, I was clobbered with anxiety.

I doubted Dr. Grice saw any of this. And why should she?
My model for behavior was the Dalai Lama, because he smiled no matter what. When I was little, my model had been the Queen of England because she exhibited no feelings whatsoever except a love of horses. Most of the time I achieved a blend. Call it cheerful reserve or quiet strength.
Boy
, I wanted people to think,
there goes a calm woman
.

There was that little incident of weeping on Dr. Grice’s bumper over a dinner date with a man, but I didn’t do that very often, and I was sure Dr. Grice had been surprised, just as she would have been surprised to know how alone and afraid I felt now, how incompetent.

I stood by the truck, squinting into the impossibly beautiful afternoon, trying to fit the word
tumor
into the kaleidoscope of spring surrounding me. It was a bad word to float across verdant pastures bordered by flowering orchards. How had it found its way down this country lane on to my small farm tucked behind its sturdy fence? It was like the word
death
finding its way into Christmas, the last day I’d seen my mother alive. Where, in the cluster of gifts underneath the Christmas tree, did you put a dead mother?

Dr. Grice had finished writing my bill, and the corner of the paper fluttered in the breeze as she held it out to me. “She’s a lucky horse,” she said, “because you’ll take such good care of her.”

I smiled and nodded even though I knew she was wrong. I knew somehow I’d run away.

L
AY
M
E
D
OWN’S
illness filled me with a sense of urgency. It changed time from something abstract to something almost visible, something to be watched and measured, something as precious as Lay Me Down herself. Time was achingly finite and unfair, too. Lay Me Down deserved better. So had my mother. And what about me?

I started to dread going to the barn in the morning. I used to wake up with a feeling of pleasant anticipation at the thought of morning chores, at starting the day with horses. Watching Lay Me Down’s eye changed that. Within a few weeks, the eye had protruded enough for me to see how different it was from the healthy eye. Now when I woke up, I crept to the window, half expecting to see Lay Me Down weaving her head in pain or lying dead next to a grieving Hotshot.

For several weeks after the diagnosis, I considered euthanizing her immediately. Why put her through another ordeal? Why put me through it? Then I’d go to the barn and feed her, brush her, spend time with her, and the truth is, she was content. I’d even say she was happy.

She did something all horses do but when she did it, it seemed different to me, as though she got a special enjoyment out of it. Early in the morning, when the sun was just up and the bugs weren’t out yet, she’d find the spot where the sun first hit the pasture and sunbathe. All my horses loved the morning sun but Lay Me Down was always there first and sunbathed the longest. Maybe she loved the sun because she was more sensitive to cold or maybe because once she had been kept inside and didn’t see the sun for a year. When it became too hot for the other three, and they’d gone back to the barn, Lay Me Down would stand in the sun another thirty or forty minutes, then have a good roll before going inside. And in the end, that’s why I decided not to euthanize her: because she loved the sun.

Once I decided to see Lay Me Down through her illness, something in me changed. The dread I felt about morning chores went away, and I felt less apprehensive, less scared. I spent more time with her. I talked to the homeopathic vet in Florida and he sent me a super vitamin concoction to help boost her immune system. He also sent me a liquid remedy that might slow the growth of the tumor or even shrink it. I put a few drops of it in her grain every day, along with her vitamins, carrots, and—thanks to Allie—a candy
peppermint. My grandmother had instilled in me a strict no-sugar rule for horses that had lasted thirty years, until the day Allie heard about it. “That’s ridiculous,” she’d said and brought my horses their first bag of peppermints. Lay Me Down always carefully picked the peppermint out of her grain bucket and ate it first.

I was particularly diligent about fly proofing her. I didn’t want a single fly near her face, especially near her bad eye. I used Avon’s Skin So Soft straight from the bottle, dabbing it around her eye with a cotton ball. I coated the inside of her ears with Bag Balm, originally made for cows but a good antiseptic salve for all animals. I sprayed the rest of her with a strong commercial horse spray. I didn’t like using conventional horse sprays because they contained such toxic chemicals, but they worked better at keeping flies away, and with Lay Me Down, it was crucial to keep her bad eye free from infection. If the eye continued to push out, she’d wear a full-head fly hood made of nylon mesh.

To further reduce flies, I kept her stall extra clean and bought cedar chips instead of pine shavings for her bedding. Cedar was twice as expensive but made the whole barn smell nice and probably helped reduce the flies in everyone’s stall. When they got really bad in the middle of the summer, I shut Lay Me Down in her stall while I was at work and put a box fan in her window set on low so she’d always have a breeze. Keeping her in her stall was to ensure that she would never be trapped outside the barn by Georgia. The arrangement seemed to make everyone happy,
including Lay Me Down, who headed right for her stall when she saw me walking across the pasture in the morning. I left hay for Georgia and Tempo in their stalls and put Hotshot’s right outside Lay Me Down’s door, because as far as I could tell, that’s where he spent the day.