Oh, man.
I don’t know if it’s just the past two weeks catching up with me or if I’m descending into whatever flu-illness goes around when the weather changes, but I am totally worthless today. Well…maybe not totally worthless. I did get up at 5 a.m. to go over a project one last time before sending it off to the client. But then I went back to bed. Until 11 a.m. With the exception of one very terrifying moment when my friend came by to drop off my extra house key at 8 or 9. I have no idea what I even said. I just know that Luna barking next to my ear while I was in REM was the most terrifying thing that has ever happened.
Anyhow, I think it’s the stress. All catching up to me in one big pile of You Must Sleep for Three Days Straight. And that lengthy sleep would be justified…if by nothing else, by the extensive set of family scares or emergencies of the end of May.
It started with my uncle’s mother, who passed away. She lived a long life, but, still: sad.
My uncle flew to the Midwest for her funeral and to get things rolling with the sale of her house. Actually, his house. You see, he bought the house for his mother to live in, but he still owns it. So now he has to clean things up and get that sucker on the market.
Only there’s a complication: one violently angry drug addict living in the house. Violently angry because she feels entitled to continue living in his house. For free. Obviously. So when he said, sorry, you have to leave, she told him she’d kill him.
In the end, he couldn’t even go to his own mother’s funeral…for fear of being shot by out-of-her-mind Meth addict. Plus (bonus!) she brought over her Meth-head friends and had them trash the house before she moved out. Holes punched in all the doors, many of the walls. They took the kitchen drawers…and the bathroom drawers. They took his furniture and stole the car. And they left garbage strewn everywhere. A little parting gift from America’s entitled drug-addict masses.
While my poor uncle was dealing with all this halfway across the country, his wife was dealing with a series of crises all her own. You see, because they own a large ranch with horses, cats and dogs and because they had just moved all these animals up there for the summer, it made more sense for her to stay behind while he went to deal with the death in his family. Of course, they didn’t know how things would roll out then. But either way, life wouldn’t have been good.
As soon as he boarded his plane for the Midwest, their oldest, sweetest, favorite horse started rolling around on the ground. Now, for those of you (like me) who are not horse-educated, when a horse starts rolling around, it can be a sign of colic. Colic is a life-threatening problem that happens when something is wrong with the horse’s intestines and the horse can’t poop. Because he can’t poop, he starts rolling on the ground, trying to work out the pain in his belly. But rolling is the worst thing he could do…because horse insides are kind of crappy. And if they roll around, they can actually twist their intestines, causing an even worse blockage.
Of course, my aunt noticed the rolling and put the horse straight into her trailer, driving down to her local vet. Unfortunately, her vet isn’t outfitted for the surgery he needed, so he put the horse right back in the trailer and gave her directions to another vet all the way up in Denver. It was the worst kind of two-hour drive.
That’s when I got brought into the loop. Down to the vet I went to be with a distraught aunt while she waited to hear what was wrong with her horse. Still, while worried, she was hopeful.
She shouldn’t have been.
An hour after they rushed him into surgery, they found the cause of the blockage. Not only had the horse twisted his intestines all around, but there was a tumor wrapped around them, cutting off access. To save the horse, they would have to untwist the intestines, remove the tumor, chop out part of the intestines and try to reattach them. The prognosis wasn’t hopeful. And it was going to cost some big bucks.
So she had to put him down. Her favorite horse. While her husband was in the air, on the way to danger of his own. She was, of course, devastated.
I didn’t think she should drive home on her own, so I went home and got Luna and my computer. I called my clients and asked for an emergency extension on projects. And I made my way out to the ranch to distract and hopefully help my aunt.
If you’re not an animal person, it might not sound like a big deal to you. But it’s a big deal. That horse was her first baby. And now he’s gone.
We spent the next four or five days at 100 mph…keeping busy, keeping distracted. In between, I stole moments to work on my projects.
It was sad and stressful and I still worry a bit about them. My uncle is back and all the remaining animals seem healthy and I’m sure that things will start looking up soon. But they’re exhausted and drained. And I’m sad and tired. And last week, which was a short week, was catch-up week…which meant a lot of work in a little time, all while trying to still get exercise, say farewell to a friend who is moving, eat healthy and take care of a still-sick Luna.
In summary, maybe I’m just tired, not sick. But boy oh boy am I tired.
Once I finish this week’s big projects, I’m getting a massage.
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