So clearly I am not excelling at the art of keeping an updated blog about my life, and I must admit most of these posts seem like I am musing into the void, but here goes an attempt to summarize what has been a pretty hectic 2019. I have some students and friends who are also having a traumatic year, and I’m not sure if the planets are aligned to wreck havoc, or some other universal constant is out to disrupt all the people out there who don’t like change, but this has been a bit of a rough go of things. In the beginning of February my dog Luna’s spleen burst, we rushed her to surgery and she made it through, but we found out she had hemangiosarcoma. We did a round of chemo but she was unresponsive, and passed 5 weeks after surgery. For those Phillip Pullman fans, Luna was my dæmon. Our other dog Banjo was her bonded pair, and ever since we got him at 2 we were worried about what would happen if Luna died first. He had a rough back story, and had been displaying varying degrees of dog aggression ever since the first week we had him to everyone but Luna, who he worshipped. We worked with several dog trainers over the years, but Luna mainly kept him in line. When she died Banjo completely deteriorated, he was a shell of his former self and was completely unmoored from reality, and we knew the best thing for him and everyone around him was to put him down so he could be with Luna again. It was the hardest decision we ever have had to make.
This show season was really hard because it was my first one without Luna, who wasn’t just my companion dog- she was also my service dog. But one thing that was very exciting is that all of the hard work I had put in with Knight had finally started paying off, and our last show at June HITS he was so well behaved it was like riding a real horse! I rode pretty conservative tests because I was waiting for the Knight-splosion to happen, but they never came and we ended up winning our I1 lest on Sunday with a 66.4%.
Two weeks after that show though, I was racing Knight to Tufts to have his second colic surgery. I am so incredibly lucky and thankful for my amazing vets at North Bridge Equine, and that I was able to get him to the incredible team at Tufts in time, and he made it through surgery successfully.
While all of these things kept happening it felt like I was drowning in a sea of darkness, and it was hard to see any light on the horizon. Knight’s recovery was not straight forward- despite his corset he still got two small hernias, he had a terrible suture reaction and my amazing vet had to come out at least once a week for what seemed like months. It seems like finally though we are through the worst of it, and Knight is back at work and going better than he ever has. Also the hours I had to spend every day on his care has made Knight bond to me in a new dimension, and for the first time ever he actually comes over to me everyday in the paddock (I know that is sad that that is exciting). He also spends his mornings stalking me from his grass paddock, and our forced return to basics I really think is going to make us so much stronger when we can get back out there. For now though I am just so thrilled to have him back, and be able to ride my heart horse again. I even was able to bring him to NEDA so I could babysit him and do his rehab rides!
Both my husband and I miss Banjo and Luna everyday, but we did end up adopting two new puppies- Gizmo and Buttercup, and they are both pretty great. While this was probably one of the hardest years of my life, it also really forced me to look at the world in a new way, and grow as a person in aspects I don’t think I ever could have accomplished without dealing with so much loss.
