The Bombshell

  Part 1

The next tool I recall this woman pulling from her bag of tricks was guilt. I had plenty of that knowing that Dave and Lindsay were carrying the entire responsibilty for my horses so when she stated that no one could take care of this many horses and I was being totally unfair asking them to do so, she got no argument from me. I had been beating myself black and blue with the bludgeon of guilt from the day I got sick over two months earlier. All she had to do was broach the subject for me to fall in line.

With that out of the way she went on to the condition of my herd. It was there she got an argument from me. Yes, I was not happy about the weight of the horses and particularly Aana's but I was not alarmed by any of them and I said so.

It was then she pulled out the "rescue" card. Claiming she had worked in such cases for many years, she told me all of those people were well intentioned people who never intended for any hat. To befall them. Life had just crept up so they did not see the deterioration of their horses because they were looking at them everyday.

She reiterated that I could not trust Dave or Lindsay because they obviously did not have the skills to see what was right in front of them AND that I was too sick and too heavily medicated to be trusted. That's all there was to that!.....or such was her implication. My herd was in bad shape and we just were not seeing it.

This just did not set right with me. I ran over in my mind what I had seen in my barns. There was nothing there I had not seen at one time or another and nothing I had not seen when I worked at training barns. Stallions, particularly,  can run off weight in one turn out. Nervous horses like Aana can drop weight because of heavy traffic congestion on the highway or a buddy being moved. Adjustments in feed need to be made sometimes. There was nothing I saw that said my herd was in trouble.

The only horse I saw that concerned me was Aana. Because she is an aged mare, I try to stay on top of her weight we don't fall behind that old horse curve so we can keep her around as long as possible. For a hard keeper of her age, the mare did not look alarming to me but she did look like some changes needed to be made to assure she stayed healthy.

It was when I dug in my heels about the condition of my here that this woman dropped her bomb on me. She told me if I lived in her county Animal Control would seize my entire herd because of the way the one horse looked. They would  not consider her age.

I was literally struck dumb by this statement. I could not believe that anyone would sit in my living room and tell me such a thing if it was not true.

My mind raced searching for pictures of the horses as I had seen them in the barn that day but they just would not come. The memory blur that comes with opiate use blocked all clarity......or maybe it blocked my trust in what I remembered.  I don't really know. What I know for sure is I could not reconcile what I remembered with what this woman said. Because of this I knew I was in trouble and I desperately needed help. 

By this time I was also in excruciating pain. All of the afternoon's confusion had caused me to miss the scheduled time to take my pain meds, not to mention my pain was intensified by all the standing and walking I had done.   That meant my thinking was impaired by the pain too.  I was so focused on the severity of the conversation I was oblivious to how badly I hurt so I didn't realize this was a contributing factor in my inability to find my way out of this trap.

With her bombshell dropped and her target totally off balance, this woman swooped in for the kill. She let me know she intended to help me out by taking a couple of horses off my hands.

To be continued...

Choices.........