Visitors.....and Colic......of the Human Kind............

 Part 1

During the time I was in the hospital that second trip, two different parties came to my farm to view sale horses.  It was hard for me to allow Dave to show horses to anyone but that was the only way to get it done. All attempts before my surgery had fallen through for one reason or another so Dave got the job.

He loves them all but really doesn't know much about their pedigrees, conformation or level of training etc. and his idea of grooming is a quick brush if absolutely necessary. That makes him not the best person to show horses when first impressions are so important.

Like all those who inquired about horses then, these people were told of the allegations made against me by Kelly Panowicz and reiterated by Crystal Baker. I  have never kept secrets about my horses and I wasn't going to start.  I thought this was something they should know. Then they could make their own decisions about the condition of my herd.

It was the norm for visitors to broach the subject after they saw the horses. No one person who came to my farm  agreed with Kelly Panowicz or Crystal Baker's assessments or their behavior.  All openly volunteered their concerns about the ethics of both women and some were openly angry that I had been exploited when I was so vulnerable.

It was reassuring to hear every single person believed my horses were well cared for but I still struggled trying to reconcile the difference between their perspective and that of Panowicz and Baker.  I needed to make sense of this thing.  The two views were such opposites and my friend was right there in the middle. I had to have answers to how this could be.

I wanted to trust what these people said but the insecurities propagated by those two women and fed by my illness weighed on me.  Logic just would not win out over the emotional roller coaster I was on no matter how hard I tried.

Now that I was back in the hospital the ride was picking up steam. This routine surgery turned out to be anything but routine and my life, once again, hung in the balance.

I thought I posted about that surgery and its complications but I can not locate that story so I will recap. The complexity of that hospitalization definitely fed the emotional roller coaster ride that had become my life. I think to even be able to imagine how I got myself into the messes I have stumbled into these two years, it is necessary to see how very ill I really was.

The reattachment surgery was supposed to be nothing more than routine for one surgeon and was expected to last no more than an hour and fifteen minutes.  It turned out to be long over four hours with two surgeons racing the clock to get me closed up sooner instead of later. It would be nearly two years before I would understand the jeopardy behind that race. At the time I was only told extensive adhesions were the reason the surgery took so long.

A couple of days after the surgery, I began vomiting. Tubes were forced down my throat to siphon off my stomach contents until my stomach would settle down. I had no sounds in all four quadrants of my gut.

Any horse person knows lack of gut sounds is bad news. In horses they push water and oil by use of a stomach tube. Sometimes they will resort to IV fluids to step up the hydration. It's all about breaking loose a blockage.

The surgeon told me there was no explanation for why the human gut shuts down.....and that there really is no treatment. The tube to my stomach was to remove undigested contents and bile. Once the stomach was finally empty the liver would stop producing bile and hopefully irritation to intestines so maybe they would decide to function again.

The tube was extremely painful and not conducive to talking. I was trapped in a silent world fearing for my life. My fast failing health fed my fears that my horses were at risk and my inability to talk only added to them. I wanted to believe everything at home was ok but all I could think about was how Kelly Panowicz and Crystal Baker now had more information to manipulate to their own ends. I felt like a sitting duck but I tried hard not to think about dying.

To be continued......