Posts filed under ‘Sad’
Allie Brosh, phone home!
I love the fact that when a few blog-less days go by, people start checking in to ask what’s up. And I do apologize for not slipping in a mid-week post this past week. In general, you can assume one of two things when the blog goes quiet: either Hugh Laurie has whisked me off to the Maldives for a frolic, or I am down for the count with a rotated lumbar spine. And, alas, this week it has been the latter, although I never completely give up hope that Hugh will knock on the door one of these days.
I haven't checked Webster's, but I think the two-word definition for dreamboat is Hugh Laurie (image from house.wikia.com)
When my hypermobile spine and sacrum go “out”, which literally happens at the drop of a hat if I’m so bold as to actually bend to pick one up, a cascade of bad things happens. There is the obvious biomechanical dysfunction and then the swiftly attendant muscle spasm as the nearby muscle groups rush to manage the situation.
Then there is the Central Nervous System screaming “Mayday!” “Mayday!” and sending torrents of not-so-helpful pain signals to (what’s left of) my brain. After twenty-some years of this torment, it’s not as if I really need all those reminders that something is wrong, but the CNS and its sidekick, the Parasympathetic Nervous System, have, so to speak, a mind of their own. Their long and tortuous road leads directly to the limbic system of the brain, where you get an interesting two-for-one. Since both emotions and pain are processed here, when you experience pain you’ll find your mood worsens and conversely, if your mood dips, you may experience physical symptoms. This is why for some people (unfortunately I am not one of them) taking antidepressants can actually alleviate pain.
The hippocampus and amygdala are part of the brain's limbic system which processes both pain and emotion.
Which brings us to Allie Brosh.
A few years back when I was in similarly dire straits, Polloplayer friend Katherine came across Allie’s brilliant blog, Hyperbole and a Half and forwarded me Allie’s mad funny take on the traditional 1-10 pain scale. If laughter were truly the best medicine I would have been instantly cured by her post and I promptly requested and received her permission to re-post it. And then I became one of the thousands of readers who faithfully followed Allie’s blog updates about things like her “simple dog and “helper” dog. In the world of blogging, she would be, say, Tolstoy, while I labor away like a kid writing for the school newspaper. Allie Brosh is crazy talented. There was even an announcement that she’d landed a book deal.
And then she just seemed to disappear.
Her last blog update was back in the fall of 2011 and if her book has been published, I didn’t get the memo. Hope (@hopecutechick) even follows her on Twitter but so far, no updates from @alliebrosh. I did find this interview with her on YouTube, but it’s from way back in 2010.
So here’s the deal, Allie, wherever you are. I’m crazy miserable and in desperate need of a blast of your brilliance to counter all the yuckiness currently lodged in my hippocampus. And I know I am not the only fan who wants you to phone home to cyberspace with some witty splash of cleverness to remind us that the Patron Saintess of the blogging world still reigns supreme. You’re way too young to be interested in Hugh Laurie, so I know you haven’t stolen my place by his side in the Maldives. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I wish you and your dogs all the best.
image of Hyperbole and a Half header from blog.comiccritique.com)
UPDATE: As usual, Katherine is in the know and she directs us to this discussion on Reddit. Much of it is conjecture and hearsay but Allie’s own posts in the early part of the discussion provide some insight.
Allie, you are in our prayers.
A heart for hens: the Turlock rescue operation
Creature or commodity? The chickens you eat are slaughtered at six or seven weeks of age and the ones whose eggs you buy at the grocery are “discarded” after one or, at most, two seasons of laying. In a nation hungry for its protein, you can see how the lines get blurred.
But last week, a line was crossed, one so egregious that mainstream news picked up the shocking story: Turlock, CA egg farmer Andy Keung Cheung abandoned 50,000 hens when he reportedly ran out of money to feed them. He just walked away and left them to starve.
Starving hens at A&L Poultry near Turlock (image from sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com
According to the Modesto Bee “Authorities say the hens had not been fed in more than two weeks. About one-third died of starvation, while thousands were in such poor condition they had to be euthanized.”
And these are some of the lucky ones: this is how they lived. (image from news10.net)
A volunteer holds one of the rescued hens (image from animalplace.org)
I heard about it via Hope’s Twitter feed since she follows MyPetChicken, who tweeted a plea for donations to help the surviving hens. I was so horrified by the story that I managed to make a donation from my Blackberry via my PayPal account while I was walking down the street (who says modern technology is not sublime?)
One lucky cluck: a surviving hen (image from animalplace.org)
I received an appreciative email from Kim Sturla at Animal Place, thanking me for my donation and providing an update on the rescue operation. Kim shared that their “exhausted small staff and volunteers have been working around the clock” to save as many of the starving, debeaked hens as possible. And she mentioned that the food bill alone is $300 a day until the birds are healthy enough to be adopted out.
The ethical issues of battery chicken farming are complicated and difficult. I won’t even begin to debate them here. I can even summon up an iota (only an iota, nothing more) of compassion for Mr. Cheung, who perhaps was at the end of his financial and emotional tether when he walked away from the birds that represented his livelihood. But, as a backyard flock owner, my heart is with the hens and with these organizations who saved the lives of so many of them this week. May all those little ladies find loving homes soon!
This photo says it all. An Animal Place volunteer snuggles with a rescued hen. (image from animalplace.org)
1,000 Days of Autumn
Do good hens go to Heaven? I hope so.
Autumn left us on Thursday morning, and strange as it may sound, we are grieving. For a chicken. I know what you’re thinking but please don’t say it.
It’s only a chicken.
Not quite true. Autumn was a horse of a different color when it came to being a chicken.
Autumn's baby photo:June, 2009
Even the most hard-bitten flock keeper will admit that at any given time, one or two hens wriggle their way into the humans’ hearts. In our case, Autumn made a bee-line for our affections; she was always underfoot, always looking for a cuddle (and, no doubt, a treat) and generally seemed to prefer human companionship to that of the other hens.
She loved to help!
She was a pretty girl. Her glossy, mahogany-colored feathers were tipped in caramel. If you held her close she would make soft little clucking sounds. I think that was her way of saying she was happy.
As many of you know, Autumn was stricken with internal laying and egg yolk peritonitis last spring. This condition is generally fatal, but we kept her going with frequent vet visits and Lupron shots to suppress egg production. But new problems emerged: a few weeks ago she began to favor one leg and then could not walk or even stand.
Chicken Emperor's best friend
We brought her inside and made her a little nest in the kitchen where she held forth for several days, enjoying hand-fed treats and lots of affection. She actually seemed to rally for a few days, relishing tidbits of oatmeal and cheese, and we wondered aloud how our house-sitters might react to being slaves to a house chicken.
It's always more fun to read with a chicken on your lap!
But sometime during the night on Wednesday, the pain and dysfunction became too much for her little body. The CE found her on the floor, unable to even right herself to a sitting position. He took her in to see the vet, who said it was obvious from the cast of Autumn’s eyes that she was in pain. It was time to say goodbye.
Her last days were good ones.
The vet prepared an injection and the CE held Autumn in his arms and rocked her for nearly half an hour until she was gone. The vet said to him “Thank you for taking such good care of this little chicken.”
She was only two-and-a-half years old, but those were pretty darned good years for a hen. Some may think it’s silly to care so much for a pet. For a mere chicken. I almost agree. But on another level, I think that any time we care for another creature, it makes us a little bit more human in the best possible sense of the word.
Autumn is buried in a very nice spot back under the oaks where she enjoyed searching for bugs and worms. She will be missed.
Terrible. Horrible. No good, very bad weekend…keeping our fingers crossed.
I know you’re getting used to more frequent blog posts, so I will try not to disappoint. Just don’t get spoiled, okay? After all, there’s only so much one can say about chickens and the randomness of life, which is more and more often the topic here, it seems. And this post will be about a little of both.
When I called Autumn to the coop Friday evening, I noticed she was walking slowly. Autumn has always been the athlete of the group, racing so quickly toward a handout of scratch that she often looks like she will pitch forward in a face plant. (hold that thought because “face plant” is not irrelevant to this post.)
Autumn as a baby chick: she's in front with Hope behind her and Amelia in the back
Her gait suggested that she might be in pain, so I palpated her abdomen to see if she might be eggbound. This is a common condition in laying hens, and indicates that an egg is too large or the chicken’s muscles are too weak to push the egg out. Another common, and often fatal condition is egg pertitonitis. In this scenario, the yolk leaks into the abdominal cavity instead of the hen’s oviduct. A more thorough explanation can be found here: http://poultrykeeper.com/common-articles-to-all-poultry/health/egg-peritonitis.html
Since Autumn has not been laying for several weeks and, before that, was laying only yolk-less “wind” eggs (see http://polloplayer.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/chicken-drama-a-broody-wind-eggs-and-baby-chicks-on-the-way/) the spectre of egg peritonitis is a plausible explanation for her behavior.
Autumn as an adolescent, striking her best vulture pose
On Saturday morning, Autumn would not come out of the coop, and when I carried her outside, she did not move from the spot where I placed her. Something was very wrong! I dropped her off at the vet in hopes that they might be able to help her.
What happened next made a bad day far, far worse. I came home from the vet, then tripped and fell against the kitchen door, slicing a neat inch-and-a-half long gash in my forehead. And no, I am not posting a picture of it. Fifteen stitches. The less said about it, the better.
Mine won't have the cool lightning bolt effect, but you get the idea...(image from killerj.wordpress.com)
The weekend was a kaleidoscope of misery: by day I moaned about the after-effects of crumpling my body at full force against a door, whined about the pain in my arm from the tetanus shot, wept over what will be a scar of Frankensteinian proportions, and lay awake at night worrying about Autumn. The vet was unable to come up with an immediate diagnosis and elected to keep her for the weekend to give her IV nutrients; this was not a hopeful sign.
Autumn and her beloved golf ball
I called the vet first thing this morning, fully expecting to hear that Autumn had perished. But finally, a bit of good news: she is alive and “resting comfortably” and the vet will continue to work on finding out what’s wrong with her today. Of my four original chicks, only Autumn and Hope remain. Not a good track record, especially if we now lose Autumn.
I’ve done a bit of research on chicken life expectancy. Many sources claim 7-10 years as an average lifespan for a chicken, but there is an undercurrent of anecdotal evidence that suggests hatchery stock is more fragile. Since many, perhaps most, hatchery birds are either slaughtered for food at six or seven weeks or age, and laying hens often discarded after one or two years, breeding for longevity is not a priority for hatcheries.
Autumn is our most social chicken. She loves to cuddle with the CE.
Polloplayer readers will be the first to hear the news, be it good or bad.
Meanwhile, Hope and the chicks are doing well. They came out of the pen yesterday for their first (supervised, of course!) walkabout
Home is Where the Tart Is
It’s been a bumpy week. The funeral, which went as well as it possibly could have. The travel, which, um, did not.
First, though, thanks to everyone for the meaningful condolences. From cannoli to cards to so, so many beautiful flowers, the expressions of sympathy have been so appreciated. There’s a certain fragility that seems to set in at times like these, an odd wobbliness, and it seems that each time someone reaches out with a kind word it gently guides me back to equilibrium.
These beautiful flowers from Pollo Amiga greeted us at the church
Neither Elkhart, IN or the Roman Catholic Church get a lot of positive press, but they both have a gem in Father Bill Sullivan of St. Thomas the Apostle church. He knew my father well and spoke of him with wisdom and kindness. In his homily at the funeral mass, Father Sullivan mentioned that my father had hoped to have “one more spring”, which I also knew to be true. As spring does unfold, I will try to appreciate it all the more this year.
Father Sullivan (and my grand-niece Makenzie in the foreground)
It was a relief to have one “normal” evening in Elkhart, thanks to my friend, Nancy, who arranged her visit there to coincide with ours. The CE and I spent an evening with her and her parents, Fern and Jerry, and their criminally adorable Yorkie, Rufus.
Fern and Rufie
Fern and Nancy. Resemblance much?
After the long, bleak drive to O’Hare, we had our first encounter with a full-body scanner, and, risk to national security that I am, I was sternly led off to the pat-down area. I always wonder who they allow to sail through security while the TSA ponders my nether regions. To add insult to insult, my camera was apparently stolen from my suitcase on the front end of the trip.
photo credit: Wonkette
We were thrilled to learn that we’d been given first class upgrades on our flight home from Chicago. After an hour and a half wait at the gate, however, the thrill was definitively gone. At the two-and-a-half hour mark, they de-boarded the airplane for another tense hour, after which we were called back on board with a load of empty promises. Another hour and a half twiddled by. Those of you who know the CE can only imagine how much eyebrow -twisting ensued. Somewhere just short of the six-hour mark, we left the gate and finally headed home.
And it is, indeed, good to be home. Dave, Karen and Victoria predictably spoiled the animals, who greeted our return with hearty yawns.
"Oh, you again?"
Hope puts her best foot forward
Dodger pretends to care.
The Tart refuses to move until Uncle Dave comes back.
It may be an uphill battle to work our way back into the good graces of our pets, but we are well-armed with treats and what looks to be a sunny weekend. Hope yours is a good one!
RX: Stay Busy
Very glad we were in NYC when the news of my father’s death arrived. Taylor was coming up for the weekend and the three other kids plus grandkids are here, so we’ve been blessed with companionship/solace/distraction. Given the circumstances, it’s been a good week.
Tina and family came in from Connecticut last Sunday for brunch and a dip in our building’s pool.
Ev and Viv dance on the fountain at Lincoln Center (for about 3 seconds until several of NY's finest swooped down and busted them!)
Swimming with Grandpa has become a tradition during our visits:
Viv and Grandpa
Family fun!
When Taylor visits, our agenda turns to food. He’s almost 6’5″ and has the metabolism of a hummingbird. We walked over to our fave nabe place, Cafe Fiorello, for a bite of lasagna:
That's a SINGLE order, folks. And yes, he ate every bite.
The CE was hoping for snow, a wish he shared with every New Yorker he encountered, risking great bodily harm in the process. It’s been a long winter here. His prayers were answered with a fresh few inches of the white stuff early in the week:
We awoke to this lovely sight.
Not as much fun when you're standing there FREEZING, is it, CE?
In an effort to be “real” New Yorkers, we did not let the snow slow us down. We headed over to the UES to see the just-opened Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt. Not to be missed next time you’re in the city. The exhibit runs through June 5, and the museum itself – Andrew Carnegie’s former home – is a jewel.
A must-see!
The CE’s Christmas gift from me was a night at the opera, specifically, La Boheme at the Met. It was a lovely evening.
The CE at Lincoln Center
Since I recently finished a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, I had on my to-do list for this visit a trip downtown to find his birthplace. It’s right there at 28 E. 20th Street, complete with a guided tour of the house conducted on the hour.
This is where Theodore Roosevelt spent the first years of his life.
As always, we spent time with Ang, Bob, the boys and Tiny, who, unfortunately, had a bit of a scrape with another dog this week. Poor baby has seven stitches in his ear:
Awwwwww...
James and Bobby having a laugh at Carmine's
Yesterday we enjoyed what has become a tradition with each of our visits to the city. Tina came into the city and Ang and Karen dashed over to join us for a child-free champagne respite.
Bless the babysitters! Yay!
What happens after glass #2 of champagne...
Daniel has been camera-shy this visit, but we’re meeting him for dinner tonight and I’ll try to get a few snaps to add to this post. Tomorrow we fly to Chicago and drive to Indiana. My father’s funeral service will be held Tuesday morning. Thanks to everyone for all the thoughtful encouragement this past week.
As promised, we went back to St. Patrick's Cathedral and lit another candle for my dad.
Final Gifts
My father died yesterday. He was 89 years old and lived a full, happy life. We were not especially close; a product of the “Greatest Generation”, he provided faithfully for his family, and considered the little time he had left over after working ten-hour days, six days a week, to be his own. He was in his element on the golf course and in his public life, where he delighted in the attention he received as a small town celebrity, dispensing gardening advice over the radio waves and to packed audiences of gray-haired ladies at local garden clubs.
You don’t miss what you don’t know, so it was never of great concern to me that I didn’t have much of a relationship with my father. The distance was a comfortable one; he was always cheerful, never mean, rarely angry – he just wasn’t generally present.
This arrangement worked well until about ten years ago, when my mother died and Dad was diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer a few months later. Perhaps he re-evaluated his life. Perhaps he was lonely at the loss of my mother. Whatever the catalyst, suddenly my father was interested in me. He asked about my children. He actively sought a relationship with my husband.
This was annoying, to say the least. I don’t do well with change.
Now I was having to make room in my life for someone who had never been part of it and I, being the deeply flawed person I am, resented the imposition. Where had he been during my childhood? Where had he been during the early years of my children’s childhoods? My thoughts ran along the lines of an uptight theatre usher: “No late seating allowed!”
Fortunately, my father was patient and persistent, and my husband provided gentle reminders around the theme of “better late than never”. I slowly adjusted to sharing a bit more of my life with my father and hearing about his. He liked to talk, by the way. His stories were many and long. He savored his life, especially now that he’d had a cancer scare which had been barely beaten into remission through an intense course of radiation that left him with nerve damage in his legs and a panoply of other side effects. He never complained. He always smiled.
At one point, I happened to mention I had just read Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, which is widely touted as a modern-day parallel to the Confessions of Saint Augustine. He expressed interest; I sent him a copy of the book. Soon after, he paid a visit to his parish priest and asked if he might renew his acquaintance at church. He was heartily welcomed, of course, because God is a much more gracious being than stubborn and resentful adult daughters. God understands “better late than never”, and it is never too late with Him. In his last years, my father attended mass often, sometimes daily, and he became close pals with Father Sullivan.
Dad on our last trip to Las Vegas; March 2010.
The cancer, inevitably, returned. The last year and a half of his life was a blur of ups and downs. He began to end all of our phone conversations with “I love you”, another change that called me deep consternation. In our family, no one ever, ever said I love you (a failing that I may have over-corrected in my own parenting, since my constant declarations of adoration for my children have led them to consider themselves, if anything, somewhat over-loved.) Responding in kind was a tough order. I stumbled over the words; the awkwardness of this new intimacy made me hesitate and stammer. Did I mention that I am deeply flawed?
A final, cruel run of chemotherapy last spring took more out of him than he could bear, and he finally said “enough”. The doctors told him he should probably make the acquaintance of the local Hospice folks, but, characteristically for him, he never wanted to trouble anyone so he managed to the very end without engaging their services. He nearly died before Thanksgiving, but rallied for the holidays and celebrated his 89th birthday in January with a visit to a nearby casino.
He never, ever complained. Not once. He demonstrated a courage and a grace that astounded me and everyone around him. During our last visit in December, he took my husband aside, as he had many times before, to tell him how much he admired him for both success as a businessman and his devotion to me and our children. I often joked that my father had a “man-crush” on the CE. What was probably more accurate was that he saw and admired in the CE was a dedication and fulfillment in marriage and fatherhood that he wistfully wished he could have shared.
The CE and my father - Dad loved having his picture taken with his "man-crush"
A few weeks after his birthday in January, he returned to the hospital with complications from the cancer, which was now on a crash-course, attacking organs throughout his abdominal cavity. The doctors suggested he might have two to three months to live. Working around our scheduled trip to the East coast, the CE and I tried to decide if we should stop through the Midwest to visit Dad on our way to New York or the way home. We chose the latter, thinking he would be in better shape after a chance to rally from the latest surgery. He had begun physical therapy and was hopeful of being released from the hospital soon.
I spoke with Dad almost every day in the past few weeks. With long practice, I was finally improving at our parting “I love you’s”. On Monday, I told him I had stepped into St. Patrick’s Cathedral to light a candle for him and say a prayer. He was deeply emotional and wept with gratitude at this simple indulgence, thanking me profusely. I did not tell him that my prayer was that he not be asked to suffer unduly. On Tuesday, he told me again how grateful he was that I had lit a candle for him. He cried again. “I’ll see you soon, Dad”, I said. “I love you, too.”
On Wednesday morning, I received a call that Dad had gone into renal failure and slipped into unconsciousness. That night, I lay awake, wondering if I should catch a plane in the morning. I drifted into sleep around 6 am and was awakened by a call at 9 – Dad had passed away a half hour before. In the end, it was not him that waited too long, but me. But thanks to his concerted and persistent efforts over the past several years to salvage our relationship, there was nothing left unsaid and no unfinished business to be conducted. He was at peace with God and with his family; a final gift for us all.
Dad was a “celebrity” to the end; his passing was announced as “breaking news” on the Elkhart Truth’s web-site, where a story about him is posted today: http://www.etruth.com/Know/News/Story.aspx?ID=535427
Cock-a-doodle-doom
File this one under poetic justice.
The world is full of things I don’t understand, but cockfighting is is right up there near the top of the list. CBS Los Angeles reports that “a California man attending a cockfight has died after being stabbed in the leg by a bird that had a knife attached to its own limb”. The autopsy report stated cause of death as “accidental sharp force injury” to the man’s right calf.
I’m not saying cockfighting should be punishable by death, but it is senseless and barbaric, not to mention illegal. Very sad all around.
CBS Los Angeles photo
Plan B
The CE was thinking that by two weeks out of surgery, it was time to don the Hawaiian shirts and charge back into action.
His first outing was to church last Sunday
He and his cast even went out to dinner
He made it up to the house to pay some bills and insisted he was ready for a few outings. For all I know, he might have been contemplating an afternoon of bowling or a game of pick-up basketball, but instead, there was the Smackdown. Pain is, apparently, your body’s way of telling you you’re an idiot.
And the pain was severe.
A call to the surgeon’s office provided some clarity: “You had a big honking surgery, one of the worst cases we’ve ever seen, and you are not getting better any time soon so take your pain medication and for the sake of all that is holy, SIT STILL!”
Thus, for the remainder of the week, there has been a lot of sitting still. For him. Victoria, Alexandra and I scurry around like the mice in Disney’s Cinderella (whistling while we work, of course) and rather miraculously, things have not yet completely fallen apart.
Birdie likes the new arrangement; he visits the CE in the pool house every day
Except for the loss of Amelia, of course.
Now there are two
We still don’t know definitively what caused Amelia’s death. I called the vet for clarification and she assured me that she had ruled out every possible communicable infection or virus.
Her best guess was that Amelia sustained an injury that affected the spinal cord and cut off nerve supply to her organs and caused them to shut down. I think that’s a stretch since we were unaware of any injury she might have sustained, but without a necropsy, we will never know what happened to her. On any given day, there are up to a dozen posts on backyard chicken web sites from people whose chickens die mysteriously; as a species, chickens are fragile.
Life is short. Autumn decides to be pro-active about finding treats.
Two chickens is not an optimum number. They are flock animals; there is safety and companionship in numbers. Under ideal conditions I would immediately bring in new chicks, but cannot do so until the CE is up and around. Time of year is also a consideration as availability is scarce until spring. Therefore, the plan is for Autumn and Hope to hang on together until spring. Although, of course, we all knows what happens when we make plans…
Amelia; June 2009 – September 2010
We lost Amelia early this morning. Thanks to Victoria and Alexandra for making her last few weeks as comfortable as possible; thanks to everyone who threw a treat Amelia’s way during her brief (but very happy!) life.
Amelia
