Life goes on, until one day it doesn’t ...

Moses made a textbook recovery from his knee surgery of 2012 and life was fine for him and for us. Our days unfolded in orderly fashion and all was well until …

… September, 2014 ended sadly and suddenly for our beloved Moses. He was taken down by a tick-borne disease that crept up on us all. We never saw it coming, and by the time it took its toll it was too late to save him. Mo lost his battle to survive on the first day of autumn - a warm and beautiful day filled with light. During the golden hour of late afternoon he crossed the rainbow bridge. He was just 10.

After Moses died, we suffered deep loneliness. We were desolate and so depressed. Our family was diminished, our pack incomplete. There was too much quiet. There was no warmth to fill the stillness. There was no protection in the long nights. The third breath in the room was stilled. There were no paw clicks on the tile floors. Even the cats and macaws could not fill the emptiness. We asked ourselves if we had energy and time left in our older age to raise another pup, and we decided that we did.

Unable to express our profound grief, we have allowed time, the healer of broken hearts, to pass. That is not to say our hearts are healed; far from it. However, there does come a time when the heart is ready to move on.

Added to the loss of Moses, we also lost our oldest cat, Kitty, this past January. She was probably 17 and was just worn out. She was with us for over 15 years. Soft-spoken, kind and sweet tempered, Kitty was a skilled mouser and a wonderful lap-warmer. She watched over us all and I’m sure she still does from her little spot in Heaven.

Today, April 28, 2016, would have been Mo’s 12^th birthday. It is springtime again on the farm. Geese are flying in and making their nests. The fruit trees are in blossom. It is raining a lot and everything is greening up. The lush grass needs mowing at least twice a week. Dandelions are everywhere.

Today we choose to celebrate BB Kiddo, our new German shepherd girl. She was born on Sept. 18, 2014, and we named her Beatrix Kiddo vom Kirchenwald . Bred and born in Gibsonia, PA, BB is the daughter of West German Schutzhund III parents. We named her after Uma Thurman’s character, The Killer Bride, in the “Kill Bill” films.

We got BB at the beginning of the winter of 2014 when she was 8-weeks-old. She is as different from Moses as any dog can be. She is our eighth German shepherd; our fourth girl. She has been our biggest challenge, too. This big girl is still attending obedience classes which provide a structured, stabilizing and socializing environment for us all. BB attained her Canine Good Citizen degree before her first birthday and will pass her advanced (CGCA) test in the next few weeks. The classes are a new form of family fun and therapy for us and are necessary for BB if we are to be able to manage her 80-pound exuberance in our later years.

We are never too old to learn. And life goes on until, one day, it doesn’t …

The Flying Mo and his TPLO

The Flying Mo

Moses has been a hard charging dog all his life. When he was seven weeks old we brought him home to live with us at Jolico Farm. We took him to the top of the highest hill on the farm and told him that the entire world that he could see from that lofty vantage point belonged to him. He took us literally, as German Shepherds do, and he took charge of his world. Every hill, every valley and all that the farm contained, he became master thereof.

And so he came to know every rock, every blade of grass, every smell, every bush and tree, every groundhog hole, all the geese who stopped by on their yearly migrations, all the muskrats and fish in the lake, as well as the mail lady, the UPS and Fed Ex drivers and the neighbor farmers who work our fields.

Mo has put a lot of miles on his body in his 8-1/2 years at Jolico Farm. Most of those miles were racked up at warp speed and many of the distances he traversed were taken in great leaps and bounds while patrolling his territory. 

When he was seven weeks old he obsessively picked up bits of gravel in his mouth. We retrained him to carry sticks in order to keep him away from the gravel, so he developed an obsession with carrying around wooden sticks. At eight months of age Mo lost a tooth when he ran through a tight space between the barn wall and the post and rail fence while carrying a long stick in his mouth. The stick got jammed between the barn and the fence as he was charging through and out popped a molar which never grew back.

Mo the corn-dog!

At three years of age, while galloping through a snow-covered, harvested cornfield, Mo came down on a sharp piece of corn stubble which sliced into his carpal pad and led to a bloody ride to the vet to be repaired.

At five years of age Mo broke his left rear 5th toenail and wrenched his right knee hurtling himself off a high bank and across a small stream. This time he required surgery to extract the broken nail. His knee was never the same after this happenstance and has caused him painful episodes of lameness over the past three years.

This year in early November we came to that place where the rubber meets the road. After a painful summer, Mo's right knee was frequently limiting his activities of daily living and we knew we had to do something to help him. Our local veterinarians knocked him out and got some stress x-rays of his knees, confirming what we already suspected. Mo had torn his right cruciate ligament and he needed major surgery.

We were referred to Dr. Jon Anderson, a specialist orthopedic veterinarian at Pittsburgh Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center, who recommended a TPLO procedure. The description of a tibial plateau leveling osteotomy would make you squirm if you heard all the tortuous details about how they cut the dog’s lower leg bone in half and re-angle it, securing it with a plate and six screws in order to eliminate the dog’s need for the stabilizing cranial cruciate ligament, and about how they remove the torn knee cartilage. They told us the new angle of the tibia would stabilize the knee joint and in several months, when recovery was complete, Moses could return to full athletic ability.

We were of mixed minds -- obsessively sick with worry over the consequences and ramifications of a major leg procedure. Would it work? Would there be complications? What about infection? What about him surviving the operation? But life was not joyful for him in his present condition so we knew we had to take the chance. Three weeks later, on Nov. 19th,  we delivered up our precious Moses for surgery.

Moses at home after surgery with Louie the cat keeping him company.

Dr. Anderson's initial impression was that Mo had a partial tear of his cruciate ligament. But post-operatively, he told us that when he got into the knee, he found that, unbelievably, Moses' cruciate ligament had been completely torn, and it had already been re-absorbed by his body.There was no sign that there had ever been a ligament present. Moses had been doing a great job of hiding his pain and disability from us. We knew then that we had made the right decision for him. Without this surgery, he would have developed progressively painful degenerative arthritis in the knee joint and decreasing ability to use his leg. He would eventually have been reduced to living his life as a 3-legged dog.

Our world has drastically changed over the intervening month since Mo had his surgery. He has had many restrictions placed on his days, as have we. No running, no stairs, no outdoors except for potty trips, no walking, no slippery floors, confinement to a 10 x 10 space or locked in a crate when not supervised. For a month we could not leave him alone lest he chew at his incision and create a deadly wound infection. We moved downstairs to the living room to sleep on our two couches so that he would not be alone. The cats, not to be left out, moved to the living room with us. We could not leave the house together for the first month; always ensuring that at least one of us was present for our boy. 

His first week or two were spent in a pain-killer haze, but slowly his incision began to heal and the hair has begun to grow back on his shaved leg. He has become perky again, even wanting to chase the cats. It's now difficult to keep his exuberance for life in check.

We are now in the middle of week #5. At this point and until he gets his 8-week x-rays in mid-January, he is allowed to walk slowly on a leash the length of one to two blocks a day. We all still sleep in the living room but we are breathing a bit easier knowing that the leg is healing and gaining strength, and he continues to make small daily improvements.

Now, if we can just keep it all together until we get our collective freedom back, we'll be home free. We'll keep you posted!

The Ides of February .........The Dead of Winter

"Fleetwood"

Twenty years ago, in a fierce blizzard on the day after Valentine's Day, we lost a very special 2-1/2 year old German Shepherd Dog to canine epilepsy. Fleetwood suffered his second seizure on February 15, 1991 and within minutes he lay dead on the kitchen floor. In the blinding snowstorm we drove his body to the veterinarian for a post-mortem. The vet told us that Fleet was as beautiful on the inside as he was on the outside. He could find nothing wrong that would have caused the seizures. It was just a horribly unfortunate occurrence that caused Fleet's death. Epilepsy is supposed to be treatable, not fatal. After his first seizure, we had been advised not to start him on medications, that he may never have another seizure. We were advised to just wait and watch and see. Forty days later, just as we were beginning to relax into normalcy, just as we were daring to let out a cautious sigh of relief, Fleet succumbed during seizure number two.

Sol Ajax, or 'Red', a Tennessee Walker. Direct grandson of Midnight Sun.

Fast forward nine years to February 15, 2000. On this cold, snowy Tuesday morning, when I looked out the kitchen windows I did not see the familiar figure of my 34 year old Tennessee Walking Horse standing in the doorway to the barn. As I made our breakfast, I kept glancing out the window to look for him. Art also grew worried and decided to go out and see if Red was OK. A 34 year old horse is a very old horse. By now Red was our 'only horse', as his buddy of 25 years, Art's horse Prince, had died peacefully in the pasture the previous year at the age of 29 and Red had been going it alone ever since. Art was gone for a while and I grew more anxious. When he returned, I knew something was wrong. He told me that Red was lying down in the straw bedding and that he couldn't get up. At 34 most horses have arthritis and Red was no exception. He could still see and hear but he had very few teeth left with which to chew. We had previously switched him to pelleted food which doesn't require much chewing. I headed out to the barn with Art. We tried so hard to get him to rise to his feet, using bribery and strong coercion. Then we let him rest a bit while we called our neighbors to come and help. They came, four burly farmers, but with all our combined might, we couldn't get RD on his feet again. He had lost his oomph. We called the vet, who came early that evening. Red was near the end of his strength at that point, so we gave him that blessed relief that only we can do for our animal friends. My beloved horse became the second casualty of the Ides of February. We buried him next to his buddy Prince, in the horse pasture overlooking the valley they called home.

Our 14' x 24' Gazebo, reduced to toothpicks

Fast forward to last Tuesday, February 15, 2011. Art and Moses came in from their daily walk down to the lake. Something about Art's demeanor didn't seem right and I asked him if anything was wrong. "Good news and bad news, honey", was his reply. He knows that I absolutely hate to hear that! "OK, give me the bad news first", is my standard come-back. He told me that the gazebo roof had collapsed under the weight of heavy snow and the 60 mph winds we had the night before. He told me he thought the gazebo was ruined. I was stunned, as it seemed we had much heavier snow last winter! Down the hill through the deep snow I went to survey the damage and to take some pictures. I really wasn't prepared for the devastation I saw. As we stood surveying the wreckage, I asked him, "So, what's the GOOD news?"  He replied, "At least I don't have to paint it anymore!"

So February has become to me, a month of death and dying. We seem more vulnerable in the month of February, more diminished with less strength of spirit. It takes a toll; makes us feel that if we can just hang on a bit longer, its grip will loosen and we can escape into the warmth of renewal for one more year, one more springtime.

"Tuffy" ~  Romark's Jolico Tuff Guy

Next week, February 22 will mark nine years since we lost another of our beloved dogs, who we had aptly named Tuff Guy. Tuffy had a genetic condition called 'mega esophagus', which meant that his esophagus resembled a megaphone, large at the throat and tapering down to normal size towards the stomach end. As the dog ages, this condition causes food to lay in the esophagus, which progressively forms a deep pouch that holds ever more food. We worked with Tuffy for over two years to keep him from having attacks of vomiting after eating that often led to aspiration pneumonia. He had several severe episodes that almost killed him. But he was true to his name, a real Tuff Guy. Also, we were not yet willing to let him go, so we continued to aggressively treat his episodes and made many trips to the vet. He pulled through every one of them. He was such a wonderful, loving boy, we really hated to lose him. I prayed to God, "Dear Heavenly Father, please give our good boy Tuffy a normal German Shepherd life", which I felt should properly be 12 years. "Divine Father, he is such a good boy, he deserves his 12 years. Please God, grant Tuffy his full 12 years of life." Well, Tuffy's 12th birthday came...and went... and he lived on for another 3 months! But eventually came the inevitable final episode. He had an aspiration pneumonia and lay in the veterinary hospital, sedated for a week. Every time they tried to lift the sedation, Tuffy would devolve into another attack of violent vomiting and he lost ground very fast. After all, he was 12 years and 3 months old, no longer a young, resilient dog. I had another conversation with God and thanked him for answering my prayers and letting Tuffy have his proper quotient of dog years. I told Him that we were ready to let Tuffy go. As with Red, we were there with Tuffy when his final moments came and he died in our arms.

Driving home from the vet's, as we tearfully recalled Tuffy's life with us, I came to a stunning realization. The date was February 22, 2002. It was exactly 12 years ago to the hour that we had picked up Tuffy as a puppy and brought him home to live with us. God had indeed answered my prayers in a very special way. He had given Tuffy exactly 12 years with us. Our Divine Father sent us a very powerful message, one that He wanted us to make no mistake about. Heartfelt prayers are often answered, though perhaps not in the way we prayed them. We may not be given exactly what we pray for. We may instead be given exactly what we need.