Steak and Eggs Breakfast

 Donnie Hair was a few of years ahead of me in school.  He was a hard hitting linebacker his senior year and rumor had it that Miami University of Oxford was interested in him.  But Donnie was not interested in college at all, he was too much into having a good (wild?) time and scholastics were not part of that life style.

So the summer of my senior year, we had gone to a softball game in Verona that evening to watch some of the girls we knew play ball. We happened to see Donnie there and said hi to him.  After the game we were all going to a road party outside of West Sonora. As I recall a couple of my friends were with me at the time, Tim Thornsberry and Jim Heltsley.  So we invited Donnie to come along since we had not seen him for awhile.

So a road party was when you went to a rural destination where there was little or no traffic on a road. And there was a parking spot where folks could pull off and park their cars.  Frequently there was a bonfire and we would sit around, listen to music (On an 8 track stereo system which was the thing at that time) and have a few beers.

This particular location was at the end of a long farmers lane by a creek outside of West Sonora.  There was a little concrete bridge there and there was plenty of room to park.  The farmer was old, lived well off the road, and his view was obstructed by all of the tree's. He may not have known that we were there or maybe he just didn't care, but we would frequently have parties there and no one ever complained.

Well things got off to a rough start when the softball game was over. As everyone was leaving, Donnie backed out of his parking spot and hit a garage on the other side of the road.  He may have been guilty of doing a little pre-gaming.  He stopped and looked at the damage.  "Hmm, well it isn't too bad." Hopped back in his car and drove away. He had broken like 3-4 boards on the side of this stand alone wood garage.  

After we all got to the road party someone started a fire and we all opened a few cool ones.  By this time it was getting dark.  We were over talking to a few of the girls when someone comes up to us and says, hey your friend is burning money in the fire.  We hustle back and sure enough Donnie, who had just gotten paid, and was tossing 20's one bill at a time into the fire!  

We were not aware of it at the time, but we found out later that Donnie had taken PCP, also known as Angels Dust. Donnie was already half crazy and as we would find out this would take him to the edge. 

So we got Donnie settled down and got him to stop burning his money and put his wallet back in his pocket.  We got back to the business at hand which involved beer and young ladies.  It did not take very long and we heard a big splash.  "What was that??", someone responded, "Hey your friend is swimming in the creek!"  

Sure enough, there is Donnie splashing around in the creek.  It took like 5 minutes of encouragement to finally get him back up on the bank. We get him over by the fire to dry off - and see that he is bleeding. When he first dove into the creek, he had hit his face on a rock.  He had a couple of cuts but the worst was that he had split his upper lip and was bleeding profusely.

About a year or so earlier a rock band named KISS had burst on the scene and was all the rage. The lead singer, Gene Simmons, was known for his stage antics - blowing fire, blood dripping from his mouth, and his long tongue.  Of course a KISS song comes on and Donnie is rocking a PCP induced Gene Simmons - standing over the fire, dripping blood from his face, and sticking out his tongue while playing air guitar.  It is an image that I will always remember.

The reaction of the girls was predictable - "Oooooh!",  "Gross",  "Somebody stop him."  Since we had invited Donnie, we felt responsible for him and got him to settle down so we could look at his lip by the fire light. It was in rough shape - he definitely needed stitches.

I recalled that there was a new doctor in Lewisburg, a Doctor Kim who was South Korean. So we get the bright idea to drive to town and get on a payphone (this was before cell phones) and get Doctor Kim to meet us at his office.  I convince him to meet us and he is surrounded by 3 half lit teenagers and a crazy Donnie Hair.  The doctor must have called the police (probably a wise a decision on his part), as they arrived about 10 minutes after he got there.  

Doctor Kim washed his hands of us so to speak by saying that Donnie needed to go to a hospital. After a quick interview by the police who wanted to know details on what happened, etc. he gave us leave to go and we were soon on our way to Good Samaritan hospital in Dayton.  

So we get Donnie checked into the emergency room and very shortly an orderly comes out to the waiting room, "You guys need to get back here and settle Donnie down, he is trying to fight the doctor and me. If you can't get him to settle down, we are going to have the cops come and get him." So we go back to the treatment area and smooth things over as best we can.  We placate Donnie enough so that the doctor and orderly can treat him and give him stitches. 

Finally it is time to leave the hospital.  Donnie seems to have come down from whatever high that he was on.  As we are driving back to Lewisburg, Donnie says hey I'm hungry lets stop at Perkins in Brookville (sadly Perkins is no longer there) and I will buy you guys steak and eggs for breakfast - just like the Marines.  Luckily Donnie had not burnt all of his money and as the sun was coming up we enjoyed the promised breakfast of steak and eggs. It was a suitable ending for a memorable night.

Postlude:  Remember that Donnie had backed into the garage?  Well someone called that in and Donnie was busted for it the next day. He had a sad incident several years later.  He did get married and he and his wife were having an argument as he was driving down the road.  He exclaimed that "I will kill us both!" and drove the car off the road.  The car flipped over and paralyzed his wife.  He just had minor injuries. That was that last that I ever heard of him.  Me and my friends were talking about this night the other day.  No one knows what ever happened to Donnie.  Either dead, in jail, or living in a homeless encampment in Los Angeles was the specuclation. 

Tim Hambee

 A fellow that I ran around with in high school passed away not long ago - Tim Hambee(sp).  We lost track of each other over time, but he was an interesting character that I remember well. We had common friends and ran in the same circles at times. He cheated death at least once not long after graduation. He was working on a cooling tower for a power plant in Florida.  One of those tall circular concrete towers that you see from time to time.  He was working on the scaffolding an lost his balance. He fell over the side, but as he was falling he managed to grab a cable.  He was hanging on for dear life as his co-workers wrangled with him and go him back onto the scaffold.  He took the rest of the day off, but was back at work the next day.  If it were me, I probably would never have started a job working at such heights, but after a near fall like that then I would have called it quits.

He also married not too long out of high school, but that marriage lasted like 2-3 months and he got divorced.  We told him that he didn't even have a chance to get the bed warm.  He said that he liked doing what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do and his wife did not fit in with that life style so he parted ways.

He had a similiar mentality when his power got turned off.  There was some dispute with billing with the electric company so they disconnected his power to his house. That night he got his revenge.  He had a lever action .44 caliber rifle.  He went down to a power substation and emptied his magazine into the transformers. I was not there, but I guess that sparks were flying.

But the story that I tell most frequently is about a weekend before graduation.  Tim was a year behind us, but was riding around with me and my friend, Mike Truax.  Mike was riding shotgun and Tim was in the back seat.  We had a can of spray paint and had written "77" on several road signs and on a highway under pass.  We were going through town so that I could drop off the guys.  As we were getting close to the stoplight in the middle of Lewisburg, Tim says, "Slow down, slow down."  So I braked the car and we were creeping along.  As I was getting ready to say what do you want? Tim leans out the car window with the spray can and proceeds to spray paint a line down the side of the Lewisburg police squad car.  We were like WTF! Dude! Needless to say we high tailed it out of town.  

Fortunately, no one saw us - or if they did, they did not report us.  But Tim was one of the wild and crazy guys, I would have liked to have seen him one more time just to see if he settled down.  I was sure that the younger Tim Hambee would have ended up dead or in jail.

The last word

 

The eulogy that I gave today at the Memorial Service:

Today we are here in Memory of my Mother, Susan Golshani. She was very independent, strong willed, witty, had a dry sense of humor, and was very much a person who never knew a stranger. She was married and divorced 4 times. She traveled quite a bit – as she told me the English love to roam the earth. She not only only marched to the beat of a different drummer, but she danced, ran, and even some times crawled to that beat. Her life was anything but mundane.

When we look at her life we need to think of a prism and it's different colors – so depending on your perspective of a prism you can see red, blue, yellow and so forth. So it is with Susan's life. At different periods of her life you will see her with different perspectives.

Her life was altered at a young age. She was born in England during World War II. But about 8 months later she lost the father that she never really knew, Eric Anthony Tweedale-Hill in the battle of El-Almein. But her Mother married an American air force captain, grandpa Freedman, who became the father that she knew for the rest of her life.

She remembered growing up that sometimes it felt like life in a fishbowl. You have an English Mother and a Jewish Father and you live in a small midwestern town in the 1950's. So you are very much an oddity, everyone is curious about you.

But it is around this time that she discovered horses and grew in love with them. The family would sometimes vacation out West and go to Dude ranches. They had a place where they kept horses here outside Lewisburg and she would sometimes ride a horse to the swimming pool in West Alexandria.

She met my Dad and married him at an early age. They lived on a farm where of course they raised horses and had 4 kids. She decided after 13 years that she had had enough of this life and left. We kids didn't understand what all was happening, but my Dad stepped up, persevered and raised us.

This was where Mom's life took a dark turn. She had married at a young age and I think she wanted to explore what all she had missed. She got into drugs and eventually got into heroin. She describes knowing people that had been shot and killed over drugs and also knew people that been the shooter over drugs. She herself had been shot at.

Once when we were talking I mentioned that I only watched a part of Breaking Bad because it was so dark and I couldn't stand what people were doing to one another. She told me that desperate people do desperate things. That the portrayal of people in that series wasn't far off.

She eventually was busted with drugs and sent to prison in Mississippi. She was able to get a pardon from the governor and was released. However a local TV station made a big stink about a drug dealer being released from prison and she was warned that the pardon was about to be revoked.

So she fled to Europe where she got a British passport. She traveled around Europe, North Africa, and spent some time in Portugal before settling down in London. I did find out later that she spent some time in jail in Europe as well.  But she met Ali Golshani at the Playboy Club. She married him and went to Iran where she helped a professor translate ancient texts into English.

But after a couple of years the Iranian Revolution happened and relatives told her that people were wanting to turn her in, so she fled across the border and back to Europe.

She had tired of life on the lam and decided to come back to America. She turned herself into the authorities in Mississippi and served her prison term. Then she came to Ohio and served out a prison sentence here. I remember visiting her at the prison in Marysville.

She was eventually released and bought a house in Dayton and settled down. But she rented the basement out to a fellow who got mixed up with a drug dealer and owed him money. The dealer decided to get revenge by getting a can of gasoline and went around the house and set it on fire.

The guy in the basement got out OK. But Mom got confused – she got lost in her own house. She ended back at the stairway and she sat down thinking this is it, I am going to die. But the guy in the basement went back in and found her and got her out.

But by that time she had 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns on almost half her body and the doctor said that she had a 25% chance to live. She had a rough go of it in the burn unit but she pulled through. I asked her about it later and she said that when they were doing debridement treatments that there were times that she wished she was dead.

After this incident, her life began to go a different direction. She bought some land in Southeast Ohio and got back into horses again. She became president of a chapter of AA in Cambridge, OH. I later found her AA tokens when she was moving out West. I never knew that she had a drinking problem but maybe she had an addictive personality that contributed to her problems with alcohol and heroin. Up until that point, I did not know of this and later when I went through her stuff, I found some letters from people thanking her for helping to change their lives around and getting sober.

At this point in her life, she seemed to have found peace and contentment. She made one last move to New Mexico to satisfy a dream that she had always had to have a ranch out West. About a year ago we had a talk there on the ranch and made our peace with one another. She apologized for leaving us. I told her that as a person we are the sum total of all of our experiences and people we deal with – both good and bad. So yes it hurt when she left but the challenges and changes that happened help shape us kids into the people that we became.

I told her that I learned from her to accept people that are different from us and by the same token, not to be afraid of being different from everyone else. To keep an open mind and also to be adventurous. We were allowed to bicycle 4 miles to town by ourselves when we were growing up – in today's world that just wouldn't happen.

So you can see her life was like a prism – at times yellow and sunny; red with turmoil; blue with sorrow and but it all came together with contentment at the end. But depending upon what part of her life that you looked at you might come up with an entirely different idea of who she was. She went from being in jail to leading an AA chapter. This teaches us that none of us are absolute sinners, or absolute saints. But our lives are various shades of grey.  That even when we sink to the depths we can come back and redeem ourselves the way that she did. I think this is a legacy she would want us to remember.

Lastly, I hope that if there any one out there that is battling addiction of any kind to know that help is out there. There is both AA and NA chapters to help any one who is battling these types of problems. Thank you all for attending.

Postscript:

So after we got to the church the winds were picking up for a front that was coming in.  The lights must have flickered 8-10 times in the 2 hours leading up to the service.  Heather and I commented that of course it couldn't be a normal day on the day of Mom's Memorial Service. But at the time it started the clouds diminished and you could see the sun shining through the windows.  The service went well and we ate afterwards.

We had a fair attendance - around 50 people, about what we anticipated. Mom had not been in Lewisburg for years. Some people did come in from out of town so we particulary thank those who went out of their way to be there.  We did get a compliment from the pastor about the grandchildren. They were very well behaved during the service.  Not quite as quiet as a church mouse, but not very far off.  I remember those days of wrangling youngsters, so compliments to the parents for their efforts.  

The Queen is Dead; Long Live the Queen

 

After arriving in New Mexico we found that Mom was on the rebound and doing better. The hospice nurse said that she had been doing hospice for 25 years and her case was very unusual. Generally people progress through all the stages and then pass away. Sometimes they go back a stage for a spell, but rarely do they do that more than once. But there were several times where mom was near the end and then rebounded and so it was this time.

So we decided to spend time at the ranch (where we could stay for free) and then visit on the weekends. I was able to get a little bit of work done on the ranch while we were there such as painting the pump house, fixing a broken window, and so forth. I am not much of one for just sitting around and well with no TV, internet, and sporadic radio reception – there was simply not much else to do.

On one of our early visits Mom wanted to sit up, then she tried to get out of bed. There was no way, she was simply too weak to even stand. Her will and her mind were still strong, but her body was weak. She was wanting me to take her to the ranch, but there was no way that would work out.

But as time went on, she began fading again. When we visited, she would only stay awake for like 15-20 minutes then fall asleep again. Other times we would try to wake her up and she just wouldn't awaken, so we just let her sleep on those visits. On our last visit, she was not very responsive and mostly slept. She did open her eyes and smile at Becky when we kissed her goodbye. The caregiver said that she had been awake over night and kept asking for her handyman from the ranch. When she asked why, Mom said she wanted the handyman to drive her back. So she was fixated on the ranch to the very end.

Our last visit was on Monday morning and on Wednesday morning we got the call that her eyes were locked open and that she was not responding. The caregiver, Barb, said that we should get there as soon as we could. We were about 3 hours away and we were about halfway there when we got the second call that she had passed.

A little side note to that morning. It is dry and arid in New Mexico. So we rarely saw fog or mist in the mornings when we had stayed at the ranch, well that morning I noticed the light patchy fog on the valley floor and how it looked in the morning sun. It was a unique morning compared to what we usually saw. I called out for Becky to come out and look at it too. I recall saying at Misty's Memorial Service that whenever there was a misty dawn that I would think of her – which I did. Then when I got the call later that same morning, I recall wondering if that was a sort of sign, or omen. Maybe a coincidence, but perhaps not.

The funeral home was Johnny on the spot. They were already there when we pulled up. We asked for a few private minutes with Mom. I prayed that she would meet the Father (Eric Tweedale-Hill) that she never really knew and the Father (Grandpa Freedman) that she had known her whole life. Grandma, Misty, and Matt – I hoped that they would all meet together. I was glad that her suffering was over. She could not have been happy at all the last 6-7 months of her life after being shuffled from one medical institution to another and being confined most of that time.

She had an interesting life and a very unique one. She rose, fell, rose again, fell, and had a lot of turmoil. One constant was a love of horses. This interest was cultivated from an early age. She went to dude ranches out West with her family as she grew up and her family had horses that she would ride to the swimming pool in West Alexandria in the summer.

When she married my Dad, they raised horses on the farm that they bought. After the divorce she had horses for a short while but then got in trouble with the law. She had gotten mixed up in drugs – hard drugs. So she had to get rid of the horses as she went to jail, fled the country at one point when her pardon was revoked in Mississippi, and finally came back home when she tired of living on the lam.

While she was in Europe she met a guy in the Playboy club in London. Ali Golshani, who's Father was an importer in Iran. She married him and went to Iran, where she stayed until the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. She finally had to leave the country when she started to hear that people were wanting to turn her in to the Revolutionary Guard.

She was tragically in a house fire in 1980's in Dayton. The fellow that rented the basement of house had ripped off a drug dealer. To get even he poured gasoline around the house and set it on fire. The dude got out, but Mom didn't. He did run back in the house and got her out, but she had burns on almost half of her body. She was given about a 25% chance to live and she did live but spent months in the hospital recovering. I sure hope that karma caught up to that drug dealer.

It was around this time that she got back into horses again, this time in earnest. She kept horses in SouthEast Ohio. She also gave back as I would find out later when I was going through her belongings. I found tokens from Alcoholics Anonymous in one of her drawers. I never knew she had a drinking problem, but maybe she had an addictive personality with both alcohol and heroin being her primary substances of abuse. In her papers, I found that she had founded a chapter of AA in the Cambridge, Ohio area. She had been president and there were some cards and letters where people had thanked her for her help in getting them sober.

In that same paperwork she had a speech that she had delivered to the AA chapter that described her life and the cost of addiction. Spent time in jail in both the US and Europe. Had people shoot at her, knew people who had been shot – and killed, knew people who had been the shooter – and killed others. A very stark portrayal of life on the other side of the law.

I recall saying to her that I had watched Breaking Bad and could not watch the entire series because at one point it was so dark and I just couldn't watch it anymore. She told me that desperate people do desperate things. She went on to say that the depths to which people will go as depicted in the series had accuracy.

We made peace about 6 months before she passed away. She apologized for leaving home and us kids. I told her that the sum total of what we are is created by the experiences and people that we deal with. A Chinese proverb says that a child is an empty book upon which everyone they meet writes a page. So yes it hurt when she left, but the challenges and changes that occurred shaped us kids into the people we became.

I told her that I learned from her to accept people that are different from us and by the same token, not to be afraid of being different from everyone else. To keep an open mind and to be adventurous. We were allowed to bicycle 4 miles to town by ourselves when we were growing up – in today's world that just wouldn't happen.

There is some irony that a horse is what lead to her demise. My sister, Heather, and I both pleaded with her multiple times to cut back on the horses and stop raising them. We tried to get her to sell off the herd, maybe keep a couple of old mares to keep for companionship and to sell off the rest. But when I visited and found that she had not 1 but 2 stallions, I knew that she was determined to keep raising horses until she just physically couldn't do it any longer.

She was trying to get a halter on an unbroken filly in a trailer when it spooked and knocked her over. This frightened it more and it started to jump and fight the rope. It knocked her over and then landed on her leg and broke it. She recovered from the injury – after several surgeries, but never got her strength back. If you raise livestock you know that sometimes when a horse gets down, it generally does not get back up again and so it was with her.

I plan to put together a story of her life. I don't know that it will ever be published, but I want to document her life's arc, because it certainly will be worth a read by future generations. So feel free to contact me with stories and antidotes about her life. Both positive and negative stories are OK as I know that she could be a polarizing figure. Contact me at chrisaukcam@gmail.com

Mom Bounces Off the Mat - Again

 

Well as always, Mom never ceases to amaze. Her will power is something else. So I spoke with both the caregiver and the hospice nurse on the phone. Her legs have a light blue tinge, she can't eat, can barely drink, mostly unresponsive. It sounds like this is it from all appearances.

So I decide to take the trip down to Las Cruces to ease what appears to be her passing. But as always, she rebounds off the mat like a Big Time Wrestler. When the referee's count gets to 2 then she summons up her strength to bounce off the mat and strike her opponent with a chair! Our 1^st day of the trip we get the report that she is eating again, then sitting up in bed. But it is too late to turn around so we continue our trek out West. She is speaking now that we have arrived, although she is difficult to understand. I recall a cousin saying before we left that they are not going to believe she is gone until she has been dead for 3 days!

During our visit in Las Cruces there was a rough 24 hour stretch for the caregiver, Beverly. Her younger sister fell while riding her bike and broke both her hip and knee cap. Then the sister got a blood clot in her lung. So when we arrived that day, for an afternoon visit, she was just leaving for the hospital. The nurse, Ruby, arrived to cover for Beverly while she left to look after her sister.

Both Ruby and her husband were all dressed up, it had been a date night for them. So I felt bad for them having to lose an evening together like that. But the kicker was something we found out the next day. The elderly woman (94) in the room next to Mom passed away while we were there. Ruby put her time of death at 4:20, we left at 4:30 to go eat supper.

Beverly had cared for Dorothy for about 5 years. So she was upset at that and also her sister when we saw her the next morning for our visit. You could tell that she was fatigued. We only visited for about a half hour that morning so that Beverly could relax. Oh, fortunately the doctors were able to remove the blood clot. There was another surgery needed for something else that I couldn't recall, but it seemed like her sister was out of the danger zone. So hopefully poor Beverly can relax and gather herself together.

On a positive note, we met an Armenia family at the pool in the motel during our initial stay in Las Cruces. There was a heated pool and Jacuzzi. There were 2 boys and 2 girls. The girls may have been twins, they were about the same size and looked to be about 6. The boys were older. The girls spoke very good English and were all smiles. The younger boy was very timid about getting in the water to start with, but was soon splashing and causing mischief.

The father said that they were going to stay for 4 more years and go back. The kids are getting Americanized, they may have a tough time convincing them to return. I recall some of the people I knew from India that came here to the US to work. Oh we will only stay 3-4 years and go home. And years later they are still here.

We plan now to stay in New Mexico for about 4 weeks to see if anything happens. If nothing has changed and Mom is stable, then we go home. But we figure while we are here then we will play tourist a little. We always wanted to check out Santa Fe so we are heading there for a few days before going to Rodeo.

The Countdown

 

So Mom has been in failing health for awhile. She had her leg broken by a horse in the spring. They had to put a metal contraption on her leg to hold it in place while she healed. It was broken across where her artificial knee was inserted inside the lower leg bone to make things even more complicated.

Well she spent all summer in an extended care facility - Cascadia. Per medicare, the stay was limited to 100 days. When she was released one of the caretakers told me that “Your mother is a very sick woman. Most people don't stay here the entire 100 days. People are generally here for a month, maybe two. She used the entire 100 days and probably should have stayed more.” So a not so re-assuring sendoff.

Also while she in Cascadia she had to be taken to the hospital multiple times for respiratory distress. Fluid was collecting around her lungs making it difficult to breath. They gave her treatment – including actually using a needle to remove the fluid.

So then she was released to Solstice which was recommended by Xochitl, the social worker at Cascadia. Later we found that this was probably not the best place to go, but we went with it because it was recommended by a “professional.” She probably was not in there for more than week when she had to go to the hospital again. Oh, and during the 1^st stay, her heart stops but they are able to bring her back. She comes back to Solstice and after another week or so, she is returned to the hospital.

Then I get a call, she had a stroke. She could not sit up, talk, or move very much. She could press their fingers to answer yes and no and that was about it. The doctor explained that she was on blood thinners and that the treatment for a stroke was blood thinners. So it was a delicate balance to dissolve the blood clot.

Well she wakes up after sleeping for 12 hours and it is almost like nothing happened. She did not recall anything about the previous 24 hours. But just had some minor speech problems. Still she again cheated death – Mom is like a cat with 9 lives.

An after effect of the stroke is that sometimes she speaks in riddles. You have to stop and figure out what she is really trying to say. “Where are you going to eat” means I am hungry. “When is Matt going to be here?” means when is Chad arriving (she just got the name mixed up).

But now they are recommending hospice. It was a tough decision to make, but I said yes it is probably the way to go given her declining health. She had wanted to get stronger and go to Houston. That way she could be close to Heather. But with her poor health, travel just wasn't possible.

The doctor recommends Mesilla Valley hospice. So I say OK, lets move her there. But after about 4-5 days I get a call. Your mother is no longer in declining health, she has stabilized, and if she wants to stay here it will be $500 per day! What the ??? I was not very happy, I had called Solstice after the move and had the hospital bed, air, bed table, etc. all taken away. So now I had to call them back and say – nevermind, she is coming back after all.

By this time she has been in at least 5 different medical facilities in Las Cruces. It almost felt like she was being passed around so that everyone got a bite of the pie!

Now she is getting hospice care only it is at Solstice. My daughters, Vanessa and Chelsea, come down to visit her for about 5 days. They bring her treats to eat and have a good time visiting as well as hiking nearby hiking paths in the Las Cruces area.

Then I get the call that she has like 2 to 5 days left. So Heather comes to Las Cruces to stand watch and then I drive down a few days later. And she has up and down days, but does not appear close. We both concur over lunch that her time is not near. To borrow from Mark Twain – rumors of her eminent demise have been exagerated. Heather has to head down back home after about a week and that leaves Becky and I to stand watch.

Now there was one day where Becky said, “I don't think that she will make it through the night.” We come back the next day and she is sitting in her chair eating breakfast! And that has been the pattern for the last 2 weeks. Good days and bad days but she is hanging on. At times, she seems to be getting stronger.

Chad, like the girls, took some time off work to come visit grandma about this time. We also were able to work in a hike and visit a couple of nice restaurants. Joe was unable to make the trip as he had used all of his vacation. But we were able to do a video call with Joe and his family so that sufficed for them to give their regards - still she perseveres.

One theory we have is that they stop all medication, except medication that gives comfort. So maybe there was a conflict with all of the medications that she was on and by removing all the medications she is actually healthier. But it could be that she is just not ready to go. She has a strong mind, but a weak body.  

She is frequently asking to go to the ranch, outside, or just for a drive. I tell her that it just isn't possible until she gets stronger.  After I wrote this the caregive at Solstice said that she will try to arrange a bus ride for next week.  We shall see how this adventure goes.

So today the hospice nurse calls and says that Mom now has up to 6 months. Given their track record, I am not willing to bet any money on their prediction. However she sure seems to have 9 lives like a cat. We are going to the ranch for a week or so to see how things go. Then we will test the wind and see how it feels before we decide to stay or go home.

But this has opened my eyes to healthcare – or lack thereof to the elderly. Some bureaucrat decided that 100 days is the right target for the type of care that Cascadia provided. Then the deal with the 1^st hospice outfit. She wasn't in there a week and then we have to move her out. Why was I advised to move her there in the 1^st place!  I increasing find it difficult to rely on professionals. It certainly seems to very important to do your own homework.  But for now the countdown is on hold.  

Operation Crazy Horse Roundup

 Well my Mother has always had a love of horses and we have been pleading with her to scale back operations since she has gotten into her 80's. All to no avail, she had actually gotten hold of not one but two stallions while we were gone from our last visit. So it seems that her intentions were to keep the horse operaton going until she was just physically unable to do it any longer. 

That finally happened this spring. She had a filly that she was going to sell and so it needed its shots. She had Robert help her load the horse and take it to the vets at Silver City.  In order for the vet to work with it she had to have a halter on it.  So she got Robert to hold it with a rope around the neck. Meanwhile she got into the trailer with the filly and attempted to put a halter on it.

This filly had not been worked with and so it was very skittish. Mom fell which excited the horse even more and it began jumping - fighting to get loose. It landed on Mom's leg several times.  Breaking the leg just below the knee.  What made this worse was that she has artifical knees and it broke at a diagonal across where the joint was inserted into the bone.  So she initially went to a hospital right there in Silver City.

They did not have the expertise to work with this and so she was transferred to Las Cruces. A surgeon put a fixator on her leg to stablize it.  A series of rods and pins from the thigh down to the foot. It locked her leg in position so that it could heal. The surgeon warned us that if the bone did not knit there was chance that her leg could actually be amputated. 

Moreover, lack of bloodflow from swelling had killed a muscle that goes down the front of the leg.  This muscle moves the foot up and down - so no more driving. The surgeon also warned us that at her age, the leg would heal slowly and the remaining muscles may not recover 100%. With her COPD and other health problems, she needed to live closer to medical care - not in the middle of the desert.

She did say that we needed to have a fire sale with the horses. So she saw that we needed to get rid of them. I did try to sell some locally by contacted the local FFA. I got a few tire kickers, but no one actually came out to look at them. I knew that there are few local buyers for these horses, quarterhorses are the preferred breed for the ranches as they are a working horse.  The Peruvian Paso horses are a gaited horse and so there just isn't much demand for them.  

Meaning that buyers would most likelly be several states away.  So transportation and logistics would be a problem. They would all need shots to go out of state.  Most of the horses had not been worked with, so we would have the same problem that Mom had - how to get halters on unbroken horses. It would have been a long summer of wrangling horses if I had followed her plan. Sure she would lose the money from the sales of the horses, but none of them were that valuable.  Plus, she was spending around $2500 per month on hay and so forth. So in year, the saving from not buying hay and feed would more than pay for the horses.  Finally, even if we got experienced horse people out there to work with the horses, there would be a liablity issue if someone else got hurt.

So I made a few phone calls and found a horse rescue place to take them all.  We were planning on taking the oldest Palimino and her colt back to Ohio with us. So far, so good - or so we thought. The horse rescue place put out photo's of the horses and let some people know what would be coming soon. One of the people happened to be a friend of Mom's and immediately sent out a bat alert that someone was trying sell her horses. It became a crap storm after that.

Mom was furious and called me from the hospital.  We actually got into a shouting match over the phone.  People were wanting to come pick up horses but I refused to let them do it as I had already signed a contract with the rescue folks and also because of the above reasons.  I got some hate messages on facebook messenger.  

Someone even got Becky's phone number and sent threatening messages to her.  They spoofed a bogus number from Nebraska and said that if don't stop what you are doing, you will be dead!  Later Mom said someone was coming to get a horse. I told her a truck was pulled in front of the gate and that I had a 9mm pistol if they got past that.  Things had gotten that bad. People were even threatening the horse rescue people.  All this commotion for a bunch of horses! 

It seems that nothing is easy when it comes with dealing with issues related to Mom. So the day came for the horse rescue to load the horses.  The 1st trailer was loaded and pulled to the side.  However someone forgot to latch the gate to the trailer. The horses began to ease out.  A teenaged son tried to be a hero and rush to the gate and shoo them back. They rolled him over, but luckily he escaped injury. 

Well we joked, that 1st trailer was just practice. We finally got them all loaded and off they went. A few days later we suspect that someone was posing as a brand inspector called us and threatened that if we tried to move the Palimino and the colt to Ohio we would be fined.  Well by that time we were done. So we got hold of another horse rescue place to take the last 2 horses as the 1st bunch were finished. 

It was a younger guy and he was not experienced pulling a trailer. Even though the address is on the front of the property, he turned into the place next door and had to turn around. By that time it was dark.  But loading the horses was not a problem.  We watched as he left with a feeling of relief.  Which lasted for about 30 seconds as he missed a turn in the driveway and began heading across the mesquite to the mountains! I franticly ran down the drive waving a flashlight to get him to stop. He went well over 100 yards before he realized his mistake.

His girlfriend was not much help in directing him to back up so I helped as best I could.  It probably took a good 30 minutes to get him out of his predictament.  I walked him out to the gate so that he wouldn't have any more drives into the brush. When I saw his trailer lights on the highway North of Rodeo I finally relaxed.

We stayed another day or two to get things set as far as a security camera and better locks, then we left. Becky had done some cleanup intially, but after the big blowup we halted any work on the house.  Much later Mom came around, still not pleased about everything but maybe more resigned to the fact that she could not return to her previous life. So we at least have a truce.  The plan is to move Mom to Houston close to Heather when she is recovered enough to be moved. But I have never seen people get so riled up about a bunch of horses in my life.