Saving Baby (35 page)

It took him a month to die. He would have turned ninety at the end of March. He had already booked a hall and an accordion player for the party, so excited was he at the prospect of reaching his tenth decade. But at two-something in the morning on February 1st, a Sunday, he passed.

I went to the hospital every single day through January. I still had to write the annual Blue Horse Charities grant application, answer e-mails, and deal with some phone calls, but I was able to handle a lot of that from his bedside. Poor Jessica, there she was trying to plan her wedding yet checking in on her grandfather as often as she could.

With my father gone and the hall picked—Jessica was going to get married over Thanksgiving weekend later that year—I headed into the 2004 racing season, continuing to grieve but knowing that I had to continue on.

One Saturday in May, when things were still slow for CANTER at the track, I was going to drive out to Great Lakes Downs for the morning and then meet Jessica at a bridal salon to help her pick out her wedding gown late that afternoon. That would give me enough time to get home, take care of my own horses, and shower. I was looking forward to it. Because Rebecca lived in Las Vegas, she had picked out her wedding dress on her own, trying to describe over the phone the choices to which she had narrowed it down. Now, I'd be able to enjoy that motherly rite of passage with Jessica, not to mention have another “moment” with Baby, who was paying for the dress. I needed the respite from my work. It would be a chance to create some of the family balance to which I had given such short shrift.

The day at the track proved uneventful, as I had expected it would. Just before I was getting ready to leave the backstretch and head back to the Detroit area, however, the track vet came up to me and asked if I had been to a particular trainer's set of stalls.

I responded that I had walked down that shedrow but hadn't seen him.

“Well, you need to go talk to him,” the track vet said. “He has a horse there that he won't do anything with. It's been colicking for over a week. See if he will give you the horse and let you put it down.” The track vet, Hal Davidson, had no problem injecting horses with ever more cortisone and other painkillers, as that was his bread and butter, but he also looked after them, whether to assuage a guilty conscience I don't know. He even took thousands of dollars' worth of X-rays of CANTER horses for free over the years and traveled to Judy's farm a couple of times to treat horses for free.

I found the horse Hal was talking about. Named Naseer Spirit, he had already raced three times for his trainer the previous year but earned only $171, just enough to pay his jockey fee.

Naseer Spirit was down on his side. Unlike a dog or cat, horses cannot vocalize their pain. They suffer in silence, and the utter lack of any whimpering makes their physical distress all the more pitiful. If there was one thing I could change about horses—and I know it's sacrilegious to talk about wanting to change something in beings so magnificent—it would be to give them voice when they're in pain, allow them to moan. The lack of noise reinforces to people the notion that horses are not feeling pain when they are.

I spent at least an hour with Naseer Spirit's trainer, trying to talk him into giving me the horse. Finally, after much haggling, he agreed.

“I can bring him to emergency at Michigan State right away,” I said, “but we have to find a trailer.”

“I have a trailer,” the trainer responded eagerly.

“Great,” I answered. “Let's load him right now and get him over to the hospital.”

“That's so far for me to drive,” he then said. “Can someone else do it?”

“I do not have a trailer volunteer here today,” I told him. “This is your horse. I'm going to take care of all the veterinary expenses. He suffered for a week. You need to drive to the university hospital in Lansing with me.” The horse should have been euthanized right then and there. But the trainer wouldn't have let me. He had an idea in his head that the horse would be okay. I was lucky enough to get him to donate the horse and let me see about a colic surgery.

Finally, I convinced the trainer to make the drive, and I followed him out of the race track. On the way to Lansing, a drive of an hour and forty-five minutes, he needed to stop for gas and wanted me to pay for it—even though if the horse could have benefited from a $5,000 colic surgery, CANTER would have footed the bill.

I had had it. “There comes a point,” I told him testily, “where
you
have to take some responsibility for your horse, and it's going to happen at this gas pump.” The man did end up paying for the gas, and when we finally got the horse to Michigan State, it was just as I had suspected. The trainer had waited too long, and the horse needed to be put down.

I signed the euthanization papers at the front counter, tearfully, as always.

I was still crying as I drove home, thinking about the horse and all he had needlessly gone through, about my father, about how nothing made any sense, when the cell phone rang. It was Jessica. It was already close to an hour past the time I was supposed to meet her at the bridal salon.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A couple of months before Jessica's wedding, John started needing to take breaks after walking just short distances. “Wait a minute,” he'd say if we were going down the hallway of the mall or a long grocery store aisle.

“Are you out of breath?” I'd ask. So many times over the years he had given up smoking, and so many times he had gone back to it.

“No,” he answered. “My leg's just cramping.” John never complained about his health, and he also never went for a physical. In our thirty-six years of marriage, I couldn't remember him once ever going for a checkup.

Concerned that something significant might be wrong, both Jessica and I got on him to go for a checkup, and he said he would, but not till after the wedding. I think he figured I'd forget to keep nagging him, but I didn't. I couldn't. After just a half block of walking, he'd have to stop because the cramping pain was so intense.

The doctor immediately referred him to a cardiologist; his blood pressure was high, as was his cholesterol. Thus began a battery of tests that took place over the course of several months—ultrasounds of various arteries, CT scans, contrast dyes sent through the blood vessels in and around his heart to see whether an artery there was blocked, and so on.

While the doctors were trying to figure out why John was cramping—we were now just a couple of weeks into January of 2005—I received a call that my mother, who turned eighty-nine just before Christmas, collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. She lingered only two weeks, dying a year after my father, almost to the day.

Soon after, it was confirmed that John had peripheral artery disease. His femoral arteries—the ones that branch off at the pelvis, one going through each leg all the way down to the feet—were 100 percent blocked.

We were referred to a vascular surgeon. Both the right and left leg were going to need a femoral artery bypass—a fem-pop, they call it, with a new blood vessel to replace the blocked artery extending all the way from the abdomen to the ankle. The surgeon would start with the better leg, the left, so John could see how uncomplicated the procedure was. His concern had been that he'd miss an entire summer of golf, but the surgeon said he'd operate in May, schedule a second operation for the right leg in June when the left one healed, and that John would be golfing again before the summer was over.

We dodged a bullet, we felt. There was no significant blockage in the heart itself, and once both legs underwent the procedure, John would be out of pain.

In the meantime, CANTER work went on as usual—there were always horses to protect, horses to look after once they were out of danger—but this year, the board also started talking about taking our rescue's work to another level. We discussed at meetings the idea of having our own farm rather than boarding horses at foster farms all over the state. It would be a state-of-the-art facility near the university so that horses who needed surgery wouldn't have to travel far and would receive the best of care after their operations. We entertained as well the notion of having at the farm an education center and an event space for holding fundraisers. Horse rescues that took in just fifteen horses a year had their own farms. Here we were intaking more than 100 horses annually yet still boarding them at far-flung locales that required many miles of driving in order to visit convalescent Thoroughbreds. A CANTER “center” would not only make our work more efficient, it would also bring us more renown, which in turn would bring in more funds to save and care for more horses.

I was glad for this forward thinking, but things were about to take a headier turn still. In June, as new ideas were swirling and John's recuperation was progressing without a hitch, I received an e-mail from a woman who lived in Montreal. It was one of close to 500 that were waiting for me, as we had just returned from a four-day visit to Rebecca, and on a typical day, more than 100 CANTER e-mails poured in. At first it seemed business as usual.

“I have a horse that I think was yours,” this one said, “and I can't keep it anymore.”

“Can you tell me the name of the horse?” I wrote back, also asking for a little more information.

“Groovy,” she responded. I could literally feel my heart racing. It had now been four years since he had left my farm and a year since I lost track of him when he was, presumably, sold underground. “I will take him,” I responded. “How is he doing?”

The woman, pregnant, explained that she didn't have time to ride him or take care of him anymore and that he had a problem with his coffin bone, the main bone in the foot that supports a horse's weight. She wanted me to come get him as soon as possible.

Not since the moments before Baby broke down on the track had I felt so elated. How much sleep I had lost over Groovy, even through Jessica's wedding and John's ordeal with his legs. How I longed to see him, to stroke him, to make sure he was safe and happy, as he had been at my farm.

As luck would have it, an adopter of CANTER horses who lived on Northern Vermont's Canadian border, only an hour from Montreal, said she would retrieve Groovy for me and bring him out to the Midwest. I knew the woman, Brenda Lamb, wouldn't let me down. She had once retrieved a horse from the farm of a trainer in Michigan and stayed an extra night to clean the stalls there because the man had crippling arthritis that made it hard for him to take care of things.

It was going to be a few months before Groovy arrived back at my own farm. He was underweight and had two abscesses, one on his shoulder that was really festering, along with some benign skin tumors and various welts, scrapes, and cuts, and Brenda didn't want me to see him in that condition. He was in good hands in the meantime.

“Groovy was born to be a Lhasa Apso,” Brenda e-mailed me. “He's
so
darling.… During a stiff neck moment, he just put his nose in my hand and leaned on me with one little blinking eye, saying ‘Fix this.'” I couldn't wait to see him.

Unfortunately, only days later, my joy was alloyed when John developed his first postoperative complication: pain in the leg on which the surgeon had operated. Testing showed that the bypass, now only a little more than a month old, had already occluded, becoming filled with plaque, just like his femoral artery. They said it would take only about an hour to reopen it, but hours and hours went by before the vascular surgeon came out to tell me it was all over. It had gone very slowly because the plaque had already solidified.

Two weeks later, on July first, we were back in the emergency room once again. The bypass reoccluded and the pain, quite severe, had returned a second time. The surgery on John's right leg was going to be delayed until the surgeon felt sure that the left would remain stable.

Later that same month, I was spun in yet another direction when I was notified that I had won the Dogwood Stable Dominion Award. It was an incredible honor, a prestigious award given once a year to an “unsung hero of the racing industry.” Among those sitting on the panel of judges was Secretariat owner Penny Chenery.

For CANTER, the timing couldn't have been better. The award would be presented, as always, at the Saratoga Race Track in New York at the beginning of August. Everybody who was anybody in racing would be there—the biggest names with the deepest pockets—and we felt that was our “in” for generating donations to make our idea of a farm a reality. Even after I was nominated but before I won, a number of racing publications interviewed me, bringing more attention to our cause.

The farm in our minds now became the CANTER Thoroughbred Midwest Rehabilitation Center. All CANTER affiliates in the Midwest would be able to send their horses there, not just horses in Michigan. From there, we'd establish rehabilitation centers in New England, in the Mid-Atlantic, and in the Gulf area. We already had affiliates, or would soon have them, in all of those regions.

In a ten-minute speech I would be allowed to make following the presentation of the award, I'd be able to drive home my point that the Thoroughbreds needed help. Those in the highest echelons of racing—not people at our crummy track trying to eke out a living but the most distinguished breeders, trainers, and owners in the country—would hear my plea.

I rehearsed the speech during my hours in the car driving back and forth to Great Lakes Downs, taking a stopwatch with me and saying the lines I had written over and over to put the emphasis on the right words while making sure that I didn't go over my allotted ten minutes. I even pulled off the highway when necessary to scratch something off or make changes, perfecting the speech until the last minute.

John was able to come with me to Saratoga—the pain had not returned by the first week in August—as were my daughters and several members of the CANTER board, including Joy. The track there was unlike anything I had ever seen in Michigan. Instead of an asphalt parking lot crammed with cars and flanked by a grandstand with flaking paint, it was a pastoral scene with a large picnic ground. The tableau reflected the money and pedigree of the Social Register set who flocked to Saratoga each summer for a month of parties. They also watched races filled with horses who, in the prime of their careers, had not yet had the life run out of them. All was pageantry and tradition, as if the previous 100 years hadn't gone by.