Saving Baby Read online

  I felt nervous calling her, but after the first few words, once two people know they’re both about horses, all the differences between them fall away. Also, she created no wall or feeling of distance. She was without airs, just very soft spoken and both passionate and compassionate about horses.

  The conversation lasted only a few minutes, but Bo did agree to be on the advisory board and said that if she could make the fundraiser in Kentucky—we hadn’t decided on a date yet—she would. My mind was racing. If Bo Derek committed to being present, we’d be beating people away from the door.

  The date for the fundraising soiree was soon set for the end of November, and I made three more trips to Lexington that fall, a five-and-a-half-hour drive each way, to meet with Annette in preparation. I knew even without her telling me what the event would be like. She would have someone playing music on the grand piano, valet parking, a man who took coats at the front door, butlers carrying trays of appetizers. Annette was a society woman. I even made the Society Pages myself because of her back in Michigan one year when I attended her annual Michigan Horse of the Year Ball.

  We sent out 250 invitations. Beige with brown lettering, they looked like wedding invitations, down to the little reply cards. They went to all the important racing people in Lexington and a few others we knew of in other areas. Some had been at Saratoga.

  RSVPs only trickled in during the first weeks, with a good number of responses saying “will not attend.” But we weren’t too concerned. Dr. Stick had already said he’d be coming—a big coup, because he was well known and well respected by those in the upper echelons of racing.

  In the middle of this excitement, and with the urgency that always went with more and more horses taken in by CANTER during fall rush, Groovy came back to me. From the bottom of the driveway, I could hear him bellowing full-body whinnies from inside the trailer—not distress calls, which are more like odd snorts of warning, but sounds springing from deep within his chest. He knew where he was. “Open the door, open the door!” he was calling. I could hear his feet going up and down on the trailer.

  He shot out of the back like a bullet once the driver unhitched the doors but didn’t try to go running around. Instead, he breathed into my nose, then pulled immediately to the fence to see Sissy and Scarlett. I believe with all my heart that he knew, as I did, that he was home, that he would never be leaving again. He was the only CANTER horse out of thousands that I ever kept for myself.

  “Is this the same?” he wanted to know about everything he passed, sniffing a pail he came across, a piece of equipment. “The trough is still here. Good. Let’s go out into the pasture.”

  Sissy and Scarlett didn’t need any reintroductions. Scarlett sniffed into his nose, then, the next second, pulled her ears back, as was her way. “You remember, I’m the boss, don’t you?” her body language warned him. Then she went right back to acting friendly.

  Sissy, for her part, was delirious with joy. She and Groovy would graze together as if they were joined at the shoulder, not an inch between them as they walked.

  But I was still his favorite horse in the herd. “How can I make your life easier?” he seemed to ask as he stood still while I picked up his feet to clean them, or while he let me spritz him with fly spray. That eagerness to please was why I had been even more afraid for him than other horses. He would have jumped for someone no matter how much it hurt him and no matter how much it would have destroyed his body.

  Not that he didn’t still enjoy his high jinx. He’d go into my pockets, pull off my hat to make me laugh. He’d play with latches, trying to figure out how to open gates on his own. “How does this work? Hmmm, more horses over there. Maybe I’ll go visiting.”

  He also loved to be scratched under his chin, and on his trunk if he had a fly bite he couldn’t reach. “You want me to get it for you?” I’d ask.

  “Oh, yes,” he’d respond by moving into position so I could reach it more easily. A pasture ornament who couldn’t be ridden because of multiple problems—significant arthritis in both knees as a result of fractures, arthritis in both hocks in his back legs—Groovy slept every night in Baby’s stall, the one he stayed in when he first came to my house years earlier.

  Got my Groove back!

  My bond with him was different than with the others. Your children you love because they’re your children, which is how it was with Sissy and Scarlett. I was there when they were born. I saw them take their first steps. But Groovy and I were bonded by circumstance. If you’ve ever met someone you had to have in your life—that’s how we felt about each other. Being together took some of the pain away. It made everything right again. It was a feeling I hadn’t had for a long time.

  Groovy’s homecoming made the upcoming fundraising event in Lexington all the more wonderful to prepare for.

  By the middle of November, however, worry was setting in. Not only were we not receiving a lot of responses that people would be coming, we pretty much stopped getting RSVPs either way. Bo Derek was a definite “no.”

  Annette’s house was cavernous. A sparse showing would look disastrous.

  In the end, only about twenty-five people showed up, some of them friends of Staci Hancock that she managed to corral at the last minute, whether or not they had been on the invitation list.

  Our total take for the evening: $2,900. It seemed painfully apparent that eyes filling up during a speech about saving horses’ lives was one thing—racing’s wealthiest participants were happy to have CANTER protect the Thoroughbreds they threw away. But participating in the rescue—writing a check for the amount of a designer hat to be worn once in the grandstand—that was quite another.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was time for a break. It wasn’t just the disappointment of the small turnout at Annette’s house. In fact, it was easy enough to rationalize that away. The event had been held the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, a difficult time of year to gather people. Also, a lot of those on Lexington’s Who’s Who list had already left Kentucky by then for their winter residences.

  Staci Hancock steadied my spirits further by suggesting that her newly founded Kentucky Equine Humane Center and CANTER put on a combination fundraiser on a much larger scale come the 2006 Kentucky Derby. The social scene around the time of the Derby was especially bustling, drawing people from both Lexington and Louisville for balls and other galas, and it so happened that a coveted date was open because a big event scheduled for that time had just been canceled. Even Bo Derek would attend. She promised me she would definitely come to CANTER’s next fundraiser if I could give her more notice.

  But from August through November alone, I had made eight out-of-state trips on CANTER’s behalf. I was exhausted. And my husband, who still could hardly walk and was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, by expecting that his new artery would reocclude, needed me.

  We were ready for a vacation—a true vacation not punctuated by phone calls about horses having broken down and calls in the middle of the night from potential adopters in different time zones and constant visits to foster farms all over the state and at least 100 e-mails a day.

  John and I rented a condo in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, for the month of January ’06. It was right on the water, not only so John and I could enjoy the view at all times but also because he wasn’t capable of taking walks on the sand. He was using a cane by that point, and couldn’t get far.

  I left detailed instructions with both volunteers and board members on how to deal with evaluation of new intakes, transporting surgery horses, and working with veterinarians, with farriers. I also left guidelines for handling fundraising, answering e-mails, and overseeing CANTER affiliates in other states. This would be my first time away from the organization since starting CANTER almost ten years earlier, and I was determined not to be contacted. I had spent so much time away from John, taking him for granted while placing the needs of the horses above his own. We were now going to enjoy our first real vacation by ourselves since
the girls were born.

  It didn’t work. From the time we reached Florida, the cell phone never stopped ringing—which, in turn, led to my buying a month of cable service so I could retrieve e-mails. So many of the phone calls were about e-mails sent but left unanswered. “I wrote CANTER an e-mail but didn’t hear from anyone,” the person would say. “Someone needs to return a horse she adopted, and they want to bring it to my farm tomorrow, but I don’t have any room.”

  One of the e-mails waiting for me was an angry diatribe from a fellow board member. I had not approved a potential adopter—a friend of a friend of his who had already adopted and returned two CANTER horses and now wanted to try a third—and the board member was furious, to the point that he threatened to resign.

  While I had thought that along with giving John my undivided attention, I would be able to heal, or at least soothe, my psyche on this Florida trip, it quickly became clear that neither was going to happen.

  “Can’t someone who lives closer handle that?” John would ask at first, or “How much sleep did you get last night?” knowing that soon after he went to bed I dialed up the Internet on the slow connection I had rented to tend to business. But it wasn’t long before he stopped asking questions and, each time the phone rang, just rolled his eyes. Knowing how well he knew me, I’m sure he had wanted to trust that this time away would be about the two of us but probably suspected, correctly, that I wouldn’t be able to abandon the horses, not even for a month.

  The phone would ring at any time, including when we managed to snag seats in a favorite eatery we found with little areas that jutted right out over the water. Not living near the ocean, it had particular meaning to us to be there, but at that restaurant, or on our lanai looking at the sunrise over the water, I was as often as not on the phone discussing where a horse should be transported, how swollen its leg was, whether someone had or hadn’t followed through on a particular detail.

  At the first CANTER board meeting in February, after we returned home, I gave notice that I would be resigning as of March first. There wasn’t going to be any turning back. I didn’t know how I was going to handle not taking care of the horses at risk, how I would square that decision with what I let happen to Baby. But it became clear, even to me, that I had gone around the bend, my life completely ceasing to have any balance or even moments not dedicated to the rescue.

  John Stick asked me to stay on as advisor and consultant, arguing that I was the only person who had the institutional memory that would be necessary to keep the operation running as well as possible, and I agreed. But I knew the fundraiser with Staci Hancock would not take place, and also that we’d never raise the money or maintain the vision for a Midwest rehabilitation center. CANTER had a wonderful reputation and even national recognition, but the opportunity to make the leap to the next level, to mature it into the kind of organization that could earn a half million dollars in a night of fundraising, would be lost. This was to say nothing of the fact that a number of people on the board continued to feel it was a waste of money to save horses too injured to repurpose into one of the sport disciplines, cutting into the very heart of the reason I founded CANTER in the first place.

  I felt overwhelmingly sad, like I was abandoning my “foal” for someone else to nourish, to raise. But there wasn’t much time to ponder my decision. Only four days after my resignation went into effect, just before midnight on March fifth, John awoke screaming. I had been in such a deep, sound sleep that I didn’t realize at first what was going on, but when I opened my eyes, he was holding his left leg, and I realized he was shouting out in excruciating pain, much worse than anything he had experienced with the previous occlusions.

  John has a very high pain threshold, so I knew this had to be particularly bad. Trying to control my panic, I called Jessica, who said to get to the hospital and that she’d meet us there with a vascular surgeon.

  Unfortunately, the ambulance insisted on taking us to the nearest hospital rather than the one where Jessica was—those were the rules—and we lost hours while they triaged him and poked and prodded him until they determined that they couldn’t handle his condition and would have him sent by helicopter to the hospital where Jessica had wanted him sent from the beginning.

  It took almost an hour for the helicopter to arrive, and the EMTs then did their triage—taking John’s blood pressure, checking his pulse, and so on. I actually beat the helicopter to the second hospital in my own car, without any lights or sirens.

  By the time John reached the next emergency room, the sun was almost up. The doctor said they would try to save his leg, but he warned that a limb can go just so long without blood, and many hours had already gone by.

  John was then admitted for observation, then finally taken to the operating room. The left leg had to come off. In a grim, cosmic irony, it was the same limb that Baby had shattered the day he’d died.

  “We managed to stay below the knee,” the doctor said afterward, explaining that the ability to ambulate is much greater if an amputee still has his knee, allowing him to walk with a normal gait, to golf, to move about much as he had before. He said, too, that he hoped the leg would heal successfully with the cut where it was, as the leg was extremely compromised and there might not be sufficient blood flow for the stump to stabilize. There was a possibility that John would require a “revision,” meaning the removal of more of the limb.

  It was then that I began to cry. Before, I needed to be strong for John—and for myself. Now, the gruesome procedure was over.

  John had to stay in the intensive care unit for a week after the operation. He ended up in critical condition, his life hanging in the balance, not because of the amputation but because his heartbeat coming out of the anesthesia was wildly erratic, along with his experiencing other cardiac issues, and the medical staff was having a hard time normalizing his rhythm and the other aspects of his cardiac functioning. Machines would start beeping, and the nurses would come running in. We called Rebecca home.

  Some of the medications John was taking caused hallucinations, which he recalled vividly. In one, it was his turn to give a speech at the Master’s Golf Tournament, but he couldn’t get down. There weren’t enough beds at the hospital, and one of the nurses had taken him home and had him hanging up by a meat hook. In another, he was in charge of all the football equipment for the University of Michigan. The team was going to an away game, and he had lost all of it—uniforms, pads, cleats, helmets, everything. The team coach from 1969 to 1989, Bo Schembechler, was yelling at him.

  My husband, my rock, my capable, athletic, confident doer, was reimagining himself immobile, incompetent. He had been my first crush. I knew him since the age of ten, when I was in the fifth grade and he was in the seventh. My heart was broken when he gave me up for a while to date someone else before coming back to me.

  I did not go home while John was in the hospital. The first few nights, I slept in his room. Then, once Rebecca arrived and she, Jessica, and I rotated, I would sometimes go to Carol and Dave Rhodes’s house at two in the morning and sleep until five or six, then head back. Carol and Dave, our best friends since high school, lived much closer to the hospital than we did. I had had a key to their house for many years.

  Various other friends took care of Scarlett, Sissy, and Groovy, the only horses in the barn at that point as there were no more CANTER rescues. There was no question that I would stay close to John rather than go home and take care of them, but tending to the animals in the barn had always brought normalcy, routine, comfort. Like a temple, the barn was a place of release, of letting go of stress and tension, and now I didn’t have that, that rhythm of the day around which my life revolved.

  The doctors did eventually bring John’s heart problems under control, but the whole time he was in the hospital, he didn’t want to take the covers off. He wouldn’t look. It did prove extremely distressing to see nothing there. You can understand the word “amputation” intellectually, but when you look for a part of y
ou, of your life mate, and it’s gone, it hits you.

  Even after John was finally discharged, he couldn’t bear to look. He would stay perfectly still for me as I unfurled the rolls of gauze and tape and other special material that covered the stump in order to cleanse and rebandage it. But he kept his eyes closed.

  For me, it wasn’t so much looking at the wound and stitches of the stump (how I hated the word “stump,” yet even the doctors had no euphemism for it) as knowing that it wasn’t completely healed and that if it didn’t heal sufficiently, he was going to have to go through this procedure again and have even more bone and leg taken off. The fact of it was there all the time. While we sat and watched TV, while I went and got John something to eat, there was no leg, and the prospect of even worse to come. The loss of a limb—it’s not something that you become used to in a month or two months or six months or a year. It’s something you never really get used to.

  Then worse did come. Within days of John’s homecoming, the stump began showing signs of what looked like bruising with deep discoloration, after which patches here and there started to turn black, first a very small spot, then another and another until the whole bottom of the stump looked as though someone had taken a blow torch to it and charred it black as black can be. The tissue there had died from lack of sufficient blood.

  Back to the hospital we went for more leg to come off, just five weeks after the first operation, and more life-threatening heart rhythm complications immediately following the surgery. John was returned to the intensive care unit, critical once again. The good news, for lack of a better term, was that the vascular surgeon was still able to retain the area below the knee. It was a tough judgment call—the last thing anyone wanted was to go in a third time, especially with John’s poor reaction to anesthesia—and we were all hoping for the best.