2002-07-14
11:12 p.m.

I haven't really been in the mood to write lately, just a lot of things going on through my head.

Tuesday, I got stuck at work until one thirty in the morning. Dr. Fuller decided to do surgery on a nine week old puppy, which is needless to say very risky on an animal so young. We were trying to save the puppy's leg. Fuller asked me to do anesthesia, which is really nerve wracking on such a young animal. If I allowed the puppy to get to deep, then I risk losing him, if he's too light, he wakes up and could go into shock. After six hours of staring at the EKG machine, I was seeing little heart blips wherever I looked. Despite the six hours of effort, the surgery was unsuccessful. It sucks to try so hard, and then to fail. I guess we gave the puppy a chance, and that's what really counts.

Death has a certain smell to it. I don't mean the rotting of flesh, but the act of death itself. It's like a certain tingling in the air, that gives you chills that speed up your spine. I always seem to bond with the souls who fight their hardest. When these souls are laid to rest, I feel I lose a piece of me. We had a beautiful horse at the clinic who has been there for a month, fighting against a horrible cut on her foot. She's been three-legged lame the whole time, and she wasn't really getting any better. After a month of fighting, the towel was thrown in. I held her head as she died, whispering heart felt apologies into her ear. She took her last shuddering breath, cradled in my legs, and I smelled, and felt death. It wasn't menacing, or painful, but just a simple peace, a calmness. Sweet, like the smell of roses in the spring. Death isn't really the end, I guess, but just another step in life.

My horse suddenly decided that she would rather have me dead than alive. After I had to fight for twenty minutes with her to get the bridle on, I was happily riding her, when she began to throw one of her little temper tantrums, which consists of minor rearing, head shaking, and backing up. Normally, she will settle down, and we will go on our merry way. Well, she decided to take her tantrum a little farther. She went up for a rear, and miscalculated, and ended up falling over backwards, with me on her. I remember her struggling for balance, and I was staying on to try and encourage her to put her feet down, then I remember trying to just slip off and land on me feet, and then, I remember watching her come about two inches from landing on me, then stepping on me. Having been around horses a lot, I have learned that when you fall off, you roll away. Had I not moved, I would have been stepped on. As it was, both Leslie and Jake thought I had been stepped on, because it was so close.

Elisa then decides to run away from us, straight toward a major highway. There is a six acre plot across the street from Leslie's, then there is the highway. Well, we caught Elisa at the very end of that six acre lot. I have never wanted to kill that horse so bad in my life. We were chasing her through briars taller than me, and my ankel is killing me from the fall. After that little escapade, Elisa was lunged until she was too tired to walk... okay, so it was actually until I was too tired to walk. I think she understands that I was mad though. I need to get over there and work her more often.

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