Life (and death) Down on the Farm PDF Print E-mail
Written by Jim and Diane Hunter   
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 05:57
FOR HELEN BELLEN


Traditional farm folk have a whole ration of ways of coming to terms with the death of the animals that share their lives:  "It's the cycle of life," or in the words of the Holstein cow in the movie BABE,  "It's just the way things are."

As a student of agriculture, Jim chose to meet animal death head on by taking a job at the university slaughtering plant.  He has developed a certain stoicism.

Southeast Portland born and bred, Diane possesses no such tools.  An animal lover from day one (the proprietors of the local variety store had to pry her away from their stuffed toy animals) she experiences each animal death on the farm as the loss of a dear loved one.

But we were both stunned this week by the loss of our dear Helen.  Helen was Diane's orange kitten (pronounced kid-dun in Diane and Jim's private dialect).  Helen was one of the feral litter that tumbled into our lives on a harvest day two years ago.  Just as we were ready to depart for delivery, Diane met Jim in the back yard of the rental with a pale orange kid-dun tucked in one arm and a black one tucked in the other (Charlie and Grace).  Over the following week or two we chased four more kittens around the yard.  Jim distinctly remembers Helen standing on all fours on top of a box in the back yard.

But by the time we captured Helen, through some accident or narrow escape from a predator, s/he had lost the use of her back legs.  Diane named her Helen, "the face that launched a thousand ships."  How literary.  For reasons that will become apparent, Jim called her Helen the draq queen.  Diane had always wanted an orange kid-dun.  And in the case of Helen, the old adage "be careful what you hope for..." definitely applied.

Now, the reader may be puzzled by our use of the modern ambiguous designation "s/he" in referring to Helen.  Helen was born with a fully intact and operative set of male plumbing.  Whether it was our inexperience in sexing kid-duns, or just Diane's refusal to follow traditional categories, Helen was named Helen, and her gender was so assigned.  It gets a little confusing when we talk about "her" penis, as we are afraid we must.

Now from the beginning, Diane was warned that the prognosis for survival of paraplegic kid-duns was not very rosy.  They were likely to chew off a leg.  The most humane thing to do was to put them down.  We debated the question for about thirty seconds.  Our vet often has said that if anyone has the dedication to care for a marginal animal, it is Diane.  And Diane earned her stars with Helen.

And the woes for Helen and her sibs did not end with paralysis.  Shortly after the kid-duns capture, Diane trapped their mother (Mama), to have her spayed and re-released to her feral life (and one kid-dun that defied capture).  But the humane society called us and informed us that Mama tested positive for Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV), and had to be put down.  They informed us that the kid-duns would have it as well.  The most humane thing to do would be to put them down, we were told.

But Diane wondered if you couldn't just isolate them and protect them from diseases.  As a week past and bonding occurred, the humane option felt more and more difficult.  And then we were saved.  While perusing a veterinary guide at Powell's, Jim found a "did you know" side bar that stated that the kid-duns would test positive for six months, but after that, there was a good chance they would test negative and develop no symptoms.

Now the kid-duns would only have to be isolated for six months, and then we could place all of them but Helen in other homes.   Right!  After six months in isolation, the feral kid-duns knew only Diane and remained terrified of and hostile toward all other humans.

Well back to Helen's story.  Helen peed and pooped pretty much any where, and so Diane covered the kid-duns basement home with soft acrylic blankets and frequently traded out the ones that Helen marked with the scent of her very smelly male urine.  The urine dribbled on one of the paralyzed legs and irritated the skin.  From time to time Helen would lick them raw.  Diane experimented with a variety of solutions such as premie diapers and sanitary napkins as kid-dun diapers and condoms to sheath the raw leg.  Eventually she settled on a combination of gauze, tape and vet wrap that kept Helen from abrading the leg, but allowed it to breathe and heal.

All the other kid-duns eventually tested negative for FIV and were spayed or neutered.  But we were leery of surgery for Helen.  Eventually, our Vet pointed out that if neutered, Helen's urine would become less irritatating and not so smelly, and the operation went off without a hitch.  Part of Diane's daily routine with Helen was to tickle her penis and press on her bladder until she peed in Diane's hand.  She felt it was important to be sure Helen was emptying her bladder completely at least twice a day.

Helen developed massively bulked up front leg and chest muscles, but when she and the other kid-duns started developing post kid-dun-hood paunches, Diane began to ration their food.  For various reasons, Helen earned the privilege of supplemental hand feeding.  Every morning and evening, as Diane prepared to enter the kid-duns lair, she would hear Helen screaming for her food.  Diane reproduces the sound as a sort of, "hrrrmmmmm."  Jim would describe it as sounding like the trumpeting of a very tiny elephant.

Now every animal death at Hunters' Greens is unique.  We've experienced four in the last six months.  Inky Shtinky was a middle aged, long haired mahogony black talker.  Suddenly she stopped eating.  We took her into check it out, Dr. Eric ran a blood test and we came home with a lifeless Inky wrapped in a towel.  Her kidneys had stopped functioning and the toxin levels were off the charts.  Sudden, shocking, but no doubts about the outcome.

Chevy was our 150 pound big red dog.  He developed a bone tumor in his leg.  The prognosis was ninety days of pain and decline.  We loaded up with pain killers and took him home to give him the best three months of his life.  The tumor grew, but Chevy grooved on his now punctual daily walks and still chased geese and jet liners, granted with a little less enthusiasm.  At about 70 days, the tumor started growing rapidly and threatened to burst through his skin.  There was nothing that could be done.

Penny Wennie Woo, aka Wennie, and most recently Weenie was a near twenty year old bony sack of crusty ferocity.  She had one canine left and dined on increasingly expensive formulations of soft food.  For perhaps three years, every time her appetite flagged, Diane knew it was the end.  Jim would go out and buy a fresh chicken breast and coax her back into eating.  Finally the chicken breast failed us.  We agonized about how long to wait for her to eat, but the time was coming, we knew.

In comparison to these, Helen's death seems cruel and unusual.  Helen was two.  Her death was the human equivalent of a car crash on graduation night.  Last Tuesday, Diane noticed Helen wasn't peeing and objected to her bladder being squeezed.  The next day was harvest day.  Jim half heartedly offered to cancel the harvest and go to the Vet with Diane, after all the spinach was on its way out and there wasn't much to replace it.  Diane deferred to our professional obligations and Jim didn't argue.

We ALWAYS go to the Vet together when the situation is serious.  Jim calmly asks questions, while Diane falls apart.  But Diane went alone.  Eric was gloomy from the start.  He tried to catheterize Helen and got nowhere.  She had a stricture in her urethra, and there was nothing he could do.

Being able to ask questions rarely changes the outcome, it only sooths the doubts when we ask if we'd done the right thing.  You could not choose a malady that Jim would have more questions about.  Jim knows urethras.  Due to a birth defect called hypospadia, his has been reconstructed, catheterized and stretched. He's had a stricture removed arthroscopically, and after forty years of torture, he finally had a simple operation to return it to the state in which God or Mother Nature gave it to him.  End of problem.  Could the same slash and stitch procedure have saved Helen?  Almost assuredly not.  You can't tell a cat as you torture it that it's for his/her own good.  Paralysis further complicates treatment.  But Jim never got to ask.  And so we doubt.  How can a beautiful two year old cat die because of a micrometer too much skin at the end of her dinkus?

It was Helen's very marginality that has left such a huge hole in Diane's life.  Every day, Jim received a report on Helen's latest malady and her funniest two legged antics.  Now she is gone and there is nothing to tell.  Her favorite cat toy remains untouched as a reminder of her absence.  Diane describes her as having been the bright light in her dark basement of feral kid-duns.  We have been through stages of grief and Diane remains depressed as Jim has seldom seen her.

Yes it is the cycle of life.  Yes, it's the way things are.  Yes, Diane gave her two years that no one else would have attempted (why not four or six?).  Damn it!  It still fudging hurts like hell!  We find more solace in the fateful words of a dead Beattle, "Life [and often death] is what happens while you're making other plans."
< Prev
Last Updated on Tuesday, 01 July 2008 11:39