"The best
thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse." Winston Churchill
Sometimes, you learn about riding in unusual ways. Or painful ones.
I have been extremely ill the last two months. Out of the
blue, I was hit with upper intestinal bleeding. I woke up with this immediate
need to hit the bathroom, and instead of the runs, I passed 'coffee ground stool', blood clots, and black blood. LOTS
of it. For 18 hours. I was hospitalized for two days, had to do a colonic
cleanse despite the fact that it was 'obvious' it was my upper intestine or
stomach.
That wasn't all. Whatever demon had invaded my
digestive system had many more evil tricks to play.
I developed dysphagia. If bleeding out is immediately life
threatening, dysphagia can kill you, but far more slowly and miserably. It
means inability to swallow. Yes. I could not swallow anything solid. I'm told
there are people who live for years with this, but to me, it's not living and I
was despairing that I'd never eat again. The idea of being fed through a tube
in my stomach was not something I wanted to even contemplate.
But the demon wasn't done! After a few weeks of blending
everything, I could swallow again, but then I was hit with regurgitation. This
isn't vomiting. No, its one step below. Whatever you swallow doesn't stay in
your stomach. No, it comes back up into your esophagus to rest in your throat
or just behind your sternum. Up and down it goes, or just hangs there for
hours…sometimes days. The only way it goes into your stomach and stays there is to eat ramrod straight, do not bend over or do anything sudden for 45 minutes, and even then, hours later, it still might come back.
I had to worry most about inhaling the stuff that liked
my throat better than my stomach, and when you inhale food, you develop
pneumonia and have to take antibiotics…that kill the good bacteria in your gut,
so you get C. Difficil.
Did I mention the pain? Despite the fact that it was my
stomach and gut acting up, something in the mix decided to send pain to my
chest and shoulder. Nothing touched it: not aspirin(which, I am now forbidden
to use), none of the other 'pain killers', nothing. It gets worse at night, and
the only way I can sleep is with an ice pack on my shoulder. Even then, the
pain is such that I'm only getting about 3 hours of sleep a night. I have moved
into the guest bedroom so that my dear husband can sleep.
I've had several blood draws, all of which say I'm anemic. Ya think! when one's red blood cell count drops to 9.0 because of a bleed, you're instantly anemic.
Oh, and I've lost weight. Yup, who would have guessed? I
dropped 12 pounds in two weeks, and it doesn't look as if I'll ever get it
back.
And through it all, I have yet to talk to a
gastroenterologist…the doctor who looks in your stomach and gut and diagnoses whatever it is that is
trying to kill you. That's because my insurance company, the one I pay a lot of
money in premiums to every month, can't decide if hemorrhaging for 18 hours
constitutes an 'emergency'; is still trying to decide if I was truly admitted
into the hospital as an "inpatient' or was I just 'under observation in a
hospital' as an outpatient, which, of course, means they don't have to pay.
That, and not being able to eat or sleep is something they don't consider
'medical'. But damn it, get that premium in or we'll cut your ass off. Can't
lose a dime, now can they!
But that's not why I write.
A few weeks ago, I was feeling well enough to go to the
barn. Sue (who's an RN) insisted I ride Raven bareback, as I always love to do.
You've heard that old saying, "just what the doctor
ordered"? It's true. That first ride…after two months of illness, feeling
like death warmed over, staying indoors and trying to stay alive through
blending every atom of food into a liquid, being atop a horse was …incredible.
Raven, always intuitive, was VERY careful with me, he knew something was wrong.
It felt so good to be on his back. It felt so good to be in his mind, feeling
him responding. What astounded me was…me.
I had 'forgotten' how to balance. No, actually, I had NO
balance. Losing 12 pounds caused me to lose that 'set point' for balance I'd
developed over the years. I weighed a
lot less than before and that, apparently makes a difference!
But…unlike my other problems, twenty minutes or so of
riding bareback helped my mind re-adjust to the new me (no matter how unwelcome
it is) and I recovered that sense.
Today, …I am feeling so much better, and I'll tell you
how in a minute…I rode him in a saddle. Again, something is new. I haven't
gained an ounce back, but my balance was there. And…for the first time in my
adult life, I found I had thighs that fit the saddle. Up until this weight
loss, my thighs have always been, ahem, Rubinesque. Okay, let's call them for
what they were. Thunder thighs. I never
could 'put the flat of my thigh' on the saddle because I didn't HAVE a flat
thigh. They were nice and round. Fleshy. Fat.
But now? They're gone. No thighs. Well, yes, they're
still THERE, but there's no meat on them…and now, I can put them on the saddle.
It makes a HUGE difference in how I ride. I am astounded at how much difference
there is.
Which is sad, because most women I know have thighs that
are like mine were. It's just how we're built. Thunder thighs kept us women
alive during the Ice Ages.
Is it fair to say, then, that the top notch riders have
no thighs? Or thighs that are nothing but bone, like mine are, now, 'correct'? Damn it……
Honestly, I'd rather have the weight back. I refuse to go
out and buy all new pants/jeans/etc. I swim around in my jeans. My belt ran out
of holes. But I do like the way it feels to sit in a saddle, with thighs 'flat'
on the panel.
Now how, do you wonder, have I healed whatever it is that
caused me to bleed? Well, I still have the pain, but I can eat now, slowly and
thoroughly chewing my food and it goes into my stomach and stays there-and
comes out the other end without blood.
My acupuncturist…who IS willing to see me, and if you
have never had acupuncture, let me tell you, it works, told me my gut was
tissue paper thin and I need to build up my levels of iron and protein. I
needed to heal my gut. How to do this?
Bone broth and collagen.
So I've been drinking a lot of bone broth and ingesting
beef collagen. It's a tasteless powder that one can put in soup, or a glass of
water. I am convinced it has brought me back a lot quicker than could be hoped.
No, I've not seen a gastroenterologist yet, but when I do, and they do an
endoscopy to find out what the hell happened, hopefully they will find I've
healed.
Hopefully. Hopefully I never have another bleed, because
it was bad.
Because, while seeing what seemed endless gouts of my
blood going down the toilet, I thought I was going to die. Then I was afraid I
WASN'T.
I didn't. And I learned that one's weight has a great
deal to do with riding, and a bony thigh makes all the difference in the world
to riding.
