Riyah Is Home Again

I picked Riyah up and brought her home yesterday. She looks good--perky and interested. Thin, though. She is eating her hay well, but I am going to add beet pulp and oil and a little kelp. She is actually walking much better than before the surgery. Getting that joint cleaned out must have helped. Of course, she is on Bute, too.

Written on the papers I brought home from the vet clinic:

Prognosis: "Guarded due to advanced cartilage damage."

Recommendations: Two weeks stall rest. Adequan at two weeks. Hand walk/ small turnout 4-6 weeks. One year rest with controlled exercise.

We can do this. The hardest part will be controlling her exercise when she starts feeling better! She is going to want to run as soon as her leg will let her if not before!

I am better today than I was on Monday. It's been rough, but I received a note from my very wise-beyond-her-years 19-year-old daughter that really nailed what I have been going through right on the head. She sent me a quote from C. S. Lewis that read:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness...We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it. What I know about love and believe about love and giving ones heart began in this.

I think that is a really true but really tough statement. Thank you, Hayley.

I took Keno out for a good ride this morning. We both needed it!