I take Tern her special feed with all her herbs in it and the vet had warned me the wound would look appalling and so it did. A great messy thing the size of a pudding plate, all dripping and seeping. And yet she was as perky as a perky thing. Bright and relaxed and happy. After yesterday's Zen-Buddist-in-a-cave letting go, I felt incredibly heartened.
When I said letting her go I did not mean fatalistically convinced she was going to die. I meant going with the river of fate, wherever it takes us, and not fighting that. I do every single thing I can, but I'm not going to battle phantoms. It's an acceptance, and it works for me.
The one who worries me is Sidney and I'm having to work hard at acceptance with him. He keeps jumping up in his cage and turning around and hopping and I think of the impossibly slender bone tied together with plates and pins and I think: how can it stand? We've got all these marvellous sedatives and he leaps up through them like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn. I think of all the people who have to keep cocker spaniels and border collies still and I feel for them. We've got special new food and I've bought him about eight hundred special nutritious chews and I'm hoping the licking and chewing will settle his nervous system.
The poor horse vet fell off his own horse and the air ambulance had to come and the junior vetinerary assistant showed the paramedics Tern's wound, as a special treat - they loved it - and they said she was very sweet and good and all that was reported to me and I felt proud at the thought of her being admired by the first responders. We think the vet is going to be all right but it's not funny, falling off horses at our age.
If I can get my Sidney into the Zen-Buddhist-in-a-cave state I shall be so relieved. Poor little man. He gazes at me from his cage and cries. I think he just dreams of running.