Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  “Great,” I answered. “Let’s load him right now and get him over to the hospital.”

  “That’s so far for me to drive,” he then said. “Can someone else do it?”

  “I do not have a trailer volunteer here today,” I told him. “This is your horse. I’m going to take care of all the veterinary expenses. He suffered for a week. You need to drive to the university hospital in Lansing with me.” The horse should have been euthanized right then and there. But the trainer wouldn’t have let me. He had an idea in his head that the horse would be okay. I was lucky enough to get him to donate the horse and let me see about a colic surgery.

  Finally, I convinced the trainer to make the drive, and I followed him out of the race track. On the way to Lansing, a drive of an hour and forty-five minutes, he needed to stop for gas and wanted me to pay for it—even though if the horse could have benefited from a $5,000 colic surgery, CANTER would have footed the bill.

  I had had it. “There comes a point,” I told him testily, “where you have to take some responsibility for your horse, and it’s going to happen at this gas pump.” The man did end up paying for the gas, and when we finally got the horse to Michigan State, it was just as I had suspected. The trainer had waited too long, and the horse needed to be put down.

  I signed the euthanization papers at the front counter, tearfully, as always.

  I was still crying as I drove home, thinking about the horse and all he had needlessly gone through, about my father, about how nothing made any sense, when the cell phone rang. It was Jessica. It was already close to an hour past the time I was supposed to meet her at the bridal salon.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A couple of months before Jessica’s wedding, John started needing to take breaks after walking just short distances. “Wait a minute,” he’d say if we were going down the hallway of the mall or a long grocery store aisle.

  “Are you out of breath?” I’d ask. So many times over the years he had given up smoking, and so many times he had gone back to it.

  “No,” he answered. “My leg’s just cramping.” John never complained about his health, and he also never went for a physical. In our thirty-six years of marriage, I couldn’t remember him once ever going for a checkup.

  Concerned that something significant might be wrong, both Jessica and I got on him to go for a checkup, and he said he would, but not till after the wedding. I think he figured I’d forget to keep nagging him, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. After just a half block of walking, he’d have to stop because the cramping pain was so intense.

  The doctor immediately referred him to a cardiologist; his blood pressure was high, as was his cholesterol. Thus began a battery of tests that took place over the course of several months—ultrasounds of various arteries, CT scans, contrast dyes sent through the blood vessels in and around his heart to see whether an artery there was blocked, and so on.

  While the doctors were trying to figure out why John was cramping—we were now just a couple of weeks into January of 2005—I received a call that my mother, who turned eighty-nine just before Christmas, collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. She lingered only two weeks, dying a year after my father, almost to the day.

  Soon after, it was confirmed that John had peripheral artery disease. His femoral arteries—the ones that branch off at the pelvis, one going through each leg all the way down to the feet—were 100 percent blocked.

  We were referred to a vascular surgeon. Both the right and left leg were going to need a femoral artery bypass—a fem-pop, they call it, with a new blood vessel to replace the blocked artery extending all the way from the abdomen to the ankle. The surgeon would start with the better leg, the left, so John could see how uncomplicated the procedure was. His concern had been that he’d miss an entire summer of golf, but the surgeon said he’d operate in May, schedule a second operation for the right leg in June when the left one healed, and that John would be golfing again before the summer was over.

  We dodged a bullet, we felt. There was no significant blockage in the heart itself, and once both legs underwent the procedure, John would be out of pain.

  In the meantime, CANTER work went on as usual—there were always horses to protect, horses to look after once they were out of danger—but this year, the board also started talking about taking our rescue’s work to another level. We discussed at meetings the idea of having our own farm rather than boarding horses at foster farms all over the state. It would be a state-of-the-art facility near the university so that horses who needed surgery wouldn’t have to travel far and would receive the best of care after their operations. We entertained as well the notion of having at the farm an education center and an event space for holding fundraisers. Horse rescues that took in just fifteen horses a year had their own farms. Here we were intaking more than 100 horses annually yet still boarding them at far-flung locales that required many miles of driving in order to visit convalescent Thoroughbreds. A CANTER “center” would not only make our work more efficient, it would also bring us more renown, which in turn would bring in more funds to save and care for more horses.

  I was glad for this forward thinking, but things were about to take a headier turn still. In June, as new ideas were swirling and John’s recuperation was progressing without a hitch, I received an e-mail from a woman who lived in Montreal. It was one of close to 500 that were waiting for me, as we had just returned from a four-day visit to Rebecca, and on a typical day, more than 100 CANTER e-mails poured in. At first it seemed business as usual.

  “I have a horse that I think was yours,” this one said, “and I can’t keep it anymore.”

  “Can you tell me the name of the horse?” I wrote back, also asking for a little more information.

  “Groovy,” she responded. I could literally feel my heart racing. It had now been four years since he had left my farm and a year since I lost track of him when he was, presumably, sold underground. “I will take him,” I responded. “How is he doing?”

  The woman, pregnant, explained that she didn’t have time to ride him or take care of him anymore and that he had a problem with his coffin bone, the main bone in the foot that supports a horse’s weight. She wanted me to come get him as soon as possible.

  Not since the moments before Baby broke down on the track had I felt so elated. How much sleep I had lost over Groovy, even through Jessica’s wedding and John’s ordeal with his legs. How I longed to see him, to stroke him, to make sure he was safe and happy, as he had been at my farm.

  As luck would have it, an adopter of CANTER horses who lived on Northern Vermont’s Canadian border, only an hour from Montreal, said she would retrieve Groovy for me and bring him out to the Midwest. I knew the woman, Brenda Lamb, wouldn’t let me down. She had once retrieved a horse from the farm of a trainer in Michigan and stayed an extra night to clean the stalls there because the man had crippling arthritis that made it hard for him to take care of things.

  It was going to be a few months before Groovy arrived back at my own farm. He was underweight and had two abscesses, one on his shoulder that was really festering, along with some benign skin tumors and various welts, scrapes, and cuts, and Brenda didn’t want me to see him in that condition. He was in good hands in the meantime.

  “Groovy was born to be a Lhasa Apso,” Brenda e-mailed me. “He’s so darling.… During a stiff neck moment, he just put his nose in my hand and leaned on me with one little blinking eye, saying ‘Fix this.’” I couldn’t wait to see him.

  Unfortunately, only days later, my joy was alloyed when John developed his first postoperative complication: pain in the leg on which the surgeon had operated. Testing showed that the bypass, now only a little more than a month old, had already occluded, becoming filled with plaque, just like his femoral artery. They said it would take only about an hour to reopen it, but hours and hours went by before the vascular surgeon came out to tell me it was all over. It had gone very slowly because the plaque had already solidified.
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  Two weeks later, on July first, we were back in the emergency room once again. The bypass reoccluded and the pain, quite severe, had returned a second time. The surgery on John’s right leg was going to be delayed until the surgeon felt sure that the left would remain stable.

  Later that same month, I was spun in yet another direction when I was notified that I had won the Dogwood Stable Dominion Award. It was an incredible honor, a prestigious award given once a year to an “unsung hero of the racing industry.” Among those sitting on the panel of judges was Secretariat owner Penny Chenery.

  For CANTER, the timing couldn’t have been better. The award would be presented, as always, at the Saratoga Race Track in New York at the beginning of August. Everybody who was anybody in racing would be there—the biggest names with the deepest pockets—and we felt that was our “in” for generating donations to make our idea of a farm a reality. Even after I was nominated but before I won, a number of racing publications interviewed me, bringing more attention to our cause.

  The farm in our minds now became the CANTER Thoroughbred Midwest Rehabilitation Center. All CANTER affiliates in the Midwest would be able to send their horses there, not just horses in Michigan. From there, we’d establish rehabilitation centers in New England, in the Mid-Atlantic, and in the Gulf area. We already had affiliates, or would soon have them, in all of those regions.

  In a ten-minute speech I would be allowed to make following the presentation of the award, I’d be able to drive home my point that the Thoroughbreds needed help. Those in the highest echelons of racing—not people at our crummy track trying to eke out a living but the most distinguished breeders, trainers, and owners in the country—would hear my plea.

  I rehearsed the speech during my hours in the car driving back and forth to Great Lakes Downs, taking a stopwatch with me and saying the lines I had written over and over to put the emphasis on the right words while making sure that I didn’t go over my allotted ten minutes. I even pulled off the highway when necessary to scratch something off or make changes, perfecting the speech until the last minute.

  John was able to come with me to Saratoga—the pain had not returned by the first week in August—as were my daughters and several members of the CANTER board, including Joy. The track there was unlike anything I had ever seen in Michigan. Instead of an asphalt parking lot crammed with cars and flanked by a grandstand with flaking paint, it was a pastoral scene with a large picnic ground. The tableau reflected the money and pedigree of the Social Register set who flocked to Saratoga each summer for a month of parties. They also watched races filled with horses who, in the prime of their careers, had not yet had the life run out of them. All was pageantry and tradition, as if the previous 100 years hadn’t gone by.

  While I was taken with the setting, the irony of it was not lost on me. Horses who raced at elite tracks such as Saratoga were sold over and over when they no longer performed well enough to compete at the country’s few top courses and finally ended up broken and limping at tracks like ours in Michigan. As much as I was awed to suddenly glimpse people I’d seen on television over the years—owners of Kentucky Derby winners, nationally famous trainers like D. Wayne Lucas and Todd Pletcher—I was fully aware that they prospered at the horses’ expense. The custom-designed hats women wore at tracks like Saratoga and Churchill Downs cost more than the couple hundred dollars I regularly haggled over on the backside, trying to keep a Thoroughbred from going to slaughter.

  My award was presented at an exclusive luncheon given in my honor by Cothran “Cot” and Anne Campbell, in honor of their beloved horse Dominion, who died in old age. Under a tent on the grounds of a private club with a five-piece band and waiters in uniform, I received an introduction as someone who through CANTER had saved more than 4,000 horses. Normally, Cot and Anne do the honors, but John Hettinger requested that he present me with the award—a $5,000 check and a sculpture of Dominion—and the Campbells obliged him. I was so touched by that gesture. John, a champion of Thoroughbreds as much as he loved racing, was suffering from a brain tumor at that point and could barely make his way forward with a cane.

  I was so moved that John Hettinger wanted to present me with the Dominion Award even though he was quite sick by that point.

  I made my speech as gracious as possible. I truly was thankful that my work was being recognized, but beyond that, I was mindful of my aim to make a good impression so that when we went asking for money for our rehabilitation center, those with the means to help us would be well disposed toward us. Still, I did connect the dots for those present, suggesting in as pleasantly couched terms as possible that they bore at least some of the responsibility for what happened to their racehorses once they dropped down in the ranks and away from beautiful tracks like the one at Saratoga. In a talk filled with effusive thank-yous and vague references to the Thoroughbred industry’s “unwavering concern” for racing’s Thoroughbreds, I pointed out that only within the last few weeks, I had to sign a euthanization order for a horse at Great Lakes Downs who had won a race at Saratoga just three years earlier. During the same time frame, another former Saratoga winner was admitted to Michigan State for surgery after breaking down on our track.

  I knew this with certainty because while I was preparing my speech at the end of July, it seemed like we were euthanizing or hospitalizing an awful lot of maimed horses, more than usual, and I wondered whether it was true or whether things just seemed worse than they generally were because of what John was going through and my mother’s death earlier in the year. So I reviewed the Excel spreadsheets I always kept on our intakes and found that from the beginning of the year till July 29th, 56 percent of those who came into the CANTER program crossed the finish line only to find death. Many of them had started their racing careers at high-level tracks, including Saratoga. It was as it had always been. Horses who ran at our cheap little track just a couple of hours from a slaughterhouse, pumped with drugs to mask injuries, had often changed hands after illustrious starts in California, in Kentucky, in New York, and in other states with reputations for television-worthy racing.

  I wasn’t sure how my allusion to the deaths of former Saratoga Thoroughbreds would go over, but Joy told me afterward that people were not offended, that she even saw tears well up in people’s eyes. And I could see that those present were acting warmly toward me; I hadn’t ticked anyone off.

  The choice not to come off accusatory had not been easy. I wasn’t talking about wetlands being built on. This was pain and suffering and death in the worst way possible, year after year, horse after horse, and sacrificing the expression of my real feelings, as I did every week at the track when I asked trainers if they had “anything” they “wanted to get rid of,” took its toll emotionally. But what choice did I have? If I wanted to save horses, to raise money to save even more, I had to take the ingratiating route, even though I was speaking to people at the source of the trickle-down effect that allowed horses to reach Michigan lame and often unfixable. Pointing a finger wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  After the speech, John Hettinger suggested to me that I should use the national attention from the award to advance the cause of saving horses from slaughter. I told him right then about our plans for a Midwest rehabilitation center and asked if he would consider becoming the honorary chairperson of an advisory board CANTER wanted to create with people at the top tier of racing in order to shine a spotlight on the plan. He agreed immediately, and also suggested that I approach Cot and Anne, a very well known trainer named Nick Zito, and a couple of others at Saratoga that day, all of whom said yes.

  I spent the rest of my few days at Saratoga participating in events I would never have chosen to attend on my own. For instance, included in the honor of receiving the Dominion award was watching a race named for me, so in special box seats with Cot and Anne, I politely sat looking down or to the side as the horses ran by, the way a child might play with the peas on his plate to make it look like he had actually eaten some. I had
not watched a race since Baby died, and I didn’t want to see one now. To have done so would have been a direct betrayal of him, a violation of his memory.

  Still, I did not leave feeling angry. I felt positive, buoyed by John Hettinger’s enthusiasm and ready to make new inroads. I even was offered help by a woman named Annette Bacola, one of my guests at the award luncheon. I had known her for a few years by then as she had spent some time as Michigan’s state racing commissioner, and I liked her because unlike so many other racing commissioners, she truly did care about the horses. Also, she, too, had lost a horse to racing, a grey she still thought of, and that deepened our bond.

  Annette took Joy and me to lunch the day after the award ceremony, and while the three of us chatted about our love of horses, I asked her to join the newly created advisory board to help us get the rehabilitation center off the ground. Not only did she say yes, she also invited me to her home in Lexington to strategize. Flying back to Detroit, I knew we were on our way.

  I drove down to Lexington the last weekend of August to meet with Annette, who put me up in her guesthouse, a beautiful brick edifice filled with antiques, mahogany furniture, and spacious rooms, including a library, with doors that spilled onto a large portico. While the surroundings, replete with bronze horse sculptures and other equine touches, were intimidating, Annette was not. Classy but warm and sweet—a beautiful person inside and out—she suggested that she and her husband host a fundraiser at her home, offering to cover all the costs. I was overwhelmed by her largesse.

  It wouldn’t be a major fundraiser, Annette said, rather more of a getting-people-interested kind of thing. The thinking was that it might bring in somewhere on the order of $25,000. True, that wasn’t enough to build a rehabilitation center, which would cost millions. But for one night’s work, I thought such a number would be terrific.

  When I arrived home from Lexington, I called Congressman Whitfield and asked if he and his wife would join our advisory board along with Annette, John Hettinger, and the others. He said yes, and when I questioned whether he knew anyone else who might be interested, he gave me the phone number of Bo Derek, who had been very active in antislaughter legislation, even making a trip to Washington and visiting with a number of congressmen to raise support for the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act.