Saving Baby

by Jo Anne Normile

  The doctors told John that he should also have a bypass on the artery in his other leg, but he refused. He knew that would eventually make him a bilateral amputee, but he didn’t want to risk becoming one sooner than necessary.

  A week later, he was home once again, healing extremely slowly, like someone with diabetes, because blood circulation to his leg was so poor. He couldn’t be fitted for an artificial leg at that point because the doctors didn’t want him wearing a tight prosthesis over an area that was still coming back to itself; he wasn’t healed yet. They also didn’t want him using crutches because he was on a high dose of the blood thinner Coumadin. Were he to fall, he might break his other leg and also suffer internal bleeding. So all he could do was transfer from an easy chair to a wheelchair. Theoretically, he could also use a walker, but he’d have to hop on his remaining leg. And because the blood supply to that one was also blocked, he didn’t have the strength in that limb for that. So for five months, until he was fully healed and could be fitted for a prosthesis, he was pretty much stuck in the great room, hopping to the car only for doctor’s appointments. There was not even any coming upstairs.

  In the meantime, having to lift his forty-three-pound wheelchair, get it into the trunk, and then back out at the doctor’s office, I developed numbness in my right arm that wouldn’t abate. A visit to a neurologist showed that I had a compressed disk in my cervical spine near my shoulder and had to be in traction three days a week at a rehab center. A device around my head and under my chin and neck pulled me in one direction to decompress the pinched disk. I was used to hauling and throwing thirty-pound bales of hay, but not getting an unwieldy piece of metal that would keep unfolding into the tight spot of a trunk while trying to make sure the body of the car didn’t get dinged.

  Worse than the compressed disk was the loneliness, which descended with crushing silence. Just months earlier and for years before that, I had been so very busy. The phone never stopped ringing with someone concerned about a horse or some CANTER detail. Now it never did. Inquiries about John fell off, too. People, even many who are close friends, stop calling once a health crisis has passed and a compromised life looms ahead in an indefinite stretch.

  The one place I didn’t feel lonely was down at the barn, with my other family members. I could talk freely there, not worrying about expressing my fears. At first I did a lot of crying, wishing life could be the way it was. But the way it was when? Before John lost his leg? Before CANTER? Before Baby died? Before we got into racing?

  There, among the horses, I also faced my very real fear of not knowing where this was going. Would we have to give up the farm? If we stayed, could I handle everything on my own? John had always done a lot of work fixing broken gates, adjusting heavy stall mats, and such.

  If we did stay, I’d definitely keep Scarlett, Sissy, and Groovy; I couldn’t fathom doing anything else.

  Groovy—even in the midst of everything that was happening, he made me laugh. The comic of the barn, he’d purposely do something that he knew would end in my shaking my finger at him in a mock reprimand, like take something from me or purposely nudge the water pail I was carrying so that water splashed all over the both of us.

  Groovy liked his hay in a tight flake; he’d bury his nose in it. Scarlett and Sissy—they liked their hay broken up for them. That wasn’t as easy as just tossing a flake into each of their stalls, but none of it was ever about ease.

  For what I gave them, I received ten times as much in return. While Groovy offered me his stand-up routine, his goofy antics, Scarlett, the most mature, the worldly one who had been all over and seen so much, lent me her assuredness. She also allowed me an eye on the past, when things were better. Looking at her, I could think about all of her competitions, all of our travels together. I’d fly to my hotel and go immediately to where she was stabled, checking in with her and making sure her accommodations were suitable. Also, she was my tie to Baby, even though she was only his half sister while Sissy was his full sibling. She had been Baby’s best friend, the one who had gone through everything with him, the one who was at the track the day he died.

  Sissy, she was my homebody, the one who never would have been happy to go off to kindergarten. I loved her cautiousness—she would hang back while Scarlett and Groovy inspected a box or piece of paper that had blown into the pasture—and I loved her friendly, welcoming disposition toward other horses. I loved, too, how she and both of the other horses, like all horses, lived in the moment, accepting whatever was going on right then. I needed their example at that time, worried as I was about all the “what ifs” going forward.

  I had started to ride Sissy in an effort to make up for some of the short shrift I had given her in her early years, when her presence only reminded me of my grief over Baby. But when you ride a horse, it’s not if you fall off, but when—it’s simply going to happen at some point—and now that couldn’t be an option. I couldn’t afford a broken wrist or ankle because I was going to have to do everything, not just in the barn but for the household.

  So I had to let Sissy go back to being a pasture ornament, content to seek safety in her herd mates’ shadows. That was okay. She was happy to play the role of baby sister.

  About half a year after I started going back down to the barn on a regular basis rather than relying on friends, John received his first artificial limb. Your first prosthesis is like a trial leg that you use for six months before you’re fitted for your final one. The stump is still recontouring, but the new leg provides an opportunity to learn how to balance again, to go for physical therapy in order to get ready to move about without a walker.

  Over the next few months, John went from hopping to balancing without leaning on something. He was gaining a lot more control, to the point that he would be able to learn to walk eventually with a cane, then without one. The process, after a year and a half of hardly being able to walk and then undergoing an amputation, was uplifting, providing something positive, finally, to look forward to.

  By the time Christmas came, we actually felt grateful. After all, he could have had a massive stroke or heart attack and died, or been utterly incapacitated, unable to communicate. Instead, he was here, he was himself, he could joke around and talk to his children—and they to him. Both Jessica and Rebecca were expecting. John would get to see and hold his grandchildren rather than miss that joy, miss looking forward to it.

  The two pregnancies ended in two healthy grandsons born just a few months apart. Unfortunately, however, the final prosthesis did not afford John the freedom of movement we expected. We had joined an amputee’s club at the hospital, in which either a husband or wife lost a leg. And we had been heartened because all of them were walking normally. One man had even gone back to work as a firefighter. That kept our hopes for John’s mobility very high. He’d be golfing again by the next summer, we believed. We even spent extra money on a high-end leg that would allow his movements more flexibility, a closer approximation to the ambulation of someone with his own leg.

  But when you’re sixty and have a multitude of cardiac issues on top of an amputation, life is not going to be the same as for a fit fireman in his thirties. John tried golfing once and never attempted it again. Using the prosthesis proved far harder than the success stories in the amputee club had led us to believe. The artificial limb is heavy, and your other leg has to be strong. But both of John’s thighs received very little blood supply, and the main artery in his other leg remained 100 percent blocked. He just could not, and never would be able to, move around like somebody without extremely poor circulation in his lower limbs.

  It was a surprising life change, not the kind of premature retirement we had envisioned. We had seen the final-fit prosthesis as the light at the end of the tunnel, but the light went out before we ever reached the other side. What we had been through, we realized, wasn’t a temporary setback; life was never going to go back to the way it had been. I was sorry we had gone to those amputee meetings, because it made facing
the limitation that much harder.

  Not long after the aborted golf attempt, John was hospitalized again for one of many cardiac emergencies that would occur over the years. On the way home from visiting him one day, I needed to stop for groceries and household odds and ends. If I waited until I reached my own semirural area, I’d have to shop in several different stores, which would take time I didn’t have between tending to John and tending to the horses. But just off the expressway on the way home from the hospital, at exit 176, there was a Meijer’s—a huge Michigan supermarket chain store that also had aisle upon aisle of sundry items.

  I had not been to that branch since it opened several years earlier, as part of the shopping center that was built on the site of the Detroit Race Course. I couldn’t bear to go, even though every single time I passed exit 176, a part of me was still ready to get off the highway. Once I even exited by mistake, having to take the service road in order to get back on.

  That day, however, I was so rushed and so exhausted from the stress of running back and forth to the hospital that I needed to consider stopping there.

  I tried, as I walked from the parking lot to the store, to be right where I was—in the middle of a large shopping complex with a Costco, a Home Depot, a Marshall’s, a Michael’s. But I couldn’t. Crying as I moved toward Meijer’s, I could see the security guard’s shack, the track kitchen, the grandstand. I was making my way past all of it.

  Inside the store, well oriented to how things had once been laid out because the entrance road to the shopping center was the same as the road leading to the race course, with the railroad tracks on the south end, I knew I was in Baby’s shedrow right where the baby items were displayed—bibs, onesies, diapers, car seats. Around me, with people casually looking over their shopping lists, picking supplies off store shelves, their toddlers scampering about, I could see his stall, could just about make out his head sticking over the door to look out; it was more than ten years earlier, and he was still alive.

  While I was clearly able to look at everyone around me, inconsequential details to the scene though they were, they couldn’t see me. I was a leftover, an unperceived remnant of something that should have been long gone but lingered still. I hurried away.

  It wasn’t long after that day that I started tooling around on the Internet. John’s condition kept me from going out much, but going online provided access to the outside world. And with time on my hands that I never had when I was down in the trenches, I began to take a wider lens to some of the issues in racing. Who, exactly, was in charge? Who made the rules and oversaw them? I knew how things worked in Michigan and, to some degree, in the states where we had affiliates, but not as a whole.

  What I learned was that no one was in charge. Whereas sports like baseball and football had a commissioner to oversee operations and keep things fair, racing had thirty-eight separate jurisdictions overseeing more than 100 tracks around the country, most of them little nontelevised tracks like ours, and they all made their own rules, then decided whether or not they were going to follow them. It was like a small western town where the sheriff was also the judge.

  There was an Association of Racing Commissioners International that recommended rules for all the separate state racing commissions, I found out, but adopting those rules was not mandatory. Each track was free to do as it liked.

  The problems, I discovered, had a long history, going at least as far back as 1973, when a Congressional committee convened to investigate racing practices focused on doping and the lack of state enforcement. There was even a bill ten years later, in the early 1980s, that would have banned doping in horse racing, ending the practice of masking a horse’s injuries with drugs so that it could race until its bone was chewed away so severely it would be forced to limp off the track. But powerful racing lobbyists in Washington must have talked the government out of passing the bill, saying that racing would step up and do a better job of policing itself. In the meantime, things continued as they always had, with some horses drugged and some not, the public never knowing the difference and betting on races that were, for all intents and purposes, fixed. When some horses take drugs to improve their performance and others don’t and no one in the stands knows which is which, it becomes a rigged game.

  None of this went on anywhere else in the world. In Europe, in Asia, drugs on race day were banned, with spot testing of Thoroughbreds in training and stiff penalties handed out to those caught committing infractions rather than just slaps on the wrist. Horses ran purely on hay, oats, and water, which kept lame horses on other continents safe from having to run.

  Nor did other countries allow excessive use of the whip or the American practice of heel nerving—severing a nerve in the foot to prevent a racehorse from feeling pain that should keep it from running. They also didn’t allow toe grabs, traction devices put on horses’ shoes to propel them forward faster. While permitted in the U.S., they are illegal in other countries because they cause catastrophic injuries by virtue of impeding the slide phase of a horse’s stride and thereby interfering with the mechanics of what nature intends.

  Perhaps worst of all that I came across in my research was information on breeding practices that included an entire nurse mare industry, practices that took place in wealthy racing states producing Thoroughbreds worth six figures and more. Often, I learned, when a high-priced Thoroughbred mare gives birth, she is sent off within ten days to be bred again. But it’s too much of a risk to transport her valuable newborn along with her, so it’s left behind with a wet nurse not worth much. The wet nurse’s own foal, born solely so she can provide milk to a prized Thoroughbred infant, is considered a byproduct, often left to die or sent to slaughter. Seeing photos of discarded foals, I wanted to retch.

  I was given a chance to have some of my concerns aired in 2008, when a filly named Eight Belles crossed the finish line in second place at the Kentucky Derby and, in front of fifteen million television spectators, collapsed, her nose slamming into the dirt. She struggled unsuccessfully to rise before a canvas screen was brought out to hide her from view as she was euthanized. The incident led to a hearing in Congress six weeks later, for which I was asked to produce exhibits detailing the injuries and untimely deaths of racehorses, showing that what occurred at the Derby was only the tip of the iceberg.

  Again, the racing industry talked the government out of taking matters into its own hands, promising to police itself. But again, it was all business as usual.

  In the meantime, I began working on behalf of Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, providing both him and Representative Whitfield with research and data to support their bills to ban race-day drugs. A law against drugs would cut down dramatically on the number of horses that go limping off the track. In addition, I continued my work with Representative Whitfield on his anti-slaughter bill.

  As time has worn on, I have even managed to venture from our farm now and then when asked to give antislaughter speeches at conferences put on by such organizations as the Equine Welfare Alliance, the Animal Law Coalition, and Equine Advocates, and have provided information on abuses in racing to the Equine Protection division of the Humane Society of the United States.

  For as much as I have tried to remain involved, racing has been experiencing its own slow decline apart from my or anybody else’s efforts.

  In the 1960s, when horseracing was the only form of legal gambling, attendance at Michigan racetracks was three million yearly; it was the number one spectator sport in the country. Into the 1970s, in fact, racing remained a very popular venue for betting. But as its fan base aged and lotteries became legal in more and more states, as did casino gambling, people turned to scratch tickets for wagering and then Powerball in convenience stores, as well as to slot machines, particularly machines with slick casino video gadgetry. There’s not even a Thoroughbred track in Michigan anymore. Great Lakes Downs closed at the end of the 2007 season, and while another track opened for a couple of seasons back on the Detroit side of the sta
te, it could not pay for itself, either.

  Still, racing is not going away. At the very least, people continue to enjoy watching the glam Thoroughbred races on television, like the Kentucky Derby. Bettors or not, they unknowingly cheer on animals who may very well someday be sent to a low-level track and be sold right from there to a kill buyer for roughly thirty cents a pound, ending up as food on someone’s plate. And advertisers remain willing to support the industry because of the large viewership.

  Furthermore, tens of thousands of horses each year continue to be forced to run lame on smaller tracks, confined and abused their entire lives until ending up in the slaughterhouse. The number of Thoroughbreds put to death each year is, in fact, equal to 60 to 70 percent of the annual number born. The fight to save them continues, with those trying to shield horses up against those who work to stonewall Congress at every turn in order to protect, even beyond its glory days, what is still a $40 billion industry.

  It has been a long haul, and continues to be one. When Baby was born, I was a forty-three-year-old mother with two teenagers. Today, my daughters have long ago worn their wedding dresses and together have given John and me four grandchildren.

  I look out my kitchen window at Scarlett, Secretariat’s amazing granddaughter, ambling over to the water trough after grazing peacefully. Although still beautiful and in wonderful shape, time has crept up on her, too. She is already twenty-one years old. Sissy, somewhere nearby, has turned seventeen. Groovy, my beautiful barn clown whose very presence righted so many wrongs, had to be put down in 2011 because his arthritis in all four legs became so debilitating he couldn’t make his way out to the pasture to graze.