I’d got up at six to start the milking and found Joli, bless her, already downstairs making up the kid bottles. We both stumbled out to the barn, sleepy but glad to be alive, and enjoyed the fresh morning, the silvery crescent moon and the pink and purple sunrise. Joli then changed into her school uniform and went off to school; I turned the goats out into the already sunny field, drove Benji to school and came back to join battle with the computer.
The clock was ticking, as the FedEx order had to be filed by 10:30 a.m., and it was 10:08 when I discovered the computer simply wasn’t going to print. It was all too much, and I burst into tears. There are a lot of things I can conquer with sheer hard work and a refusal to give up, but technology failure isn’t one of them.
Rich had staggered downstairs, still looking green and haggard but not in as much pain as the day before. He held me gently while I cried myself out, and then we went back to work, finally sorting it out when I e-mailed the label to his computer, and he printed it out.
Made up the boxes, slid the labels into the official FedEx plastic slips and taped them shut. They sat there on the table, looking all official, and I was as proud of them as of the children on their first day at school. Two boxes, ready for courier pickup – but representing such a lot of hard work and such a long, long road that we’ve come, to reach the point where we actually have a product to sell, customers to buy it, orders, a website and a way to ship things out.
Rich and I retreated to the lounge and curled up on the sofa together for a break, and decided that we needed a new computer. Can’t afford a fancy one, but we absolutely must have one that works, and a bookkeeping software package too.
Back to the office for more ordering, bottles and stickers, tape dispensers and packaging: all the things you never think you’ll need until you suddenly do! Rich has gone off to get three big dumpy bags of goat food, which should see us through the time when he can’t get up after the operation. They say it’s a three-month recovery period. How he’ll cope with that – or how I will – I hate to think.
I’m busily packing up the boxes for tomorrow’s shipment of soap – our first big trade order – and I’m horribly nervous about it for some reason. I’m terrified that when it’s actually time to ship, I won’t have the right quantity, or something.
I’ve made Rich soup and probiotic and fresh ginger tea – stocking the top shelf of the fridge for him with mugs he can pop into the microwave – and instructed him firmly that he’s not to eat anything else. He scared me to death yesterday after he ate the seeded wholemeal bread and was in such terrible pain. No more! If he has to live on cawl until he goes into hospital, so be it. It’s my job to deliver him there in shape for his operation, and it’s not going to be easy.
Would so love a nap, but maybe a big pot of coffee instead?
Later… Ridiculously, I’m suddenly feeling happy and optimistic. Have just gotten through loads of red tape for the business. There’s nothing I can do about Rich’s illness, but to sink my teeth into a really satisfying tangle of red tape, and emerge triumphant – well that I can do. It gives me an illusion of victory – and distraction.
30 March 2012
In some strange way, all this extra work seems to suit me. Like one of those cars that only really hugs the road at 80 miles an hour, I’m waking up at 6 a.m., before the alarm, coming downstairs for tea and to exercise before I go outside to milk. I never used to get up before 8 a.m. – and I wasn’t consistent about stretching and warming up my back either, although I knew I should have been.
I make myself a travel cup and a Thermos of tea, and head outside. I cross the yard to the barn, pull the blue-painted door, latch it open. Inside, the goats, lying contentedly on the clean straw (or not-so-clean – note to self, remember to lay down fresh straw today), stir and bleat and struggle to their feet to put their heads over the edge of the pen, hoping to be first to be milked.
I switch on the radio and the water heater, put one bucket by the hot water tap and one by the cold, hitch up the stainless-steel milking bucket to the cutters and pipe, and scoop out a bowl of food for the first milker. I let out whoever insists on being first – usually Marmite, who’s aggressive and knocks everyone else out of the way – milk the first two squirts into a plastic jug (to get rid of any possible bacteria), wipe down her teats with a disinfectant wipe, put the cluster on her, sit down to watch and take my first deep, satisfying gulp of hot sweet tea.
Yesterday the morning was so beautiful that I was literally shocked. I kept coming out of the barn and hanging over the side of the fence, trying to absorb it. The mist was hovering in the valley, and the rising sun was pouring through it, so that everything glowed, luminous and boiling, as if someone had lit it from inside. The distant sea, the bowl-shaped depression between the hills, the rust-coloured trees with their tips just turning acid green with spring – all layered over with golden, glowing steam.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Merlin the Enchanter striding down the hill. The wizard of Arthurian legend is meant to have been born an hour from where we live – Carmarthen, or Caer Myrddin. Merlin’s oak used to stand in the middle of where a roundabout is now. They even built a statue to it – an oddly modern, asymmetric abstraction of an oak.
Tiny white farmhouses all the way across the valley are the only settlements I could see. And the whole landscape was as deeply familiar and beloved as the face of a family member. I stood and breathed it in, feeling lucky for a moment.
But the stress is definitely beginning to tell. Cracks are appearing for all of us. Yesterday the goats escaped out of our woods and into a neighbour’s field. I was on the phone, talking to someone about the goat show we’re trying to organize, when Taid came in, shouting that the goats were out.
Rich came in and tried to get my attention, but I’d been working on getting this person on the phone for days, and so I waved my hand over my shoulder, telling Rich to wait until I was finished. He went storming off on his own, and I heard the quad bike starting. I finished the call a few minutes later and went pounding after him, but it was too late – he was gone.
I stomped all the way down the huge, long hill, through the woodlands and over the barbed-wire fence, muttering to myself. By the time I saw him, across the field, leading the runaway goats back to our fields, I was in a spitting rage, full of fear that he’d pushed himself too hard, desperately ill as he is.
‘You should have waited for me!’ I shouted at him ridiculously, from all the way across the field. I could barely see him, and I’m sure he couldn’t hear me properly. ‘Two minutes! That’s all it would have taken!’
When I got closer, I pointed my finger at his face and screamed, ‘Next time you wait for me!’
‘All right, keep your hair on,’ he said, looking confused. We shoved and pushed the goats back through the hole in the fence, cursing them and ourselves, and ruing the day we’d ever decided to keep goats.
‘We could eat them,’ I suggested, as we tried to corner a runaway. ‘We could dine on roast goat every night for an entire month, and then we’d never have to look after them again.’
‘Goat roast,’ we intoned, tackling and dragging the last few bucking, kicking rebels through the mud. I’d split my welly on the barbed wire. Damn.
‘Goat sausage. Goat burgers. Goat meatballs.’
But the goats just looked at us out of their long-pupilled eyes. They knew we didn’t mean it.
Then yesterday Rich smashed the phone to bits during a stressful episode in which we discovered that, despite the surgeon having recommended Rich for emergency surgery, telling him to ‘just turn up on the day’, no-one at the hospital front desk had ever heard of Rich or knew anything about him or his paperwork.
‘Pull it together!’ I’d shouted at him.
‘This is me pulled together!’ he shouted back and stormed upstairs.
I looked at the smashed bits of phone handset for a minute, then picked up the other line and started again. I finally managed
to reach someone who had heard of Rich – a nurse who’d talked to him in the hospital – and she promised to help sort out the paperwork.
I went upstairs and found Rich lying on the bed, looking out of the window. His skin was a horrifying shade of pale grey.
‘Everything is falling apart,’ he said.
‘It’s not,’ I said stoutly.
‘Everything’s under control. We’re doing it. We filled all our orders. It’s going to be okay.’
‘You don’t know that,’ he said.
‘I do,’ I said, kissing him, wishing it was true. ‘I promise.’
2 April 2012
Spent the sunny Sunday yesterday making three large batches of soap – 180 bars altogether. When we start the business up again, I want to have soap ready to sell. Somehow it seems unbelievable that we’ll ever be on the other side of the surgery – that Rich will be home again. I wonder how bad it will be? How different? How unbearable? From this point, there’s no way of knowing.
6 April 2012
I’m sitting in the hospital, waiting for Rich to come out of surgery. He tried to tell me that there was no reason for me to be here during the operation, but I wanted to be as close to him physically as I could manage. At this moment that means the hospital café. I have an orange juice and a nice corner with my computer and our bills – at least I can get some work done while I wait!
By the time I arrived this morning, the nurses told me that Rich had already been wheeled off to the operating theatre. I didn’t even get to say goodbye, or sit with him while he waited, or kiss him. I suppose the good thing is that it happened so quickly; he wouldn’t have had time to worry too much or get too hungry, as they hadn’t allowed him any food after midnight.
Yesterday we finished all of our preparations – a list of phone numbers and a schedule of chores, with names pencilled in next to each chore. The goat kids and orphan lambs have been farmed out to volunteers who are willing to take on the intensive job of feeding them, and friends are coming in rotation to help Joli milk on the night shift. I plan to do the morning milking daily, and then drive the two hours or so to spend the day with Rich in the hospital. Rich insisted I didn’t have to be with him every day, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be.
Benji is off with his bio-dad, and all the loose ends have been tied up. Stockists stocked with milk; last soap orders shipped off; ‘annual leave’ sign hung in the window. I want all the decks to be clear so that I can concentrate all of my attention on Rich.
Last night, after I reluctantly left the hospital, I felt tired but oddly hopeful – praying that at the end of this tunnel will be a future for us in which Rich is strong and healthy and free of pain again. When I got home Joli and Ceris were clearing the table. They had eaten a proper dinner, complete with music and candles.
Ceris had made a beautiful chicken stew while Joli milked, with the help of our good neighbour and friend Lynn – the mother of Ceris’s boyfriend George. There was some of the stew left over, and I ate it hungrily, enjoying the candles that were still lit. I was so proud of the girls, carrying on as usual – and of our preparations.
I thought that it would be important for everyone to try to hit the mark of the family dinner – bang on 7:30 p.m., as usual, with fresh bread, candles and music. So there would be some structure and regularity to these crisis days. And so it seems there is. We are supported by these routines that we put into place.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of load-bearing lately. Something that’s load-bearing will hold up when you lean on it. A load-bearing wall in a house is one that you cannot remove without compromising the integrity of the structure. And some people are load-bearing, too, while others are not.
The kids, our routines and our neighbours are load-bearing. I’ve discovered through my experience of crises – when I found myself alone in a strange country with two children and no job, and now, as I’m running a farm and a new business single-handed and my husband’s in hospital having a major operation – that they tend to sort your friends into two piles: load-bearing and non-load-bearing. And it’s almost always a surprise, which is which.
Some people whom I would have sworn would be supportive vanished, slipping sideways and disappearing like puffballs in the wind. And some people whom I never suspected or even counted as particularly close friends, emerged rock-like from the chaos of the shifting tides. Funny how that works.
Anyhow, here I sit waiting for Rich to emerge from surgery; I’m waiting to hear our future; waiting to hear how fully he’ll recover; waiting to hear, I suppose, whether he’s even survived the surgery. It’s a major operation, and you never know about these things.
But when I close my eyes, I see him strong, healthy and powerful again, laughing, with a huge new scar across his healed stomach. He’s a fighter, my Rich. I’ll have to put my faith in that – hold on to it.
Later… The nurse called me on my mobile to tell me that Rich was out of surgery, and that I could go and see him in the recovery room. I headed there as fast as I could walk, feeling absurdly nervous. When I finally found it, I rang the bell and was let in.
Rich was lying on a bed in the middle of a mostly empty room, with monitors around him and drips feeding into his arms. He looked groggy and tired but still my own, amazingly wonderful, Rich. I just sat near him and listened as he talked about how lovely the staff had been, how kind the anaesthetist was – how the man had smiled when he didn’t have to.
The anaesthetist in question came by at that moment – a man with a cheerful face and a brilliantly white grin. Rich shook him by the hand and thanked him for going above and beyond the line of duty.
I was amazed by Rich, as I always am – so groggy with morphine and drugs that he could barely speak, but his impulse was of gratitude. Maybe at moments like these our core is revealed, stripped of all the coverings that we usually put over ourselves. And Rich is solid gold, right down to the core.
They moved him, after an hour or so, into the main ward. There were six beds in the room, the others occupied by men all over the age of 70, pale-skinned and ill-looking, attached to monitors and drip stands. I curled up beside Rich’s bed in an armchair, my back to the rest of the ward to create an illusion of privacy.
We were both oddly high – Rich with the assortment of drugs that they’d given him, me with the relief of him having come through the surgery safely. He talked a lot, telling the same stories over and over, repeating how brilliant the anaesthetist had been. I finally left about four hours later, driving home to spread the news on the phone that he was fine, that the operation had gone well.
Later that night the surgeon stopped by to tell Rich that indeed the operation had been a success. They hadn’t found anything terrible, and they expected him to make a full recovery within about six months. Victory. The result we’d been hoping for. I went to sleep feeling happy and light-hearted.
7 April 2012
Today was a different story. I thought that it might be – like running a marathon, the day after is the one to watch out for. Rich was tired, groggy, beginning to feel the pain as the huge dose of drugs for the surgery itself began to wear off after 24 hours.
He hadn’t slept well in the ward, as I knew he wouldn’t – he hates to be away from the farm and his own bed, doesn’t travel well, can’t adjust to noise and unfamiliar lights. And the other people! Like some sort of surreal painting of the rings of hell. Naked and suffering, with swollen abdomens and drip stands.
One old man across from Rich was angrily insane, telling the nurses that they were stupid, that I was weird, that he didn’t belong there, and then resolutely exposing himself to the whole ward while the nurse futilely tried to get him to cover up.
Another poor soul suffered in the far corner, the only sign that he wasn’t already dead the horrible wheezing and rattling of his lungs. Something terrible was happening to him, and because of the lack of privacy, we heard everything – the nurse explaining loudly that they had to o
perate on him right away, or he’d die; that they’d tried to contact his next of kin, but they couldn’t reach her on the phone. That he’d have to sign his mark next to the cross, to consent to the operation. It was horrifying but also banal, so sort of everyday….
This, then, is the ward where no-one wants to be. Where the patients wear their insides on the outside. Where the workings of the human body are laid completely, unforgivingly bare.
And yet, I thought, at the end of the day, it was no worse than what happens on the farm. We are, after all, animals, and our functions are the same. We eat, and the food is processed and exits the bowels. Those processes continue, whether inside or outside. We’re horrified by slime, by blood, by faecal matter, by afterbirth, by urine. But I’ve been covered with all those things in the course of working on the farm, and I know they all wash off in the washing machine.
Nothing human, by now, is alien to me. Nothing animal, either. It’s all part of what we’re doing here. Not so scary, when your hands are pried from your eyes, and you’re forced to take a long, daylight look.
10 April 2012
Yesterday was day three after the surgery, and Rich was in a lot of pain. It’s to be expected, after such a huge operation, but still difficult to watch. I get up in the morning and milk, then do some ordering on the computer (the toaster blew up; I need supplies for soap making when we start the business up again…) and then leave the house around noon, to arrive at the hospital around 2 p.m.
I stay until 6:30 p.m., reading bits of the newspaper out loud, chatting idly, just being in the room with Rich. I drive home, arriving after 8 p.m. The girls are cleaning up the remains of supper by then. Joli and I watch some TV, and then I fall into bed. Amazing that this pattern already feels like a routine.
Rich has been moved into his own private room, through some kind of miracle that I don’t understand but for which I’m deeply grateful. I seem to be more excited about it than he is. He said yesterday that he might as well have been out in the hallway, for all the difference it made to how he felt. But for me, the solace of the small room with its door that closes, away from the sounds and smells of the other occupants of the outside ward, is the next thing to heaven.
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 14