Black River Trading Co. P.O. Box 7, Oxford, Michigan 48371 USA Phone: 248-628-2986 Fax: 248-628-6422
The Tail (oops!) Tale Behind Whoop's Story
New Age "Mr. Ed" enters the "Twilight Zone"
By Jane Briggs-Bunting
The year 1993 was like a tough jump course, obstacles loomed at every turn. My 78-year-old mother who lived in another state was diagnosed in February with advanced pancreatic cancer. The doctors gave her just three months to live. Fortunately, I was on sabbatical from teaching at a university and spent six terrifying weeks as she recovered from surgery to relieve a blockage caused by the tumor. She was classified as a Stage IV patient. Chemotherapy and radiation were not viable options. It was my first foray into alternative medicine. She started taking an herbal tea called, Essiac, and miraculously, in minuscule increments, she began to improve.
Meanwhile, two of my dogs, described by their veterinarian a year earlier as beyond old, more like ancient and decrepit, also began to fail physically. Rusty, age 17, was put to sleep in early June. Spanky, my 14-year-old, 120 lb. husky-shepherd mix, was put to sleep in early September. To end the year by losing my 22 year old thoroughbred gelding, Whoop for Joy, was unthinkable. In the decade that I'd owned him, he'd been an exceptionally easy keeper. He had his regular shots and wormings from the veterinarian, but rarely did we see the vet other than to wave at him as he drove past us on the road as he made his rounds.
Whoop is an intelligent, clever, willful, flashy, mischievous and playful character, sort of a composite of my two favorite 1950s era television horses--Fury and Mr. Ed. Whoop would follow me around trailing after the dogs. I'd carry on full conversations with him, while he'd nod his head and nicker his approval or switch his tail in disagreement. With a rocking horse canter and a smooth even trot, we explored trails and meadows year round. Though Whoop is normally well behaved, I get dumped annually just to keep me humble.
The problem begins
We lead an idyllic existence until late that summer. I detected a faint limp in his left front leg. With no visible cuts or injuries to his hoof or leg, I gave him a few days off. The lameness was still there a week later, so the veterinarian came out for an exam, checked for abscesses and other signs of injury and could find none. He prescribed an anti-inflammatory drug, phenylbutazone ("bute"), and a few more days rest. That seemed to help. But within two weeks, the slight lameness was back. The vet prescribed reshoeing but that didn't help. By October, the lameness had spread to both front legs, and the hooves were warm to the touch. There were other signs, as well.
Whoop is a normally fastidious horse, who would only poop in his own predetermined areas of his paddock and never in his stall or aisleway. Now he was leaving deposits within feet of where he was standing. He became increasingly reluctant to move. The vet returned, and a reexamination lead
to a different diagnosis, a mild case of laminitis. The vet wasn't overly worried, so neither was I. He prescribed bute again and a vasodilator, and put special cushioned pads on the frogs of the feet to provide support.
He departed for an out of town workshop leaving me with the name and phone number of another vet who was covering in his absence. Three days later, Whoop's condition had seriously deteriorated. The other vet replaced the Lilly pads by duct taping a roll of gauze under each foot, switched him to a different anti-inflammatory, and gave him an intravenous treatment of a drug called DMSO (dimethylsulfoxide). The noxious odor was almost immediate. Improvement, for some horses, occurs within 24 hours, but not for Whoop. To make it worse, after three treatments with DMSO you could smell him a quarter mile away. I don't know how he could stand the stench.
I spread two yards of sand in the aisleway and a truckload more over a small area in front of the barn. The rest of the paddock was roped off. Everywhere Whoop stepped, his feet were now cushioned. Still, head down, he'd hobble painfully around moving only when necessary.
I'd heard about the Tellington-Ttouch from a friend in Idaho. Calling the Tteam office in New Mexico, I located a woman across town who was willing to drive more than 50 miles one way to teach me the Ttouch. We worked Whoop from nose to tail. She came back two more times to make sure he was getting a full body work-up. On alternate days I worked him alone.When he colicked late one night, I spent more than two hours doing Tteam belly lifts using a beach towel until the crisis passed.
Improvement seemed negligible. At least, he didn't seem to be getting any worse. But nothing seemed to be helping. Whoop refused to walk freely and would only pick up his feet to change his bandages with the utmost reluctance. The blacksmith described the pain as similar to walking on a toothache. I knew that with each passing day the prognosis was becoming increasingly grim. X-rays of his feet revealed a five degree rotation in his left hoof, and between 2-3 degrees in his right. The danger in the disease is a horse's hoof is one big fingernail. Blood was accumulating between his coffin bone and the wall of the hoof. Too much separation, and his bone would literally sink through the hoof, separating from it. We can survive losing a fingernail, a horse can not. Laminitis is also called founder. The great racehorse Secretariat was one of its victims.
In early fall, I did not believe I could ever agree to euthanize Whoop. But six weeks into this episode of laminitis, seeing his glum demeanor and sensing his acute pain, I knew that I could and would have him put to sleep if his agony continued much longer. He was too good a friend to allow much more suffering. But I couldn't quit yet. Since my mother's longevity was astounding her doctors, I took another quantum leap into alternative medicine frantically searching for an equine acupuncturist finally locating one in a nearby state. As trailering was too risky for Whoop's condition, we'd have to wait until the specialist made his next trip to Michigan in December. But there was no time to waste.
New Age 'Mr. Ed'
In retrospect, it was like a New Age Mr. Ed entering the Twilight Zone. Through a friend, I got the name of a Reiki master. Reiki uses universal power to remove energy blockages in the body. According to Reiki practitioners, illness is caused by energy blockages. Injuries also trigger blocks. With Reiki, energy from God or a higher power is channeled through the Reiki practitioner to the recipient. Once energy is again flowing smoothly through that body, then the body will heal itself. Practitioners believe Reiki also enhances other forms of healing.
The Reiki master, Linda Cox, lived about two miles from my farm and had her office in a neighboring suburb. I reached her by phone. She'd never treated a horse before but was willing to try. I was standing in the den of my home looking out to the paddock where Whoop stood dejectedly, head down, unmoving. Linda asked his name, and I told her. She repeated it, and
in that instant, Whoop darted up his head as if he'd heard her. As a journalist and lawyer, I'm a trained skeptic, so I was willing to consign Whoop's behavior to the realm of coincidence. But, I had to rethink that the next day when Linda arrived in the late afternoon for his first treatment.
Whoop was laying down in a dog-like posture with his legs tucked under him. He slept like that occasionally, but since the onset of the laminitis, he was spending more and more time off his feet. Rarely, however, would he stretch out on his side. As prey, horses are leery of predators. Whoop had never stayed down before when a stranger approached. Linda walked right up to him and said, "That's not how I visualized him. I saw him on his side." As if he understood her, Whoop rolled on to his side and stretched out his legs. For the next 15 minutes, Linda crouched between his legs, her hands lightly resting on Whoop's side near his gut. His only reaction was to sigh noisily and nicker softly. Had he'd been a cat, he would have been purring.
After she moved away, he got to his feet. She placed her hands on various areas of his body, including each hoof, but she kept going back to the gut area. Puzzled Whoop kept looking back at her, but he didn't move away. Finally, she placed her hands on each ear. I knew from the Tteam training that a horse's ears contained key acupuncture points for the entire body. The tips had been cold when I'd touched them moments earlier. By the time Linda was done, I could have toasted marshmallows on them. When she finished, Whoop rubbed her jacket with his nose. She asked me about a white horse that she had "visualized" around Whoop. At the time, her "vision" made no sense.
Yet, Whoop, for the first time in weeks, seemed to feel a little better. I got almost immediate confirmation of the change in him when he charged out of the barn, neck arched and tail cocked doing a good imitation of TV's Fury. Linda returned for two more treatments. He still was sore-footed, but less so than before. He would hang over the gate seeming to know when she was coming and would nicker a greeting when she arrived. Progress was gradual. Linda left town for a workshop in Philadelphia.
Whoop's hooves started to heat up again. The vet returned. This time the pulse rate was higher in the right hoof than the left. The vet was discouraged, there was little left that could be done. But, miraculously, the next morning, Whoop was back to his old self, walking freely and seemingly without discomfort. Later that morning Linda unexpectedly called from Philadelphia. "How's Whoop," she asked. "I sensed another blockage in his right foot and was able to move it last night. I could sense him almost kicking out his foot," she said.
I believe the Reiki treatments restored his body's flow of energy allowing its own systems to start the healing. The drugs then could have accelerated the process. As for the white horse Linda had "visualized" around Whoop, I recalled a brief few months several years earlier when Whoop had boarded down the road at a stable with an indoor arena. He became the talk of the barn, when he fell for a flashy white mare named Seline. The attraction was mutual. The two would call to each other in the barn, and my gelding tried to clamber over the fence that separated their paddocks even though she wasn't in season. I called a friend to learn the whereabouts of the mare. She told me that Seline had died the previous year.
Even a jaded skeptic could not deny what I had witnessed--Whoop's dramatic improvement after Reiki and his undeniable rapport with Linda. As for the white mare, maybe Seline just had to come by to comfort her old friend. When Whoop does eventually make his transition (the New Age euphemism for dying), I now believe Seline will be there waiting. Somehow, that will make it easier to let him go.
Seline's role
Seline was the catalyst for Whoop's story. Once I decided to write it down, weaving in the Christmas Eve legend that all animals talk on that most special of all nights, the story wrote itself. The first draft, which was virtually the final one, was written in 40 minutes. Then I put it away for more than a year. After my mother died of a reaction to a flu shot (she'd beaten her cancer), I knew I had to fulfill her hope in me that I would write other than journalism stories for newspapers and magazines.
I persuaded my former colleague and friend, Jon Buechel, to do the illustrations, and I started the discouraging process of looking for a publisher. Though several New York houses seemed interested, none would allow me to work with my chosen illustrator. The tentative publication date--at the earliest--was three years away.
I decided to try to do it myself. I set up the Black River Trading Company, read two books on self-publishing, wrote up some printing specifications and let the project out for bids. By mid-summer, 1995 it was time to do it or fold. Printing costs were high, so I had a "conversation" with my mother. Her house was up for sale, but we had yet to get a reasonable offer. The very next day, her house sold! This book is dedicated to my mother, Isabelle Sarkady Briggs and my father, David James Briggs, and, of course, to Whoop, who is now 30, and feeling pretty spry for a horse his age.
Whoop's life changed profoundly with the arrival in June 1998 of a rascally, runaway llama. Read all about him in our new book, LLama on the Lam.
The Tale's End
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