Lies and Threats

Unsurprisingly, Rex has been out of sorts since his ordeal. When he arrived home, after his release from imprisonment on the farm, he was very thirsty and hungry. He devoured a couple of days rations in several hours, and then howled during the night. The next day he seemed depressed. Since then he has been eating normally and seems to have picked up a little in mood. We have been reassuring him with lots of stroking and plenty of treats. We took him to the vet who examined him and pronounced him fit and reasonably well. Rex is certainly a resilient dog, he probably learnt this because of the maltreatment he had for the first year of his life with the old farmer. The vet also told me that a dog could only live for around four days without water. So Rex had been rescued just in time.

I reported the incident to the police. They told me it was a case of animal cruelty, which made it the responsibility of the local council. I rang the officer in charge. He took down the details but told me that a successful prosecution was unlikely because there was no independent evidence of the crime. Unfortunately a dog is unable to give evidence against its abuser. He said he would visit the old farmer and give him a stern warning that any subsequent problem with him would lead to a prosecution. I wasn’t satisfied, but this seemed the best option available. Later in the week, the officer reported to me that he had visited the old farmer and had warned him, and he had denied all knowledge of the crime.

I also spoke to a near neighbour about the old farmer. They told me that his wife had left him with their young child, so the old farmer had been on his own for forty years. They said that he came from a strange family. Apparently the old farmer and his brother were known for playing vicious tricks on people for their own perverse amusement. Several decades ago they had tricked a simple farm labourer up on top of a building they were constructing and he fell 30 feet and broke several bones, but could easily have been killed.  The locking up of Rex without food and water was in the same vein. This confirmed my gut feeling that the old farmer is unbalanced and dangerous.

As the week wore on, I spoke to several other neighbours about Rex. One told me that he had visited the old farmer when Rex was missing and asked him if he had seen the dog. The old farmer replied that he hadn’t seen him, but he was glad that he was missing because he didn’t want to see him again. And this dreadful lie was spoken when he had our dog locked up just a few yards away. The other told me that the old farmer had recently told him that he was very angry with me for reporting him to the RSPCA about not feeding his own dog properly. I shook my head and laughed. The old farmer had now produced a further lie to try and deflect attention from his own dirty deeds. I then gave my neighbour the true story.

We were speaking together below the farm towards the end of the lane. Just as we finished talking, the old farmer came around a bend on his tractor. He stopped, dismounted the tractor and began shouting at me.

‘Why did you bloody report me to the RSPCA?’

‘Because you tried to kill our dog,’ I shouted back angrily. ‘You locked him up for over three days without food and water.’

‘I didn’t do that,’ he shouted

‘Oh yes you did.’ I glowered. ‘Rex would be dead now if I hadn’t rescued him from the shed you locked him in.’

He growled at me and shook his head.

‘And I reported you to the Police,’ I shouted, ‘so you’d better be careful, they’re watching you.’

‘And you’d better watch out,’ he shouted, pointing his finger at me. ‘If I see you or that bloody dog around my yard again, I’ll do you.’

At that point he turned to get back on his tractor. I set off up the lane with Rex. I was fuming at his brazen duplicity. Five lies about Rex and two threats in one week. As I strode along I made a mental note of our exchange. When I got home, I wrote everything down and reported the lies and threats to the police and to the local authority.

Later on I told T what had happened. She sympathised and hugged me, then gave a faint smile.

‘Well, you’ve now become a fully-fledged member of NI society,’ she said.

I looked at her quizzically. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re involved in a feud with one of your neighbours.’

I smiled ruefully. ‘It’s only taken me 20 years.’

Kidnapped

A week ago Rex went missing. At first we weren’t too worried. He had a habit of occasionally visiting the farmyard where he had lived for a year. It was only a quarter of a mile down the lane and he went there to see the old farmer’s new dog. But when we went down to the farm to collect Rex, he was nowhere to be found. Then the snow came and we began to worry more. The next morning we again went to the farm and asked the old farmer if he had seen Rex. He told us he had seen him the day before but not since. Rather uncharacteristically, he told us that he hoped Rex would come back soon. As the icy weather set in, our worries increased. We began to go further afield, asking people and calling for Rex beside old barns and suchlike where he might be hiding out. But we had no luck at all.

After a couple of days we were terribly anxious and filled with a deep foreboding that something bad had happened. We remembered that the old farmer had threatened to shoot him and usually complained to us about Rex visiting his yard, for he believed that Rex was a bad influence on his new dog. Then a ray of hope, a neighbour told us they had seen a Facebook post about a stray collie that had been seen about three miles away. As T began to search for the post, I drove to the area where the stray dog had been seen and began to ask around. The backroads were very icy and I had to go very carefully. For several hours I met people who had not seen a stray collie. Then I met a farmer who said he had seen a young collie a couple of days ago. My spirits lifted. I made house to house enquiries. Many people were not at home. The remainder seemed helpful and concerned. I left our number written on pages torn from a notebook.

I got home late afternoon. T had finally tracked down the Facebook post. It was on a local ‘lost and found’ page. We scanned the hazy picture of the stray collie. He was very like our Rex, even down to the white patch on his tail. But it wasn’t him. Our spirits fell through the floor. We returned to the awful suspicion that the old farmer had killed him. After all, he had both motive (however unbalanced) and opportunity (the farmyard was the last place Rex had been seen). And he had acted suspiciously when we had asked him on the Friday about Rex, by not complaining about the dog coming in to his yard. I knew that the old farmer always visited a family member on Sunday afternoons. I decided to go down to the farm and have a good look around whilst he was not at home.

As I strode down the lane the light was fading. I feared that I would find a crime scene, with the stiff, dead body of Rex with gunshot wounds out the back of a barn somewhere. I sighed and steeled myself, I had to find out what had happened to our wee dog. As I walked into the yard there was a low bark from some stone outbuildings. I looked up the yard and saw the farmer’s new dog tethered there. The bark had come from another dog. I shouted Rex and whistled for him. No response. I pushed open the door of the first outbuilding, it was full of debris and had only half a roof. As I came out I looked up. Framed in a small high open window was Rex’s wee face. I shouted to him. He bobbed his head to me.

My heart flew as I ran around the stone barn looking for a way in to the upper floor. On the other side of the yard was a flight of stone steps covered in unbroken snow. At the top was a bolted door. I pushed it open. Rex ran out between my legs and raced across the yard. I glanced around the gloomy room, I could see neither food nor water. I ran out into the lane after Rex, calling to him. He was already far up the lane on the way to our house. Despite the icy conditions, a great well of happiness and warmth came over me. Rex was saved.

As I walked home, I realised that the old farmer had intended to kill Rex in the most horrible way. He had locked him in the outbuilding on Thursday, probably around lunchtime. The snow had come on Thursday evening and the steps up to Rex’s prison were still covered in unbroken snow when I rescued him on Sunday. He had been in there for over three days without any food and water.. A dog can’t survive for much more than four days without water. And the old farmer had lied to us on the Friday morning when we had asked him where Rex was. Our wee dog had been imprisoned on the farm all of the time. But for now my only concern was Rex, the old farmer was a problem for another day.

Young Love

The surgeon told me that the wound in my ribs would be painful for three months. He wasn’t wrong. It’s ten weeks since my surgery. The pain has diminished but it is still stubbornly there. I feel it most often at night. I haven’t found a position to lie in that doesn’t put some pressure on my ribs. I have to get up straight away after waking, as standing up eases the soreness of the night. The pain in the daytime mainly comes from simple movements such as twisting and stretching, or when I use my arms to do something without thinking. Despite having a nap most days, I find that by the evening I’m rather tired. After tea I pretty much conk out. Recently I’ve been invited to all sorts of evening events, many of them in Belfast thirty miles away. It is of course the season to be jolly. But I’ve had to decline them all.

I’ve now graduated to the lowest dose of morphine, 5mg time-release over 12 hours. I take this at night. During the day I take co-codamol to the same value. I have prescription strength tablets, each of which have 15mg of codeine. I was told by the pharmacist that this is equivalent to 1mg of morphine. The co-codamol tablets you can buy over the counter in a pharmacy are half of this strength. So I have come down from 50mg a day of morphine when I left hospital, to 10mg a day now. I hope that I can be off opioids entirely by the New Year. I’m very much looking forward to the time when I don’t have to take three sachets of laxatives a day in order to keep regular.

The surgeon also told me that walking was the key to recovery. I go walking twice a day, most days, usually with Rex. He is happy going up and down the lane, taking excursions into the fields to follow animal trails. But I’m afraid I have to report that his affair with Glen, the blacksmith’s dog, has taken a turn for the worse. For a long time they were very much in love. They would greet each other affectionately, with licks and nips to the face and neck. Then Rex would mount Glen and pump away at his backside whilst growling enthusiastically. Then Glen would mount Rex. This sexual turn-taking could go on for a while. Indeed, when I eventually walked off and called Rex he would very reluctantly join me, but would soon return to Glen after hearing his plaintive cries.

The last time they met all seemed to be going as normal, until their rumpy-pumpy suddenly turned into a full-scale fight. I don’t know why. Both dogs leapt at each other, snarling and biting. It was a ferocious melee of twisting bodies, each trying to pin the other down and bite them. The fight spun across the lane as I looked on startled and helpless. Then, suddenly, it was over. Glen ran away and Rex stood in the lane shaking and panting through foam-flecked lips. As we all know, the path of young love does not run smooth.

Rex, Pavlov and Automobiles

It’s now nine weeks since my surgery and I have built up to walking four miles a day. I do this in two walks; one in the morning after breakfast and one in the afternoon after my nap. The first walk is down the lane to the end and back. The second walk is down the lane to the old railway bridge and back, finishing up with a loop of the laneway. The laneway has a fairly steep hill. At first I was just glad to get to the top. Recently I have begun to stride out on the hill and have found that I still arrive at the top without getting out of breath. I’m delighted, for this is something that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve, pre-op.

Both of these walks are done with Rex. Sometimes we are also joined by T. I’m still trying to stop Rex chasing cars. I read online that this is a distorted hunting behaviour and as such is instinctive. No wonder it is proving so difficult to stop. When he is in car chasing mode he seems to take no notice of anything else. One of the online suggestions was that distraction by a loud noise could interrupt his chasing behaviour. I found an old whistle I had bought in a junk shop. It was a referee’s whistle with a pea inside it, called the Acme Thunderer. It was loud and shrill.

I waited till Rex was about to start his chase of a car and then gave him a blast on the whistle. He stopped in his tracks and looked very confused. I called him over. He seemed disorientated. I called him again. He came and I gave him a treat. Delighted with this success, I tried the whistle again later in the walk when another car came. Rex stopped in his tracks again. When I got home I told T what had happened. We were both delighted to have found a solution to the car chasing problem.

The next day I set out confidently on the walk with the whistle on a cord around my neck. After a while a car came. I gave Rex a blast on the whistle. He completely ignored it and raced away after the car. Confused, I wondered if I had blown the whistle at the wrong moment. Later in the walk another car came by. I blew the whistle again as loud as I could. Rex again completely ignored it, bounding away after the car and biting at its wheels.

I pondered the problem. I think it demonstrates that Rex is a quick learner. The first day of the whistle he was startled by the sound and that interrupted his chasing. On the second day he had learnt the sound and the whistle wasn’t a problem for him anymore, so he continued with his instinctive behaviour. I pondered further, remembering the story about Pavlov and how he had conditioned dogs by ringing a bell when they were being fed. Afterwards they would salivate at the sound of the bell, without any food being present.

Actually, when I looked it up I found that Pavlov had in fact never done this experiment. It is an apocryphal story that appears to have originated from a bad translation of one of his research papers written in Russian. He was a vivisectionist who used dogs in his medical experiments, many of which were pretty gruesome. What he actually reported was that the dogs salivated at the sight of his assistants white coats, because these were the people that fed them. He never used bells with the dogs.

Anyway, I decided I would try and teach Rex to associate the whistle with food. Each time I gave him something to eat I blew the whistle. At first he seemed a bit confused by this, but then he just wolfed the food down as normal. What I’m hoping to do next week is to start blowing the same whistle when Rex is about to chase a car. Hopefully his desire for food might override his desire to chase. I’ll have a pocketful of treats ready. I think it’s worth a try.

Driving and Dental Surgery

Over the past week I have made the thirty mile journey up to Belfast three times; on two of these occasions I drove myself. I suppose I have been fledging, testing my wings to see what I can manage. I had to put a pillow against my side under the seatbelt, but I completed the drives okay. I took it steadily, after eight weeks off I felt a little rusty. I was tired and my side was sore when I got back home each time, but I was pleased with my achievement.

The first trip was for the sixteenth edition of The Squat Pen, part of the CS Lewis Festival. I am very thankful to my co-host Ray Givans who did much of the organising of the event. My contribution was mainly to the online publicity. We were in a new venue, the deconsecrated St Martin’s Church, which was an excellent space but in a rather out of the way location without parking nearby. All of the contributors gave great performances to a smaller than usual audience. Our special thanks go to Paul Maddern, who stepped in as our main reader when Fred Johnston pulled out through illness. Indeed November must be the illest month, as I had to step in and select the Desert Island Poem at short notice, after Mary Montague pulled out with a sore throat.

Second was for the AGM of Cancer Focus NI. This is a great local organisation that provides fantastic support for cancer sufferers and their families. Since my diagnosis in 2011 I have benefitted from a range of their services, including counselling and residential workshops on learning to live with cancer. Indeed, I have been an active member of the Sing for Life Community Choir since it was founded by Cancer Focus in 2013. I had put my name forward to serve as a Non-Executive Director and Trustee and I’m delighted to say that I was elected. I’m looking forward to helping to give something back to this important and much needed local organisation.

Third was for an appointment with Dr Mark Diamond for a dental implant at his specialist clinic on the Antrim Road. He is the most experienced implant dentist in NI, having done this work for twenty years, and his clinic is referrals only from other dentists. I needed to be there because I have some poor teeth. This is due to a combination of gum disease, inherited from my mother, and decades of poor dental treatment. I had been referred to him from my normal dentist because I had reached the end of treatment for the tooth in question, it had first split and then had been extracted.

The treatment began with my mouth being numbed by a series of injections. Then I had a panoramic scan done of my full mouth. Mark showed me the results. He could see exactly how much bone I had in my lower jaw and where the main nerve ran. This meant he could decide how deep to drill and the exact right size of implant to insert. The next step was he and his nurse putting on surgical gowns, gloves and masks. Then the surgical treatment began.

He first cut open my gum to expose the jawbone. Then he began to drill down into the jawbone. It sounds dramatic but you don’t feel anything. He used a long straight drill rather than the small one used to drill into teeth. It took a little while. He told me that I have a tough jawbone. And when the hole had been drilled deep enough, he screwed in a titanium bolt with a little torque wrench. It felt like someone doing DIY on your mouth. The wrench clicked as he screwed in the bolt until it reached the correct tension. The titanium bolt has a threaded top into which a removable cap is screwed. Then he stitched up my gum.

The implant bolt is left in your jaw for at least three months for the bone to grow strongly around it, before the next steps are taken. I drove home with a numb mouth and a short course of antibiotics to ensure there would be no infection. After a couple of hours the injections had worn off and my jaw was a little sore. I took a couple of co-codamol and rinsed my mouth with warm salty water. I’d have to eat on the other side of my mouth for a few days. But, in comparison to the other operations I’d had in recent years, this was nothing to make a fuss about.

Sleep and Sex

Over the past week I have been transitioning from sleeping upright against a pile of pillows to sleeping lying down. It’s not been easy going from ten pillows to just one. I had been sleeping upright for seven weeks and I’d got used to it. Sleeping flat seemed very odd; it felt like my legs were higher than my head. When I woke up after sleeping upright, my neck and legs were very stiff. When I woke up after sleeping flat, my ribs felt like I had been several rounds with a heavyweight boxer. I think it’s because the mattress puts more pressure on your ribs when lying flat and you also move around more in your sleep.

Anyway, I persisted and now I can sleep the whole night lying flat. Despite waking up with sore ribs every couple of hours, I managed to sleep my normal nine hours or so last night. It’s another good step towards normality. Although, I would normally go to sleep on my left side and I can’t do that because of the wound. In the morning I still get up straight away as standing up relieves the accumulated soreness of the night. As the activities of the day inevitably bring tirednesss and soreness, in the afternoons I still go for a nap but I don’t always manage to fall asleep. Sometimes I just rest for an hour or so.

In the sunshine on Sunday, T and I did a three mile loop walk around lanes from the house. Despite the route having several small hills in it, I managed it fine. My breathing already seems better than it was before the op.  I still take Rex on walks down the lane and back twice a day. I’m trying to stop him chasing cars but with limited success. My current strategy is to teach him to come to me when I call ‘here’ and to give him a treat when he does. When a car comes along the lane I shout ‘here’ loudly and once or twice this has interrupted his desire to chase and somewhat hesitantly he has come to me for a treat. A few times he stopped chasing the car when I called and chased his tail in circles in the middle of the road and another time he ran off madly across a field instead.

The blacksmith down the lane has got a new dog, a male short-haired collie called Glen. The first time they met Glen jumped up and placed his front paws around Rex’s neck and began to lick and bite him playfully. Rex eagerly did the same back to him. There was plenty of growling. Then Glen mounted Rex from behind and began to pump away at his arse with his little red willy out. After a while, Rex leapt on Glen from behind and began to pump away at him. But Rex didn’t have his willy out and was also pumping away at Glen’s thigh rather than his arse. Methinks Rex is a little more innocent than Glen, but he has discovered sex and each time we walk down the lane he keenly looks out for Glen. The blacksmith now calls them ‘the lovebirds’.

A Review with the Surgeon

Almost six weeks since the surgery and I was on my way to Belfast to see the surgeon for a review. It was the first time I had travelled that far since leaving hospital. Indeed, I was retracing my steps. I never really paid attention to it before, but a car journey is full of low level vibration, presumably from the road surface. Then you get jolts from potholes and braking and cornering. All of this irritates the wound. I placed a pillow at my side, between my torso and the edge of the seat, and this helped a little. It seemed a long way.

After five weeks at home, I feel I’ve definitely turned a corner. My recent improvement feels secure. I am now fully independent in the house, being able to manage my own washing, dressing and feeding. I make my own breakfast and lunch. T always makes tea. My morphine prescription has been reduced again to 20mg a day, in two 12 hour long-release tablets. This together with the Lidocaine patch and Paracetamol is managing the pain. I am walking for over an hour each day. But I am still unable to lie flat for any length of time.

When I was discharged from the Royal I was given a form for an X-ray. This was to be taken half an hour before my review appointment. We did as requested and then went to wait in Outpatients. As usual there was a delay. When I went in to see him, the surgeon had my X-rays up on his screen. He showed me the difference between today’s and the one taken pre-op. My left diaphragm was now fully down (the X-ray is taken on full inspiration) and my entire left lung appeared to be inflated. Previously my left lung was squashed up, as half of its space was taken up by my stomach. Now there was no visible difference between my left and right lungs.

Today’s X-ray looks very good, he told me. I asked him how much of the functioning of my left lung I would get back. He said that I would get a lot more than I had before but not 100%, as the mesh patch would not work as well as my native tissue. The exact change would be measured by the breathing tests I did annually with my Respiratory Consultant. He advised me not to do these for at least three months as they would be putting stress on the repair. He also told me that the main stressors on the repair to the diaphragm were coughing and straining on the toilet in constipation.

I took off my top and he inspected the wound. He pointed out the four large surgical scars on my torso to a junior colleague and said I looked like a surgical model. I didn’t ask if he wanted to book me in for any lectures. He told me that the wound was healing well but that I needed to be careful for six months as this is how long it would take for the intercostal muscles, which join the ribs together, to fully repair. He told me that my regular walking was very good and I could slowly increase the exercise I was doing. He also said that I could now start to drive again.

We drove back from Belfast around 4pm, the rush hour traffic was building up, my wound was sore and I was tired. I wouldn’t be rushing to start driving again. And even then I would begin with just some local trips. But this was another good step forward on my return to normality.