Cinni and the bad back

I used to work at the barn and live and breathe horses, starting as a volunteer at 12, I was the quiet kid in the back with the broom that no one noticed. Favorites were played really heavily there, demonstrated by daddies coming in the office, and doubtless money changing hands so these girls would climb up the ladder and I never knew what I was doing wrong. I worked very hard, did everything that was asked, so it baffled me why I didn't get to be the one in the arena assisting the instructor or any of that. But I had been programmed not to make a stir, so I never asked.

The other girls would get their horses "because they got A's" or "because they turned 16" or "because their daddy loved them" or "whatever". And these weren't normal kid horses, these would be 10, 15 thousand dollar Hannovarian show horses. They were mean, too. I'd have the floor swept and it was like they had a sixth sense that the manager or instructor was coming around the corner and the would dump  bunch of shit and straw where I had just swept so I would get scolded and have to stay late cleaning up (which I didn't really mind that bad, the bullying at school and at the stable was really nothing compared to the shit I was dealing with at home).

When I got old enough to drive I would borrow my moms car as long as I would be there to pick her up from work. It was a 10 year old station wagon, obviously way below the princesses' standards, so they would slash the tires of the car.

When I was 19, and moved out of the house, I bought my own horse, Fox. He was a strange sort of chestnut/dun, and more skin and bones than you could imagine. But he had the sweetest personality, and he was affordable. Poor thing was 1/2 way to the packers.

Fox, 2 months after being put back on better quality feed- I don't have a true "before" picture of him.
http://tesseract.ca/images/Pets/Fox_John.jpg

This is Fox one year later:
http://tesseract.ca/images/Pets/FoxJump.jpg (I know I'm a bit behind that jump but I don't have any other pictures)

So it went on kind of like that. John (the guy in the photo) committed suicide, that was a shock for everyone, so I moved back in with my parents (which was awful), And I had Fox for 4 years before he was diagnosed with Navicular Sundrome (a painful osteoperosis type degeneration of the navicular bones inside the hoof) and we managed the pain on that for about 4 1/2 years before he was so depressed that it felt like the balance of the quality/quantity of life had tilted, and I put sweet Fox down. I still have flashbacks.

Then I had a sweet little Appendix QH for a short time but he got a bad colic with a twisted gut and he was put down on the operating table.

I trained a couple horses in here, I especially like training horses to jump and for trails, we do it like a game so they really like it. :)

Then I got Cinni, a PMU mutt warmblood, another rescue. I liked Cinni. He liked me. He HATED his ex owner, she would strap him all up tight with side reins and whatever and chase him around the arena with a whip, she called that "liberty training". Cinni called it "I hate you and your lunge whip" and made it very clear one day by jumping out of the sand ring with 6 1/2 feet fencing with his head strapped to his chest. I thought this would be a pretty fun horse to train.


 but in 2002
*Trigger warning: sexual assault/rape and the fallout*
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This guy I was talking to a few month earlier had asked if I'd wanted to go out with him/be his girlfriend/whatever. I told him that I was still coming down off a bad abusive relationship and I wasn't really wanting to see anyone at the moment. I thought he was ok with that. At least, at the time, he sounded ok with that.

I'll spare you most of the grizzly details, but if you want that part of the story it's blogged here http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/03/what-it-was-really-like.html

So I was raped and my back (lumbar vertibrae 4&5) were torqued so badly as he was manhandling me (I was drugged with GHB, and contrary to popular belief, you are NOT unconscious, but you are unable to control your movements! Like a puppet with the strings broken, cause I was in 3rd Person Perspective too, staring from the ceiling!)

I managed to get out, the doctor said I was lucky to get out alive (although on hindsight I often wish I didn't survive that night).

The back pain came on gradually, slowly and stealthily. Rather than becoming softer and easier to ride, Cinni would get very heavy on the forehand (horsie term that simplified means he was pulling really hard on the reins) and would get quite difficult to ride. I was running low in funds, and my friend convinced me to move him to a horse farm just south of the city so we could ride together.

But my back kept getting worse and worse and I started to lose my nerve when Cinni would steamroll through the bit, he would especially have anxiety attacks when the head "trainer" was riding, which meant a lot of blood and spit and eye rolling and whip cracking and it created anxiety in both of us, I think we were both sensitive to watching these horses being beaten- I mean "trained".

Then one day I got a phone call after getting home from the doctors, that I had to get to the stable right away, that Cinni was very sick and "it didn't look good". I phoned around and got a vet, and met him out there. I didn't even recognise him, he was such a mess. Haggard and covered head to toe with shavings, they had let him lie down and roll (a death sentence to a colicing horse).

I couldn't fucking believe it.
http://tesseract.ca/Pain/Grief.jpg

So... I couldn't afford to replace him, and I had nowhere to ride. Inquired about some leases, one weird place was trying to stick so many add-ons to a 1/2 lease it would have been more expensive than owning outright. There are some weird people out there. And just hopping on any old horse and going dor a ride is nothing compared to riding your own horse that you have deep love and companionship with.


 Then my pain dr retired and I got assigned to an absolute idiot for a replacement and the medicine I was given made me balloon up like a walrus and I started having pain induced seizures. So I can't get to the stable at all anyway.

The Cutest Thing Ever (Fox and the Coyote Pups)

The cutest thing I ever saw was I was riding my quarter horse, Fox, into the ravine (in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) and his head went up and he nickered. I thought, oh someone else must be train riding nearby and he senses one of his horse buddies...

We went around the bend and there was a coyote! I looped my hands in Fox's mane but he wasn't acting scared so I just sat still and let it play itself out. Rather than scared though he looked even happy to see her. She approached and I was really surprised but stayed as still as I could. She looked at me and Fox put his nose down and they sniffed noses and I think my jaw was going to fall on the ground, but then she went into the bushes and out came 3 coyote puppies! The cutest ever!

They all were so cute and bouncy and he smelled their noses too and bounced around his front hooves and I couldn't believe my eyes, and then as soon as they appeared a few seconds later they were gone and the mom went back into the undergrowth too.

It was so awesome and I was so flattered and such a privledge that the animals allowed me to be included in that episode, most animals would not let a human be involved in something like that.

I figured they must know each other as the mom would probably go down to the paddocks to get mice and ground squirrels.

I can't Control you

Once, in the middle of a particularly violent episode of my abusers' (this was the time he slammed me against the wall with his hand on my neck and my esophagus was crushed, I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head and my jaw slammed shut so hard that I cracked a tooth) he sort of seemed to become lucid just for a moment and realized what he had been doing. He went over to the sofa and crumpled up on it, sobbing. The empathetic caretaker in me immediately rushed to attention and I slowly walked over to this crumpled pathetic buy crying for his mommy.

I was a bit baffled.

"What is the matter?" I said, stroking his hair.

"No matter what I do, it doesn't work", he said

"What do you mean?"

"I can't control you"

That kind of... it was like a slap- not a violent kind, but the kind they give you to snap out of it.

"Why on Earth would you want to do that?"

Then it hit me, here I was comforting and consoling the same person who minutes ago had tried to kill me, just because he had a fucked up imagination. My hand snapped back like it had touched a hot burner, and I hurried out of the room.