Bertie snores noisily in "his" corner ...

.. a small, pink triangle of tongue peeking out of his mouth.

His "corner" has expanded as he has pulled his cushion and the bath mats and towels across the kitchen floor and all four legs are outstretched into the room.  

Getting at the kettle and the toaster on the counter above his head presents a challenge. Does one lean across him at an angle, hoping not to drop the two slices of bread in the process? Or does one try stepping over him without treading on a vulnerable paw, half hidden under the scrunched up bedding?

He's recovering from his early morning walk with Tod, half way round the park in town, which progresses at a leisurely pace as every giant pine tree has to be marked, several times.

The wonderful bi-lingual surgeon in Bordeaux showed us Bertie's X-rays at six weeks and warned that as he is an elderly dog, the mending and growth of new bone below his knee would be slow.  The vet drew a diagram of steps going upwards, each step representing a week and showing a bit more freedom - another five minutes added to each walk, then being able to move at a trot, and finally, being able to walk upstairs and jump up.  

We should have shown the diagram to Bertie!  We won't talk about the afternoon he managed to open the kitchen door by standing on his hind legs, run along the veranda and down the steps at the end and out onto the drive. Or the time we took him, on the lead, round to friends and he jumped into their armchair without so much as a by-your-leave. Nor indeed that, left in the back to "guard the car", his reaction is to bark with all four feet off the floor.

The diagram takes us to Christmas Day and then, all being well, freedom and the chance to run free. 

For all of us.

 

Bertie is Feeling Better

 Four weeks on and finally we've taken off his collar - with some trepidation.  Because he accepted it we kept it on as long as possible.  He licks - a lot - and we wanted his various wounds to heal as much as possible before he could get at them.

His shorn left back leg has fine baby down over it and, when he walks, all four legs are now on the ground. Yesterday he had an osteopathy session.  He was firmly convinced he didn't need it and spent much of the time trying to get off the table. The vet reassured me there has been good progress and he is walking well.

The lack of a hood offers him greater freedom. I pop into Leclerc after the vet's session and come back to find he's squeezed past the netting that is supposed to keep him in the back of the merc, has climbed over the back seats and is sitting behind the steering wheel.  The potential for him to damage his only partly healed left knee is almost infinite. 

Our challenge from now onwards will be to keep this energetic "I'm feeling better and I'm bored" mutt safe and well.  There is still another eight weeks to go!

In a calmer moment ...

Well, the deed is done ...

 ... Bertie has had the op.

We are fortunate in where we live.  A much-lauded young veterinary surgeon in Bordeaux has been operating on cruciate ligaments since 2006, when he started at UCL in London.  That's the year before Noel Fitzpatrick carried out the same (experimental at the time) op on Smudge.  So our "young" vet can't be that young, he just looks it. And he speaks perfect English, so communication was easy as he drew diagrams for me showing what he was going to do and Tod and Bertie took no notice, neither of them wanting to know the details.

All our lives have been turned upside down and will be so for the next two to three months. Thursday, we collected a subdued and slightly wobbly Bertie wearing a plastic cone to keep him from licking, with a back leg that looked like a plucked turkey's and a page of strict instructions: cage rest, five 5-minute walks per day on a short lead, no jumping, running, twisting, slipping. 

We have an extraordinary number of large cages from our Airedale days - one huge one which Smudge had for the same op and two big ones, probably for when Vita and maybe Clara and Rosie were adolescents - Airedales don't stay small for long.  So we thought we were well set up for Bertie's convalescence: the huge cage in the kitchen during the day and the big one in the lounge for night and the other big one in time to be used in the garden so he can watch us work. This, of course, assumed that he would settle - Smudge did and Vita had been known to.

All the advice is "let them cry it out" - so on our return, we let Bertie, in the huge cage in the kitchen, cry, howl, whimper and pant as we tried to carry on our normal daily lives against a barrage of unhappy noise. THREE HOURS LATER, I phoned our vet in despair - the "cry it out" strategy was not working; indeed, quite the reverse, since his distress was far from restful and healing.  She suggested when there was a brief break in the noise and he stopped to draw breath (by this stage he was having a full-on barking temper tantrum) to take him out of the cage and keep him by us on a short lead. (I've tried calling it a crate to make it sound better, but Bertie, he of the rescue centre in Cahors, knows in no uncertain terms that it is a cage). 

The moment he was out, all the noise stopped and, now exhausted, he slept. 

But he has to be in his bedtime cage in the lounge at night in order to be safe - otherwise he would be jumping up onto the sofas. I got three hours sleep that night as he leaned against me with all of his weight in the doorway of the big cage and then protested loudly as I forced the door shut.  I watched hours of rubbish TV as he grumbled and whimpered.  I imagined designing elaborate enclosures with the lounge furniture and then decided the big cage was not big enough or comfortable enough for him - he banged the metal bars with the plastic cone every time he turned round.  So I dragged the huge cage into the lounge (thank heavens for wide doorways) opened it up and attached it to the merely big one, to make a small run.  That was an improvement as it now meant Bertie could move between the two as he whimpered and panted and refused to settle. I sat on the ground with my back to the cage reading. Suddenly it all went quiet.  Great, I can now go to bed.  The moment I moved away the protestations started again. 

So, sofa cushions were put down as an improvised mattress. I rolled myself in a duvet alongside his cage and finally we slept.  

Last night, there was progress. Much grumbling while I got myself ready for a second night on the sofa cushions. The moment I lay down - blessed silence. So tonight?  The huge cage will be in the bedroom and he will go in it as I go to bed.  And for the rest of the day?  The kitchen is his domain, with doors closed and openings gated and he has his usual corner where he tucks himself down.  The only drawback? One of us has to be with him all the time with his lead to hand. So all my plans for all the gardening I was going to do this autumn while he was (happily - huh!) caged  have gone out the window.

He's snoring contently in his corner as I type this. Even in these couple of days he is getting stronger and more confident.  The new knee is still kept folded and he lops along on three legs as I walk him (briefly) round the park in town with all its enticing other dog smells to keep him diverted.

We will all get through this, just fine.

Mary had a Little Lamb

 Bertie follows me everywhere. If I get up from my desk where I'm typing this, although he seems asleep, he will "wake" and follow me - like Mary's little lamb.

The problem at the moment though is that he's supposed to be resting.  In fact he's supposed to be in a cage, resting - except that would make him wretched. So, we leave him free to roam the house.

He's torn his left back leg cruciate ligament.  I knew it was serious as he limped badly towards me last Monday, followed by one of the Jack Russells from up the road who quickly disappeared as soon as he saw me.  Were they playing? Or (more likely) was it a "confrontation"?  Anyway, the result is one torn ligament and strict instructions from the strict young female vet in town, who has no empathy, to keep him in a cage.  

This is a dog who is never still who, when we got him from the rescue centre all those years ago, we were told had jumped out the window of the family who took him the day before and so they (fortunately) brought him back.  And the photo of his mournful face looking through the bars of his cage made me decide he should come home with us and we drove all the way to Cahors to fetch him.  A cage? Not likely!  I look for reassurance that not putting him in a cage is ok and find a "modern view" on the internet that he needs to keep his other three legs strong while the fourth one stays up in the air, so it is better to let him roam (a bit).  

He's not supposed to jump either.  But that's not happening. He's up on the sofa, back down on the ground, up three steps, before we have moved.  I'm hoping that the vet I'm seeing tomorrow - the one who is also an osteopath - will be pleasantly surprised at how well he's doing and not rebuke me.

We've been here before.  Smudge had that same dire limp sixteen Januarys ago - the year we decided to move to France.  He was operated on by the "Super vet" before he was famous and then spent three months (was it really three months?) in a cage. So one of us always had to be with him and that was why, in March, I came to France on my own and found our house.

We got Smudge a television to keep him entertained while caged.  Although he was boisterous he was also resigned and tolerated his imprisonment.  Bertie?  We doubt he will be as phlegmatic.  So there is a hard decision to be made at some point whether, given his age and disposition, we put him through the same process. And for what?  Smudge never again had the same freedom of movement.  What would an op do for Bertie?  Mind you, the alternative isn't great - strapped in a prosthetic, taking painkillers and anti-inflammatories for the rest of his life.

And Bertie right now?  He's not worried. He's happy as anything, hopping round after me, as happy as Mary's little lamb.  Perhaps we should start calling him Larry.   

 

The forecast promises ...

... twenty-seven degrees Celsius tomorrow. Bliss!

We just have to get through this afternoon and tonight. At 2pm the thermometer in the shade on the veranda says one hundred degrees Fahrenheit (nearly thirty-eight degrees Celsius).

The hydrangeas on said veranda have collapsed in the heat.  I head for the water butt and a watering can then back off.  A cloud of wasps is around the tap, going for any dampness they can find.  The long hose to the outdoor tap to the house proves a safer bet.  I water the hydrangeas to the background noise of the combine harvester trundling up and down Monsieur F's neighbouring field of sunflowers that are blackened and shrivelled.  This is a month early, surely?

We cover the pool to keep off the dust and detritus from the harvesting. I'll open it up again tonight and swim in the warm water in the dark, stars and the lights from distant silent planes above me,  before heading for bed.  We have no guests at present, for which I'm grateful. No need to clean the cottage or iron bedding in these temperatures.  I have until the end of next week and its wonderful mid- twenties coolness. In Rio, when the temperature dropped that low women used to get out their fur coats. 

I've bought a mesh raised dog bed for Bertie from Lidl which is supposed to keep him cool. Bertie remains to be convinced, preferring the tiled floor. He lies in my study alongside the bed (which is not small) and I pick my way across what little of the floor is left for me and get ice to put into a small cube shaped fan on my desk, designed to be personal air conditioning. For the rest of the afternoon I'll play online games, gossip on Survive France and read others' blogs. Only mad dogs and Englishmen are out.  This English woman and her sensible dog are staying put indoors.

How and when ...

... to write about the story of these past weeks?  Maybe don't write at all? Just pick up the thread as if this hiatus doesn't exist.

But then, in time, we'll forget the details and wonder: "Did I really sell the car while you were in intensive care?"  So this is for us, in a few years time and we'll be able to say: "Oh yes, that's what happened, and we got through it".

A story that began some time last autumn - a visit to the GP following a weekend of feeling unwell, cramp in a leg that didn't go away and Tod's concern that, whilst wanting to lose some weight, he was now in something of a downward spiral.

The cramp?  A deep vein thrombosis, sorted with blood thinners and support stockings up until Christmas.

The losing weight?  Sufficient reason for an MRI scan.  The pleasant young man emerged with the results, no cause for alarm, but an interesting, somewhat unusual horseshoe kidney with a "mass" on the left-hand side that needed removing "at some point".

In a leisurely way appointments were made with a charming urologist who spoke good English and reassured us it would be very straightforward - the "mass" was external to the kidney and still on the small side. More scans were taken and blood tests, all of it to fit round the urologist's holidays and our own, intended to be a trip to Spain to see a friend in May, which we cancelled at the last minute.  The Spanish desert in May with temperatures already forty degrees was not going to be a pleasure.  We'll go in winter.

And finally we inched to the beginning of June - Tod's admission to hospital coinciding with the arrival of friends from the UK, staying for a week. I'd told them nothing before they arrived, fearing they would cancel, not wanting to be "in the way". In fact their being here kept me sane, someone to leave Bertie with as I set out, someone to talk to after I'd been to the hospital. They fed me, played silly card games and let me share my terrors.

The nice urologist promised to phone me after Tod's op and then left me with no news for all the afternoon, while I imagined the worst.  In the end, I got in the car and drove to the hospital an hour away and found my way to Intensive Care.  The friendly nurses on the desk said I could see him and I walked into something out of the worst kind of medical drama.  Tubes, wires, flashing lights, beeping sounds, bottles hanging from a stand, with clear fluids dripping steadily, bottles under the bed draining urine and blood and in the middle of it all an old, old man who looked like my father in his final days. Even more painful, Tod didn't want me there. The hardest of lessons, when someone is struggling that much, the last thing they need is a visitor. So I left and came home to the safety of friendship.

Gradually, over the following days, there were signs of progress and then, over the weekend, he told me he'd collapsed after having  his first shower - six people round his chair, straight to MRI for a scan, to discover he'd had a pulmonary embolism. That meant back on blood thinners and support stockings.  

Except that he needed to heal from his operation and suddenly he wasn't and he was bleeding internally. By Monday, he was back in the operating theatre being "cleaned up" inside.  And then back in Intensive Care again where he felt safe and I was back to driving home with my heart in my mouth and no friends to comfort me as they had gone home.  I sent cautiously optimistic emails to everyone and wished I felt as confident as my words tried to convey.

And selling the Skoda?  We took it in for service before Tod went into hospital and a few days later I got a call from the garage to come in and see them. I took our friends with me, he understands cars, she speaks good French.  In fact the message was stark and straightforward - one of us had put petrol into the diesel engine. The clear implication was it would cost a great deal to put right, with no certainty that long-term problems wouldn't emerge. Over the week we talked of the alternatives and I asked whether they would buy it, unrepaired.  In good nick, the car salesman said it would be worth 5,000 euros.  Unrepaired, he offered 4,300 euros. Tod, too frail to want to be bothered with it all, agreed to let it go and the view from friends was "bite his hand off".  We'd always had an uneasy relationship with the Skoda. I hope it found a good home.

Fresh guests arrived in the cottage and took care of Bertie as I continued my trips to the hospital.  The urologist warned it would all take longer as Tod had had two operations and two anaesthetics in a week.  Tod was weighed and he'd gained nine kilos in two weeks - this was a man who had been in intensive care for days eating nothing and then being offered not much more than potage.  His feet beneath the stockings were puffy and his thighs doubled in size.  Again, I feared for him. Phlebitis. But gradually the daily blood thinner injections and the support stockings did the job and he began to walk the corridors and the stairs with the aid of the kinesiologists. And he returned not just to his normal shape but someone a good bit skinnier.

They moved him into "rehabilitation" for more "kine" and he decided he'd had enough of looking at hospital walls and that he would heal better at home in his own bed, looking at beautiful countryside and being fussed over by his wife and his dog.  They let him go, reluctantly, the head kinesiologist saying "he won't do his exercises" not understanding that a walk down through our field and back up again, with Bertie in tow, would give Tod more joy and more healing than any hospital staircase.

For two weeks we were visited twice a day by local community nurses, for injections of blood thinner, to check the state of his foot-long scar and to reassure he was making progress, but it would take time.

It has, and it will.  It's only two months.  He's had the ok from his urologist that he can "resume normal life" - which for him is getting back on the mower, keeping the pool clean and walking Bertie.  Forty-five minutes, up through the woods and then back down across Alain's and Phillipe's fields. This is a man who five weeks ago was just able to walk the length of the ward corridor. He is healing.

Spring Sounds

The wooh-wooh, wooh-wooh of a hoopoe, somewhere up behind the house.

The trills from the trees alongside the stream in the valley, as the nightingales sing their hearts out.

Bertie's outraged barking at yet another loud "thud" from the bird scarer in the adjacent field. Monsieur F. has planted sunflower seeds and is trying (without much success) to keep the pigeons off.

The thrum of the sit-on lawnmower as Tod weaves it round the flower beds in our garden, ducking to avoid stray rambling rose stems and the lower branches of the cherry tree behind the pool house. 

He is out there for the first time in a month after his cataract operation.  He is doing well.

The Plum Trees ...

 ... that have self-seeded in what I laughingly call "the orchard" have never carried so much blossom.

Ukraine came to our small town last night ...

- a small, insignificant town in the middle of France Profonde.

For some strange reason the Grand Kyiv Ballet chose us on their European tour.  A town that could do no more than offer them the "salle des fêtes" with its too small, noisy stage without scenery, a ropey sound system (no orchestra) and an audience on hard stacking chairs.

They danced Sleeping Beauty - the choreography and the costumes so musty and classical that it felt like we were seeing the first performance.

The girls were taller than the boys - and we think they were just boys (the male principals being otherwise occupied). Young boys, not yet with the strength or experience to lift their partners effortlessly. 

At the end, following a somewhat subdued curtain call (no curtains as such of course) the young prince ran off-stage and re-emerged waving the Ukrainian blue and gold flag and the audience rose to its feet and applauded and applauded.

At Last!

The sun has reappeared after a fortnight of gloom and I make the most of it.  Time to brutally prune the vine that runs virtually the length of the terrace.

I realise as I do it how much my father would have loved this.  He was a robust pruner - much to my mother's horror, as she watched through the kitchen window yet again most of the long stems of the clematis montana disappear into the wheelbarrow before they'd had a chance to flower.

I think our French acquaintances also look with some horror on what I do with our vine.  Ours is much more of a tangled mass than the neat, compact structures in the vineyards.  We were told when we bought the house that the previous but one owner - Serge's aunt - had planted three vines, one for each of her sons.  By the time we moved in the vine at the far end of the terrace had died and the one in the middle (a white grape) was struggling.  But the vine nearest the kitchen was doing superbly and remembering the Great Vine at Hampton Court I decided to let it weave its way along the dead branches of the other two.  Over the years it has almost, but not quite, reached the far end.  And the white one in the middle has coyly put out new tendrils and gives us a few modest small bunches among the overly abundant red.

As I prune another memory of my father comes to mind. He loved France and things French. My mother recounted an occasion early in their relationship - both barely out of their teens.  He and his (female) cousin spent the entire time speaking French to each other and ignoring my mother.  I think he was hoping to impress. I think my mother showed great generosity of spirit that she forgave him his rudeness.  I'm glad she did - somehow, over the years my father passed on his love of France to me. 

(Mind you, I could do with his language skills!)

Twelfth Night

As we are leaving the mayor's "annual" get-together, being held for the first time in three years, I tell our neighbour Laurence I am going home to take down our Christmas decorations (as is customary in the UK) on Twelfth Night. She says: "But you are in France now!" and we laugh.

In fact, little is left of the evening in which to complete the task after the mayor has introduced every single person involved in running the commune to the rest of us, in the process forgetting a few individuals, being reminded, probably saying at least four times that is all he is going to say, then thinking of something else.

For our "new" mayor (Covid having intervened) it's the first time he's had a chance to be centre stage in front of all of us and he makes the most of it. 

The place feels smarter under his guiding hand. An enormous new TV on the stage at the salle des fêtes has a continuous slideshow of how money is being spent in the village. The salle itself has been redecorated with better insulation and new heaters on the walls. Those of us who have come well wrapped up are too warm by the time his speech has finished and there is a slight sigh when he hands the mike to the local priest and then to the elegant blonde who is our representative from the  Assemblée Nationale. She knows her audience - her first words are about protecting the local "chasse".

The equally elegant man in the dark cashmere coat and black mask (one of the few in the room still concerned about Covid) from the local Commune of Communes has the wisdom merely to give us all New Year greetings when it comes to his turn to speak.

The small, elderly retired farmer who introduced himself to us when we arrived writes down his address and elaborate details as to where to find his house. He tells me his father was a "domestique" to a previous family who owned our house many years ago. It sounds like things did not end well and I'm not sure I want to know more details. He is also trying to persuade us to join a country dance group he goes to - he talks about "Scottish dancing" - I am briefly excited about the thought of the Gay Gordons and Stripping the Willow - not danced for fifty years - but reality and Tod's two left feet bring me back down to earth.

And I'm back down to earth again this morning - the dining room table is covered in decorations that need putting into boxes and up into the loft. At least I managed to get them off the tree last night before bedtime.

And French Christmas decorations? Some will still be seen in situ at Easter. No Twelfth Night superstitions here.