A Shitty 2 Weeks

As the title says, it’s been a shitty 2 weeks on the farm, and this is a post I do not want to write.

I woke last week to find Mr Ruadh in the depths of pneumonia. We rushed him to the vet’s office as fast as we could get him down there. They loaded him up on antibiotics and steroids, plus put him on oxygen.

Sadly, it was too late, and we lost him at 4:30 that afternoon.

When I decided to expand the flock into colored wool, I found a beautiful moorit ewe on a farm about 10-ish hours away from our previous farm. My Rob and I took a wonderful weekend road trip thru Montana to go get her.

Miss MoMo came to us pregnant from an oops breeding. She presented us with 3 beautiful babies and Ruadh was the first born of them. He arrived as a single leg presentation necessitating me having to pull him out. I had to pull all three.

By the way Leo is his twin brother. We lost their sister Dearg several years ago.

Ruadh is a sweet tempered boy, very affectionate, and always steady. For a while after we lost Angus, he lived with Douglas, to keep him calm and happy. Both Douglas and Ruadh were the same size so I knew Doug would not be able to push him around much without getting wacked back for his efforts. Ruadh adored his peanut treats and having his nose skitchied. He seemed to purr in pleasure when you hit just the right spot on his cheek.

He is one of the bigger boys on the place, due mostly to the fact that we missed one of his testicals when we banded him. That dose of testosterone gave him his beautiful ram shaped nose. Thankfully it did not give him the ram-itude. He was always calm and sweet.

I will miss him so damn much.

The other sucker punch was Miss Putt Putt, the old lady of the farm after losing Lucy last year. Putt was the last of my three original sheep. A gift of love from my Robyn, starting me on the journey of being a shepherdess. She was 15 this year.

That is Miss Putt Putt when she first came to the farm.

Putt Putt has always had quite the attitude around here. She is the escape artist, teaching other sheep how to get out of anywhere. I believe that she felt life was worth living if she could outfox us humans. And she was so good at it. She got thru, around or over anything we put in her path. This made us laugh and be frustrated at the same time. Up here in the trees, I was always afraid she would stage an escape and run into the local coyote pack.

She was not particularly fond of being touched. Treats would bring her around to what we needed to do with her, be it changing her coat, or trimming her feet. She gave us so many beautiful babies!!

In my post about our recent shearing, I stated that we thought she got hit by someone and had her face injured. Turns out that she actually had a stroke that affected the right side of her face and front leg. When we got her out of the pen, we could see just how much her lip was sagging.

She seemed to do ok for a few weeks, and we were putting drops in her eye daily since she was not able to blink it anymore. She regained her ability to escape the pasture and make her way back to the house to munch on the corral bale of hay. We gave her warm mash to make it easier for her to eat.

Unfortunately, after that short time of being stable, her condition started to go downhill. She was not able to eat any hay and then bring up cud. We had to keep picking wads of it out of the corner of her mouth. Her tongue wasn’t working correctly anymore. She was not able to shape her mouth the right way to drink.

I made the heartbreaking decision to end her suffering.

Michael and I spent the last of her time giving her love, kisses, face skitchies, hugs, and telling her how much we love her, thanking her for being part of our life on the farm.

She was gone in an instant. No more suffering to eat and drink, no more struggling.

I truly feel like my heart has been ripped out. Losing the last of my original 3 has me feeling like I also have lost my Rob again. And again. And again. It’s one more connection to him that has been taken away from me.

I know I will see her face in the babies she gave us that are still in the flock, but it will never be the same again without her here. Another end of an era.

So it has been pretty crappy for me, lots of crying and trying to reconcile this new way of things. I dug out my grief socks. I started this pair shortly after Rob left the world as a way to try and let my brain work on something else. I got 1 and a half done before they sat for the past 3 years. The second sock is now finished.

Thank you for bearing with me as I worked this all out in my head and heart. Thank you for your kind words of encouragment.

Blessed Be.

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If you are so inclined to leave a donation to help defray the vet costs, I would be so very grateful. Thank you for your help.