Today is a day of celebration for me. My doc rang with the results of my biopsy and they are clear, no issues noted and no cancer cells identified. This is just such a relief! Another area of relief is that if I have any other issues a hysterectomy is not the primary option for resolution – we will try hormones or other approaches first. I have been worried about the risk of a major op and the ability to take that much time off as I have no sick leave or holidays left, so it would be unpaid.

Today is also Friday and it has been a long week…so I am looking forward to hanging out with the family and spending some time with my husband who has been away for what seems like months.

As always, as soon as he goes chaos ensues. It was just me and the girls maintaining the house, dogs, cats and everything else and we were coping pretty well, taking turns with the animals’ morning feeds, evening feeds, walking and of course the shopping and cooking of dinner for the humans.

On Tuesday night I get a frantic message from Lily that she had arrived home to find Navajo covered in blood, the paving covered in blood and she panicked. Her thoughts were that maybe we had an attempted break in and Nav was either injured or was wearing the criminals’ blood as an overcoat. This was because we had a broken gate at the back, we later decided was from the crazy assed wind storm we had the previous night. Her other thought was that maybe Nav had eaten one of the other animals. So she did a head count and all were accounted for, so she figured it had to be his blood, but she could not find any injuries. She let him into the house to try and determine his injuries but all this did was allow him to run around frantically and shake his blood frothed mouth and sprinkle blood everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

Luckily Caitlin arrived home and the 2 girls decided they needed to take him to the vet as they could not get the bleeding to stop. Apparently when the girls arrived at the vet they would not let them come in through reception as Navajo was so bloody, they took him back round the trade entrance. (Trade?! Do they KNOW his owner has an MBE? Hahaha)

The vets could not control Nav and gave him an injection to knock him out and sutured his wee tongue. The girls brought him home at the same time I arrived home and when they opened the door Nav jumped out but when he hit the ground he did a crablike stagger off into the bushes and then just collapsed. He weighs about 40kgs & it took both of the strong young vets to lift him so we had no hope of lifting him.

It took over an hour of scrubbing to get up the blood, but the next day Cordelia spent hours scrubbing as well so my cleaning skills obviously leave a lot to be desired.

Nav finally got a bit more stable and staggered into the lounge to lie on his bed, but he was pretty out of it until the point we all went to bed. The next day he was back to his normal naughty self, amazing how animals don’t hold onto all of that ‘stuff’ that we humans hold onto. An animal does not know it ‘should’ be sore or that it had a bad day the previous day, they see each day as new.

And that is a lesson a lot of us ‘intelligent’ beings could learn from.