This morning I get a text from my mother saying she is watching four sea eagles doing their enormous rapterous sea eagly thang outside her house, and this is my view of the one and only lovely Katy, physio dog, being super helpful and helping me with my rehab.
Spending plenty of time on the floor at the moment, but I’m particularly glad I’m not living in 1925. Apart from the non-existence of comfortable insulating floor mats for doing exercises on, and I’m not sure whether labradors like Katy were even invented then (but I think there were other types of labradors that probably had a lot of her wonderful characteristics, but were maybe a bit posher and had fewer dodgy elbows), there is a reason for this which relates to something I think is called Intrinsic Factor.
On a health tangent from my recent ligament catastrophe, I had some blood tests done because of being about middle aged and having the kind of female stuff going on that is rather unpredictable and requires you to turn up the wireless from time to time. Now every time I’ve ever had blood tests done (about five or six times in my admittedly dodgy memory), they’ve always had low circulating iron and low iron stores, so I could guess the results of this lot, but this time my GP said I also had low B12. Gads no, thinks me, and there’s me with a much betterly balanced diet and not a veggie any more. So I asks the very specific talking GP if this could be congenital, as my Dad did a lovely collapse into a wheelbarrow last year and when they tested him that’s what he had going on. ‘What’ says the GP ‘pernicious anaemia?’ Nobody has ever said I had anything with such a tremendously Victorian title before (or maybe they have, admittedly dodgy memory is related to low iron/B12). When do I go for my corset fitting Carruthers? I’ll look out my parasol.
Pernicious definitely sounds like a ten on a one to ten scale, topped with a bit of flouncy frock-coat-swirling-in-an-alley, and a sack, and a river. Apparently before 1926 PA (see, using the acronym already) could be fatal, but in the same way scurvy could be fatal until they discovered about frottaging oneself in lemons. Nowadays its annoying rather than fatal because it takes ages to get bad enough to actually notice, and when you do notice you forget you’ve noticed. Dogs were not-very-helpfully-for-them in 1926, recruited into a study where they were made ill by humans and then cured by being fed liver, which is how they started to understand how to deal with it. Thankyou those dogs, I hope you went on to enjoy a rabbit chasing saturated life subsequently.
What the subsequent generations of clever well-meaning scientifically minded and potentially more dog sympathetic humans have found out, is that some people can’t absorb B12 properly because they don’t produce Intrinsic Factor in their tummies which holds the hand of B12 and shows it the way to the blood stream. Wish I’d known this a while ago (or maybe I did, if so I wish I’d written it down somewhere in big letters and not stopped taking iron and B12 supplements because I thought my kale, salmon and venisonicious diet would be nailing that one). Anyway, thankyou dogs for your vital contribution, otherwise I and others of my kind would still be diminishing and going into the West.
And before I forget – terrific and heartfelt apologies if you have ever been a victim of my shockingly unpredictable memory. It must be really annoying when I repeat myself in seven different ways, especially when you told me the repeaty thing in the beginning. And please do remind me if I am supposed to be doing something (I prefer the friendly nudge meself if that’s ok). I have actually named this experience – this weeks Forgettatext Victim is….dahdah!! I am definitely not avoiding you, in fact any minute now I will splutter gasping to the surface of reality going ‘NNNOOOOOO!! I’ve forgotten to send/text/make something for/call this wonderful and superlatively deserving human/horse/dog person! Get to it NOOOOOWWWWWW!’ I know that if I have a list of ten things to do, I won’t log some of them correctly – I have a lovely strong bias about the poor reliability of human memory (because I’ve read the papers about it during my Psychologist Period), so before you recall you always thought I was a bit that way, along with British Airways, I don’t think it’s just me. Stuff that improves my personal performance includes fasting, exercise and coffee, oh and not being anaemic, but Things Slip At Times….
It has it’s advantages mind you, my dog and horse family get to do things they are already comfortable doing a lot, which makes them happy and reasonably smug little chaps and gels. And I really notice the difference when the supplements hit the bottom, I don’t have to constantly remind myself what I have to do next, I don’t disapparate in the middle of doing things or talking to people (dreams of having phone calls where I suddenly just stop talking), and I can hang out in the zone for hours at a time like a creative Ninja. I just remembered for instance that I meant to write about that project someone has thought up getting crows to collect fag butts – that is not fair on the crows – you’re just assuming they don’t have a life of their own to fulfill.
Today I will mostly be with my things, looking up, making Sculptaseats and waiting for the new washing machine to arrive. Katy is the opposite of pernicious.
The Integrated Horse - Anni Stonebridge 