In parts 1-3, I am sick, struggling with caffeine withdrawal and Sophie gets a direct hit from a skunk. 

It is Tuesday morning, Christina’s actual birthday, and Suzanne is on her way home with a car full of dirty clothes of the type you get when you spend a week being uber-athletic in 110 degrees. (Roller-skating in Las Vegas, to refresh your memories.) She’s looking forward to doing laundry and so my goal for the day is to finish all of my many rounds of laundry by the time she gets home around 12 or so, and then get to the post office in the afternoon.

Everything smells of skunk and I’m not so happy about that, but I’m also aware that AIP is already starting to work. If the skunking had happened a week earlier, I would have… I don’t know what. Dragged all my belongings out to the curb and said good-bye to them? I would not have had the energy or stamina to be hand-washing sheets in my sink, scrubbing floors, and running back and forth to the washing machine all day. As it was, I was tired, but I wasn’t exhausted. Doing more laundry and making it to the post office felt perfectly feasible. I didn’t feel the need to ration my energy, which felt like progress. I’m not quite at the “I can do ALL the things” stage, but it might be on the horizon.

But I’m really glad Suzanne is so close to home. Gina is not doing well. She’s complaining a lot, but not eating much; she’s no longer even pretending to use her litter box; and Olivia Murderpaws is bullying her. In fact, in the morning, when I come back in the house after feeding the chickens, Olivia Murderpaws has pushed Gina off her food and is eating it herself. OMP has a full bowl of the exact same food in her spot on the table, so this is a power move, and not good news. Fortunately, Suzanne is on her way.

I text her to find out how soon she’ll be home. Should I warn her that I feel like Gina is giving up? It’s not going to be a surprise: Gina is a sick, old cat. Suzanne doesn’t even let her outside anymore because she worries that Gina will wander off to die alone. But it will be a sorrow. Does she need to know now?

Answer: probably not.

Because Suzanne’s response to my text is, “I’m in Healdsburg now, so…4.5 hrs? And when I get home if I can grab you and have you drive me to Mad River that would be rad. I just fucked up my ankle at the skate park.”

Mad River is the local hospital. The answer is, of course, yes, I would be happy to take her to the ER.

The day got very busy after that, in the way that days that involve hospitals are busy: lots of time spent waiting for the next thing to happen, but none of it productive or useful time. And my memories of it are already blurry. Did we take all the dogs to the hospital or just Bear? I think we took Bear the first time, because we didn’t want to navigate the dog reunion, and then I took all three dogs the second time I went to the hospital, because I was going to get them some exercise, too — multi-tasking! — and then maybe just two dogs the third time, because I had just put Bear into her crate so I could have a break. But maybe I left all three dogs home that time. The next day I had two more trips to the hospital, so maybe there were dogs in the car then? Honestly, I don’t remember.

I do remember that when I came back from dropping Suzanne off, Gina was in her cardboard box on the floor. She lifted up her head and looked at me, but did not get up. She did not tell me that she needed food immediately. She did not complain that she had been abandoned. She did not tell me that I should let her outside immediately. She just put her head back down again.

This is very unlike her: Gina is the most interactive cat ever. She always says hello. In fact, she usually says something more like, “Human Servant! There you are. I have been waiting for you for at least twenty minutes. I am displeased with the current food, and I would like a new selection. Now, please. No, not after you do whatever unimportant thing it is that you are trying to do. Now! I am waiting!!”

Over the course of the next few hours, I was in and out with the dogs several times. I checked on Gina every time, but she never moved. Sometimes she didn’t even open her eyes. Finally, after I’d fed the dogs their dinners and tried to tempt her with food that she wasn’t interested in, I decided I needed to warn Suzanne. So I texted her that I thought Gina might have given up, that she wasn’t moving. Suzanne asked if she should bail on the ER and call the vet and I said, no, Gina was peaceful, not seeming to be suffering, and I’d kick the dogs out and sit with her for a while.

She opened her eyes but didn’t lift her head when I sat down, so I stroked her fur for a while and told her all the reasons that she is a wonderful kitten, about how it’s not just that she’s beautiful, although obviously she is quite beautiful, but also that she’s so curious and so communicative. And I told her that she could come back if she wanted to come back, but that maybe it was time to let this body go. But that Suzanne would be home very soon — very soon! — so it would be okay if she wanted to wait a while, too. Up to her. She didn’t move at all, but after a little bit, she started to purr and I stayed with her until she seemed to be sound asleep. Truly sleeping, though, as I could see her chest rising and falling.

I checked in with Suzanne. 6PM and no progress at the ER, except that she was making lots of friends. Also no painkillers, also no food. I asked if I could bring her something, she said she was okay, so I suggested… oh, actual texts.

Me: Dogs would love a ride in the car. How about I load them up, bring you an apple and a Kind bar and maybe a milkshake from that milkshake place?

S: I would totally accept that, even at the risk of starting a riot among the other prisoners. 😃

I brought the box of Kind bars and before Suzanne even took a bite of her apple, she was passing them out to the other prisoners. Um, patients. The waiting room was full, there were people waiting outside, and plenty of people who had come in around the same time as Suzanne had decided that they’d survive without medical care. On a random Tuesday. In July. Why?? It really highlighted for me what it means to live in an area as rural as Humboldt. Florida has its drawbacks, but it also has excellent medical care, at least around Orlando.

Anyway, I took the dogs off to the beach so they could get some exercise, then came home. Gina was awake, still in her box, but sitting up, so I offered her some dinner, and I made it sound delicious. Much to my relief, she came over to check it out. I was sitting on the floor watching her eat to make sure OMP didn’t take it away from her again, when Suzanne texted to let me know she was finally done. She’d broken two bones, maybe torn some ligaments, too. Pre-COVID, they’d be checking her in so she could have surgery in the morning, but post-COVID, they were sending her home, and she should call a surgeon in the morning.

It was probably 11PM when I finally realized: I never made it to the post office. Christina’s birthday presents were still sitting in their box next to the door.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t make it the next day either, or the day after that. But the days were not quite as exciting; mostly I was just too busy with dog-exercising, healthy-meal cooking for two, the usual Mighty Small Farm animal chores, and errand-running. Suzanne got to see a surgeon; Gina got to see a vet, and as of whatever day it is today — Saturday? — everyone is doing well, or at least as well as can be expected.

Suzanne can’t have surgery until the swelling goes down, so she’ll have another appointment next Friday and hopefully surgery the week after that. She won’t know for sure about the ligaments until they do the surgery, so recovery time is currently unknown, but she’s already going stir-crazy.

As for Gina, her smug expression when Suzanne made it home was a delight to behold. Her silent glare to OMP beautifully conveyed, “My full-time human servant is back and SHE will protect me. Eff you, peon.” The vet has a couple new options of treatments for her, so hopefully we’ll have a few more purrs and many more complaints from her.

Oh, and my house — while it still smells like skunk — no longer reeks. Or maybe I’m just learning to live with it.

And Christina’s presents are finally in the mail.

In part one, we learned that I am not feeling well and have embarked on an ambitiously restrictive elimination diet to find the cause. In part two, we learned that caffeine withdrawal is brutal.

Monday morning dawned bright and early. I think it was a little before 5AM, the sky barely turning light, when Sophie Sunshine said, “I really need to go outside. No, really, it is urgent. Urgent!” I might have told her to wait an hour, but Riley D, our guest in the tiny house while Suzanne was off in Las Vegas, said, “You know, I think I kinda want to go out, too.” So okay, I opened the door and let the dogs out. It was a lovely morning, not too cold, so I left the door open and stumbled back to my bed, wishing I could tell my Alexa to start making me some coffee, hoping for another hour of sleep.

I was really not awake, but I think Riley D came in and curled back down on his dog bed. And then Sophie came in and instead of hopping up onto the bed with me, she went under the bed and straight to the very back, her favorite hiding place, where she proceeded to begin hacking and coughing, a dog version of desperately trying to clear her throat.

With her came an incredible odor.

It was not a smell that I recognized at all. It was not a familiar smell. It didn’t remind me of anything I’d ever smelled before, I did not immediately say or think, “Oh, no, Sophie met a skunk.” In fact, my sleepy thoughts were more like, “Did some industrial waste truck just spill something outside? Are we under a chemical attack by aliens? What the hell is happening?”

It was — I honestly can’t even describe it. Real skunk, literal skunk spray — the yellow gooey oil the skunk emits — is so far beyond that whiff you get when you’re passing through an area where a skunk recently sprayed that it’s like comparing the way you feel when you see someone take a bite of delicious cake to the way you feel when you take a bite of delicious cake yourself. Although instead of cake, it should probably be more like the way you feel when you watch someone vomit vs the way you feel when you’re vomiting yourself. It was so bad that I truly didn’t recognize it as skunk.

But I got up, got Sophie outside, realized what had happened, took a cute video for the internet (posted on Instagram), took a photo to the extent that I could (she was not inclined to make it easy on me and I really didn’t want to touch her), and started figuring out what I needed to do. Hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap, according to the internet. I stole all three from Suzanne’s kitchen, made a nice little mix in a bowl, applied it to Sophie, rubbed it in really well, took her inside to my nice big sink, rinsed her down, dried her off to the extent that she would let me, and sighed with relief. Job done. And it worked pretty well. I could put my nose right up to her neck and barely get a whiff of skunk.

The yellow is the skunk spray. A direct hit, straight into the face.

So… why was the smell still so strong? Why did I still feel like I was living in an industrial spill?

Duh. Because when she came inside and ran under the bed, everything she touched also got skunked.

So I pulled out her blanket and her dog bed and dumped them in the sink. Added the towel I’d used on her and a few other things and hand-scrubbed them all with my hydrogen-peroxide, dish soap, baking soda mix. Wrung them out, as best I could, then loaded them up, carried them into Suzanne’s house and put them in the washer on the Sanitize setting, two hours, hot water, and plenty of soap.

I came back to the tiny house, satisfied with my work, but my house still reeked. Guess what I store under the bed? All my spare linens. I dragged them all out, left them on the patio to wait for their turn in the washer.

My house still reeked. My bed smelled of skunk. I stripped it, took everything outside to the patio. My house still reeked. The curtains smelled of skunk, I took them down, out to the patio. House still reeked.

I moved the bed, scrubbed the floor, moved it again, scrubbed it again. Took the shoe rack and all the shoes outside. Smelled every shoe — they all smelled, but fortunately not of skunk.

The house still stunk. I decided I was the one who stunk, so stripped down and took a shower, got dressed in clean clothing, added my clothes to the pile of things to be washed. The only thing I accomplished by that was spreading the smell to the bathroom. I’d opened the windows that could open, the door was open, the bathroom fan was on, but the house still smelled of skunk.

Still smelled, in fact, so strongly of skunk, that I couldn’t stop myself from recoiling every time I entered.

My brother texted me around 10AM, just a typical Monday morning, “how’s it going?” kinda text and I answered, “I need a word that’s worse than horrible, miserable, awful and terrible put together, but I can’t think of it.”

We wound up chatting for about an hour — an actual voice call, not texting — and at the end of it, I texted him. “I was outside for our whole conversation, optimistically thinking the skunk smell was fading. Nope. It has permeated everything I own. My curtains smell like skunk. My pillows smell like skunk. My LIFE smells like skunk. My paper towels smell like skunk.”

I don’t know how many loads of laundry I did, but the washer and dryer were in continual use through midday of the next day. I spent the entire day on Monday trying to get the skunk smell out of my life. Did I succeed? Why, no, I did not.

As I write this, it is days later, and if you walked into my house, you would automatically start holding your breath. If I stood too close to you at the grocery store or the beach, you would glance my way and your nose would wrinkle. I would shrug apologetically and not comment, because really, what can you say when someone wants to point out that you smell, but is too polite to actually say the words?

Some of my belongings are still outside — my yoga mat, the grocery box I store sparkling water in — and every time I walk in the house, I spray Nature’s Miracle followed by Febreeze. Someday — someday! — everything will stop smelling like skunk, but we have not yet reached that day.

And I will admit the truth: I did not think of Christina’s presents once between my 5AM wake-up call and my final moments of falling asleep sometime that night.

But hey, sending someone presents ON their birthday at least shows you were thinking of them that day, right?

Spoiler alert: I did not get her presents in the mail on her birthday, either. But that story will have to wait for part 4.

In part one, we learned that I am not feeling well and have embarked on an ambitiously restrictive elimination diet to find the cause. 

On Monday, July 11th, Suzanne headed off with Bear for a fun ten-day adventure to RollerCon in Las Vegas, a roller-skating convention, leaving me in charge at the Mighty Small Farm.

Now compared to a regular farm, the Mighty Small Farm is not a lot of work. Let the ladies out in the morning and put them away at night, feeding them, giving them fresh water, and collecting their eggs along the way. Wash the eggs as needed, put them in cartons. Let the baby ladies out, give them fresh water and food, put them away at night. (They are not obliging about the latter, so I’m sometimes calling them the young hooligans now. They are party animals, they want to stay out late!)

Pick produce as warranted — strawberries and blueberries and raspberries right now. Not a chore, but a delight.

Feed two dogs, walk them, clean up after them in the back yard as needed. In the case of Sophie, the energizer bunny of dogs, if I’m not up to taking long walks, play at least a couple hours of ball, either in the driveway or a nearby field, or take those walks AND play ball (her preference, definitely.)

Feed and put fresh water out for two easy cats and clean out one easy litter box.

And then there’s Gina, #notmycat. She is the only cat I’ve ever truly loved and I do love her, but she’s not well, and she’s basically an equivalent amount of work to everyone else put together.

Minor digression: we were with her at the vet today, and I was returning to the car from walking a dog while the vet tech was interviewing Suzanne.

The vet tech, clipboard in hand, said, “Any vomiting?”

Suzanne replied, “No.”

I said, “WHAT?!? That is a total lie!”

The vet tech, of course, had no idea who this stranger was who had just accosted Suzanne to accuse her of lying and looked a bit perplexed — who to trust, the cat’s owner or the random passerby? But the ensuing several moments of conversation clarified that yes, part of caring for Gina is cleaning up regular vomit, maybe not everyday and certainly not any worse now than it has been for months, but regular. As well as cleaning up all the other consequences of the insane amounts of food she eats — five or six cans a day — which flows right through her system. My routine for her was basically put three bowls of cat food down at 6AM, then another at 10:30, another at 12:30 or so, another at 4 or so, another three bowls at 8. If I was awake at 10, another can then. Five or six feedings a day. The extra bowls were technically for the other cats, but Gina usually eats them, too.

So, Gina: Feed a LOT. Clean up piles and puddles and vomit, quite often (she considers the litter box optional) and also a litter box two times a day.

Still, nothing compared to a real farm, of course. Not that anyone in their right mind would leave me in charge of a real farm, but my point is that it’s not like a full-time job or anything. Some time in the morning, some time in the evening, and five minutes here or there during the day. Plenty of time to get other things done.

So back to the story of why Christina’s presents are late: Suzanne has headed off, I am in charge at the Mighty Small Farm, and I am starting the AIP diet, which means a lot of time preparing food. It is Monday morning (the 11th) and I think to myself, “I’m not going to be hard on myself this week. I’m not going to worry about writing, I’m just going to take care of the animals and feed myself. Oh, and get Christina’s presents in the mail. Yep, that’s all I’m going to do this week. Wow, I wish I could have some coffee.”

During the ensuing several days, the latter thought was my foremost thought again and again and again. Holy cow, it is hard to go through caffeine withdrawal if you are a regular drinker of coffee. I’ve done it before, but back then I was a tea drinker. Ironically, I only started drinking coffee after I did AIP the first time, because I didn’t like plant milks in my tea, and couldn’t drink regular dairy anymore. And I wouldn’t have said I drank a lot of coffee — I have a small coffee pot and I drank one pot a day.

But I spent that entire week feeling awful. Headache, yes, and fatigue, to be expected, but also nausea, shakiness, and a general sense of physical misery. As well as the joint pain and lack of energy I was already struggling with. By Wednesday, I was seriously considering going back to the doctor again, but every time a new symptom appeared — ie, why are my hands shaking? — I’d check and it would be on the list of potential symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. It turns out that my recent consumption of caffeine was probably about four times what I was consuming the last time I quit caffeine. My cold turkey quit was brutal.

And every morning I woke up and thought, ‘I really need to get to the post office today.’ And every evening when I tried to fall asleep, I thought, ‘I will get to the post office tomorrow. It will be my one goal. I will make it happen.’ So passed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday… on Sunday night, I was starting to feel better and absolutely determined. I had one day left: Christina’s presents were wrapped, in a box, with bubble wrap even, and I would get to the post office on Monday and I would overnight her presents and they would get there on her birthday. I was determined. It would happen!

Spoiler alert: it did not happen.

But that story has to be told in Part 3.

Sophie Sunshine, the energizer bunny of dogs.

My friend Christina is awesome. She is smart and fun and funny, opinionated as anything, decisive and honest, loyal and incredibly generous. She loves books and food and dogs and geek culture and cool music. She’s a librarian to the core of her soul, and a fantastic cook. She’s also the kind of friend who, if something is wrong, says, “What can I do? How can I help?” and then does it. If I ever needed to bury a body, she’d be high on my list to call, although I suspect (like me), she’d suggest finding a good lawyer instead. But if we needed to bury the body, she’d bring a shovel.

Her birthday is on the 19th of July. We exchange presents on our birthdays these days — not big things, but fun things. My favorite refrigerator magnets are from her, ditto my favorite socks. She told me in a recent phone call that the bath salts I sent her for Christmas were great. That kind of thing. And I was ready for her birthday. I’d had one of her presents sitting on my shelf since February!

Look, presents! Wrapped and everything.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve not been feeling well. I came back from Florida at the end of May, promptly got sick, and then just… never quite got better. Achy, exhausted, and with joint pain in all my joints, not just the usual suspects. (I have a couple of joints that always hurt, so I ignore them — that’s just status quo.) Not sick-sick, no fever, no dramatic cough, nothing that would take me to urgent care, but waking up at night because of the pain, hobbling my way out of bed in the morning, and flagging on my walks with Sophie before I’d even made it a mile. My hands hurt when I typed, my knees and ankles and hips hurt when I walked, just… yeah, not fun.

But also amorphous. I truly hate going to the doctor when the details of my complaint are “well, yesterday the base of my right-hand ring finger was throbbing, but today it’s a burning sensation on the back of my left-hand and a stabbing in the bottom of my foot. Also my elbow hurts, my hip hurts, my wrist hurts, and I’m really tired.” In my experience, doctors do not do well with that kind of “something’s wrong, but I really don’t know what” symptoms.

The good news (if I can really call it that) is that this is not the first time in my life I’ve had an extended period of not-wellness. I can remember one summer, back when R was maybe four, spending about an hour on the phone with a Kaiser nurse who really, really wanted to convince me that I should go to the ER, while I really, really wanted to convince her that I was too sick to go to the ER. I was a single mom with a toddler and the thought of the ER was overwhelming; I just wanted an appointment with a doctor for the next day, so I could show up, find out why I had a fever of 103, get some good drugs, and then go home and resume lying on the couch watching my kid watch Zaboomafoo. (TIVO was my friend – probably the only time I was ever an early adopter of technology.) About a month after that, I remember telling my mom that my great accomplishment was that I’d done our laundry with only one break to sit on the stairs and cry from exhaustion. That was a really hard summer.

Fast forward a few years and we were living in Santa Cruz. I was traveling a lot for work, and every time I came home, I got sick. Sinus infections, colds, the flu, just one thing after another. The only breaks came when I left. Finally I came down with shingles. Shingles! (So unpleasant, I can’t even. Just awful. If you can get the vaccine, totally do, because you do NOT want shingles.) My doctor said at the time, “This is not normal. Healthy 30-somethings do not get shingles.” I concluded that it was the mold in the house we were living in.

Maybe it was. Probably it was. I definitely did improve after we got out of that house. No more shingles, thank heaven. But I remained a person who got sick a lot, who had to ration her energy and strategize her days. I had plenty of tests, none of which ever showed anything interesting except “osteoarthritis, highly advanced for age.” Bleck. And then a friend convinced me to try cutting gluten out of my life. Whoa! Three days without gluten and I was asking Christina to watch me for signs of a manic phase. I felt so good! But I still had a lot of joint pain, congestion,  gastrointestinal issues, etc, and so the same friend convinced me to try the auto-immune protocol diet.

I’ve discussed it before, so I won’t reiterate all the details, but it’s a very comprehensive elimination diet. And it is so hard. Not just because of the willpower it takes to live with such strict restrictions, but there are no convenience foods on AIP. No quick snacks, no cereal, nothing fast and easy. Every meal requires preparation and planning. It’s a lot of work, a lot of time spent focused on cooking, and cleaning up from cooking, and planning more cooking.

It was incredibly effective for me; I’m not going to bore you more by listing off the host of food reactions I discovered, but there were plenty. (The short list of things I shouldn’t eat if I want to feel my best: gluten, dairy, soy, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, peanuts, almonds, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and sugar. Maybe a few others that I don’t remember because they weren’t that important to me.)

So with this go-round of not-wellness, the first and most obvious suspect for me was a food reaction. I actually did think when I first got sick that I was having a gluten reaction, but then it just went on and on with no gluten in my life, so that couldn’t be it. But maybe my body had found a new gluten? I went to the doctor and had some bloodwork done to rule out other suspects (negative on Lyme disease), and resigned myself to starting AIP again.

And so I did, on Sunday the 10th of July. Nine days before her birthday, so loads of time to get Christina her presents, right?

Spoiler alert: No.

But this has gotten long, so I will have to continue this story in Part 2.

Here at the Mighty Small Farm, the chickens are known as “the ladies,” as in “Have the ladies been generous today?” Because chickens do not tend to have very long life spans (even chickens as spoiled as those at the Mighty Small Farm), every year Suzanne gets a few new chicks to add to the coop, aka the baby ladies.

In an ideal world, a broody hen takes the chicks under her wing and raises them. In the not-ideal world that we actually live in, the broody hens take one look at the new chicks and say, “Nope, not them.” Then the baby ladies get to live in a caged baby coop inside the big coop, with a heat lamp and plenty of good chick food and clean water.

Also in the less than ideal world that we live in, not all of the baby ladies are likely to make it to adulthood. It’s not good to get too attached, which is why you haven’t seen a steady stream of chick photos. Having learned my lesson about loving chickens, I’ve mostly been pretending that they don’t exist.

This year’s baby loss was a true horror show. A rat (probably) burrowed under the ground and into the coop and attempted to drag one of the baby ladies away. Suzanne heard the screaming and came running. She crawled into the baby coop and for some interminable length of time (okay, probably less than a minute), she and the rat played tug-of-war over the baby while I stabbed a shovel into the dirt on the outside of the baby coop trying to collapse the tunnel. The rat escaped, but the baby didn’t survive the trauma. For the next couple days, the baby ladies got to stay in their heat lamp box until Suzanne could add some wire mesh to the base of the baby coop.

We are finally, however, reaching the stage where the remaining baby ladies seem likely to survive. They’re venturing forth from their heat-lamp box to explore their coop. They still hide from the scary things, aka a person holding a phone camera up at the door to the coop, but they’re spending time outside, eating their food, chirruping a fair amount, and looking cute as anything.

The fluffiest of the baby ladies hiding behind the bravest of the baby ladies.

Suzanne got two different kinds of chicks this year and I should probably remember the breed names but I don’t. However, one kind is super fluffy — those are the two hiding in the back in the above photo. The other kind has really great plumage on their heads.

A better view of the plumage.

Eventually, probably sometime next month, they’ll get released from the baby coop and get to be with the big ladies in the big coop, and I’ll stop pretending they don’t exist and chat with them like I chat with the others. It’ll be fun to see what kind of eggs they lay once they start laying.

Last night, Suzanne and I went out to dinner on the funds earned from selling the ladies’ eggs. I’m waiting on some test results before I get serious about starting AIP, so it was a chance for one last restaurant meal before three months or so of diet annoyance. We spent most of the meal talking about future travel plans — fun imaginings of the future. When I got home, I spent hours browsing walking tours of the world. So many cool places to go, so many amazing things to see. When I finally pulled myself away, I felt quite wistful for a moment, and then I laughed at myself. Yep, the world is filled with beautiful places, and fortunately for me, I live in one of them.

Sophie at the edge of the Smith River in the Six Rivers National Forest on yesterday’s mini-adventure outing.