Updates: Paco, my surgery, the chaos

Paco died in the backseat of the car at the vet’s office. She tranquilized him and then administered the lethal injection. It was short and peaceful. We buried him down by the hoop house, under the willows. He has a view of the Truchas Peaks. I’m very sad.

It’s been five months since my knee surgery and I still can’t walk up the road. I don’t have Paco to take with me, but it’s not my sorrow that prevents the walk. It’s the fact that my knee is so swollen that without taking anti-inflammatories, lyrica, and 10 milligrams of oxycodone twice a day I would be in constant pain. I can do squats, ride a stationary bike, and bend my knee backwards close to its before surgery position, but I’m atomized by pain. A trip to Santa Fe to do errands leaves me exhausted. I couldn’t attend any of the hearings on the Sitewide Environmental Impact Statement for LANL in person, to cover for La Jicarita (they had zoom). And filling in for my neighbor Nancy at the ReUse Center at the dump, on my feet for two hours, just about killed me. The surgeon doesn’t know what to do to help but he wants me coming back “until the scar on your knee is almost invisible.” I’m not quite sure what that will indicate, but either because of guilt or compassion or a combination of the two, he’s taken me on as entire being who suffers other chronic conditions that may be contributing to my failure to heal.

The chaos that is Trump/Musk (T/D) has hit home here in New Mexico with the halt in hiring of Forest Service workers, especially fire fighters. They were supposed to be part of some emergency exemption but they’re not. The so-called winter of 2024-5 has been one of, if not the, driest winters on record. We had one big snow storm at the end of November that had everyone slapping on their skis—Jakob climbed up the backside of the Sandias three days in a row—and then we had nothing. The rest of the winter? A couple of smaller storms in January and February, a week of below zero temperatures with no snow, and several weeks of 60 degree weather. The last I heard we’re at 40 percent of normal precipitation in the Sangre de Cristos.

What this means for our forests is extreme fire danger with no additional fire fighters on board. Crews are already stretched thin from years of not only forest megafires but fires burning down urban areas from Colorado to California. It also means that unless the money was already allocated under Biden’s massive public spending bills like Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the forest restoration and thinning projects that help prevent megafires are torpedoed.

What this means for our rivers is restricted irrigation seasons on the middle and lower Rio Grande and probably water sharing all summer long in El Valle. To add insult to injury, this was the year that I finally challenged the acequia commission on its lack of transparency and due process—see May 31 blog in Un*#!ing Believable —to meet and discuss parciante input and complaints. Now all we’re going to do is worry over water and due process will evaporate into thin, dry air.

The chaos that is disrupting the rest of the world is beyond the reach of this particular blog post, but unfortunately, there will be others. It looks like this time around no one will be unscathed.

A Horrible Year Redux

My January 1 post of 2024 was titled “A Horrible Year.” The Israeli army invaded Gaza and began its slaughter of the Palestinian people. Now there‘s a tentative cease fire in our second go-round of Trump presiding. God knows what will happen. I guess I have to title my January 2025 post the same: A Horrible Year. For many reasons, personal and political or personal is the political.

Paco is dying. Remember, the vet calls it Cognitive Dysfunctional Syndrome, or dog Alzheimer’s. It’s come back with vengeance. He’ll be lying on the floor when suddenly he jerks up as if a gun shot just went off. Unfortunately, the gun shot is in his head, some sinister signal that evokes trembling and panting, as he clings to me for comfort. This is mostly in the middle of the night, of course, as he pushes against the bed or scrapes his cone against my nightstand, endlessly, seeking something—me— to quell his anxiety.

That’s probably what’s killing him relatively slowly. The real culprit is more likely what we thought was a harmless lipoma on his front leg but is actually a tumor with an abscess that formed from his constant licking a slight abrasion into a bloody mess. We keep trying to medicate it into a scab but it keeps erupting with blood, so once again he’s wrapped up in bandages that he constantly tries to unravel. Removing the tumor is beyond our vet’s ability and presumably beyond our financial ability as well. So he wears a cone that thankfully, is flexible. We borrowed it from a neighbor who had searched for an alternative to the wide-brimmed, inflexible type you get at the vet.

Paco has been my boon companion for almost 14 years. I found him in La Junta Canyon, running up the forest road behind our caravan of parciantes and Picuris Pueblo tribal members inspecting one of the dams that takes water from our watershed, La Jicarita, over into the Mora watershed. But that’s another story. I guessed that this three-month old puppy who’s mostly blue heeler, probably jumped out of a rancher’s truck—they’re the dog of choice in el norte—or was dumped, into my reluctant arms. I already had two old dogs near the end of their lives who didn’t need a puppy yipping around. But Paco was an excellent puppy—no destroyed shoes or slippers, no pooping in the house, no barking at the sky—and an excellent adult who went everywhere with me.

I fervently hope that Paco will drop dead on my living room floor. Most pet owners probably wish this as well, when their dogs or cats reach the age when they can barely get up, when they are in pain from a chronic injury, when they have late-stage cancer, when they have any condition that makes their lives miserable (that’s our assessment of course), so we want them to drop dead before there’s a trip to the vet. Just a few minutes ago I thought I’d lost him after his wound poured blood, I re- bandaged his horrible mess, he briefly stood up, and then flopped over onto the floor. But he’s alive. For now. For not much longer.