11/15/2025
Thank you to everyone who reached out, messaged, prayed for us, or checked in over the last few weeks. I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to every single message as everything was unfolding — my days and nights blurred together — but I want you to know your care meant more than you realize. Here’s the full story of what’s been happening behind the scenes.
You know those stretches in life where one thing goes wrong, then another, then another — until you catch yourself wondering which Biblical plague you’re currently reenacting? That was my last four weeks. What began as a soft drizzle of inconvenience turned into a full-blown hurricane that settled directly over my home and refused to leave.
The first wave hit with my cat’s emergency — and if you read my previous post about him, you already know what that week demanded. While I was still moving around that crisis, barely catching my breath between updates, one of the dogs began showing quiet signs that something internal had shifted. And then, with almost scripted timing, another dog followed. Then another. Then another. One after the next, each one slipping just enough that my entire house rearranged itself into an accidental ICU built on blankets, dimmed lights, remedies, IV lines, and whispered prayers offered between tasks that never seemed to end.
All of this unfolded at the worst possible time: peak hunting season, when I restock all eleven freezers for my dogs. It’s the most physically demanding stretch of my year — hours of sourcing, trimming, grinding, portioning, labeling, sealing, organizing, rotating. The kind of workload that normally requires every ounce of stamina I have even on a quiet week. This time, I was doing it while trying to stabilize multiple sick animals and preparing for my upcoming Europe trip with one of the poodles, a process that demands precision, timing, and a mind clear enough to anticipate every detail.
In the middle of this storm, meat prices in Tennessee sky rocketed, and in an effort to lighten the load just enough to stay afloat, I reached back out to the butcher I used to work with when I lived in Maryland. I’d known his standards firsthand — I’d seen the care, the prayer, the integrity he put into his work. He was the kind of man whose products you never had to question. But he retired. His nephew took over. And I trusted without verifying.
The shipment arrived looking perfectly normal. Frozen solid, no discoloration, nothing suspicious. I portioned it, tucked everything into Freezer Seven, and moved on — until days later, when I warmed a small amount by hand and realized the fat content was so excessive it coated my fingers in a way meat never should. The balance was wrong. The density was wrong. Frozen food can hide its sins exceptionally well.
Suddenly every symptom across all the dogs snapped into place. Each one expressed inflammation differently — one vomiting, one drooling, one stretching in pain, one sinking into lethargy, one battling explosive diarrhea, one refusing food altogether. No two dogs ever speak the same language when their gut is inflamed, but once you’ve lived closely enough, you learn their dialects. The posture shifts, the gum color changes, the tremors that come and go, the tension in the abdomen, the way their eyes soften or harden when something is wrong — all of it becomes a vocabulary you recognize instantly.
After UVBI at Dr. Judy’s — and may God bless that woman for opening her door at 7 a.m. without hesitation — the dogs stabilized enough for everything to be managed from home, but “stabilized” didn’t mean “simple.” One dog would improve while another dipped. One required hydration support. Another needed nausea management. Another needed lymphatic stimulation. IV fluids became part of my hourly rhythm, woven into my day the way most people squeeze in coffee breaks. I watched for infiltration, monitored flow rates, adjusted for hydration markers, checked gum color, tracked abdominal tension, reevaluated which remedies matched their symptoms in that moment, and kept every space warm, clean, and quiet enough for them to heal.
And yes — the diarrhea. I’ve washed enough blankets this month to qualify for a commercial laundromat license. At some point, laundry became a spiritual discipline.
This is the side of natural rearing people don’t see. It’s not pretty. It’s not convenient. It’s not Instagram-worthy. It’s a dance — a detailed, exhausting, beautiful dance — between knowledge, observation, faith, and endurance. It demands that you read each animal as a whole organism, not as a checklist of symptoms. It requires action that is both quick and confident, grounded in a deep respect for the way God designed the body to heal when given the support it needs.
And here’s the truth I want people to understand without drama or exaggeration:
If I hadn’t already built the skillset, stocked the supplies, learned to read the early signs, and trained myself to act decisively — I would have lost someone. Not because of lack of love, but because emergencies don’t wait for business hours or shipping windows. And the uncomfortable reality of modern veterinary medicine is that emergency care often comes down to what you can afford in the moment. Preparedness isn’t paranoia; it’s stewardship.
We’re not completely out of the woods yet, but the path ahead no longer feels endless. Hydration is returning. Nausea is easing. Their energy has begun resurfacing in small, meaningful ways. And soon enough, the house will stop smelling like a mixture of broth, tinctures, ozone, chlorophyll, disinfectant, and whatever spiritual lesson was tucked inside all of this.
When that moment arrives, I know I’ll pause long enough to feel the relief settle, grateful for a God who carried us through a chapter I never would have chosen yet somehow grew through — the kind of quiet strengthening comfort never delivers, but storms faithfully reveal. ❤️🐾❤️
