A Deal for Nefertiti

By Annette Israel

A Deal for Nefertiti is the story of a small, previously rescued, Arabian mare, "Neffer." She was seized by a hellish sickness over the course of several months and ultimately faced euthanasia. I lead the reader on a journey that involves Neffer, the other animals in my life, and my relationship with God. My faith in God is unshakable but I have concerns when He doesn't respond as I think He should or why it takes Him so long to make His move. I tell God when I am angry with Him and when I am frustrated and confused. I know He can grant the miracle. I just don't know if He will.
The reader will become a part of my intense relationship with God and how I talk to Him about everything; even asking Him to help a kitten poop. I show God's sense of humor and my own. I don't withhold anything about my relationship with God.
Through an honest, humble, and informative approach (talking to the reader) A Deal for Nefertiti entertains, educates and inspires. I do not preach. I offer my thoughts about God and how He might perceive us in a manner that uses the words "sometimes" and "maybe." I make it clear that I don't have the answers. Instead, I offer my thoughts that are open for the reader's inclusion. Through my own events, escapades, foibles, and goofiness the story is told. It serves as an analogy that since God displays His love and grants miracles for a horse―all the more reason that He will do the same for us. I show that God loves all of His creation. He loves His animals. He loves me and He loves you.
I compare miracles to certain cookies. They are better if someone else makes them and they are better if they come into your life as a surprise. I talk to the reader about the fact that "sometimes" we get the miracle and "sometimes" we don't. The reader will experience the loss of a grand old draft horse and the understanding that death is part of what we face here on earth. It addresses the frustrations and the loss and the grief that we will encounter and how we don't know the reason why bad things happen. We have all been given gifts to use for now; not for some day in the future.
A Deal for Nefertiti is an expression of love and passion. It's an essay on God's involvement in every aspect of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098307479

Annette Israel

ANNETTE ISRAEL is an award winning author (ForeWard gold medalist for her first book, Horsepower - A Memoir). The Blue Bead is her first novel. Annette holds a master’s degree in Humanities. She lives in the middle of a horse pasture in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan surrounded by her many rescued horses and dogs with two happy cats who refused to admit that they ever needed rescuing.

Book preview

Thirty-Nine

DEDICATION

A Deal for Nefertiti is dedicated to everyone.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This story is true. Nothing has been changed. However, only the people and events crucial to keeping the story moving forward

have been included.

14% of my profit from the sale of this book will be given to

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Please visit my website: www.annetteisraelauthorartist.com

Cover art (pastel) by Annette Israel

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My heartfelt and special thanks to the following people:

Marquette Baker

Nancy and Tom Logan

Kathy and Tim Campbell

Jeanne Berube

Dr. Brad Cumper and staff of the Saginaw Valley Equine Clinic

Dr. Kelley Jones

Ferman Hostetler

Dr. Michael Thome

Liz Thome

Dr. Brenda Grettenberger

Roger Marble

Dr. Eric Gaw and staff of the Clare Animal Hospital

Dr. Amanda Audo and staff at Great Lakes Pet Emergencies

Dr. Sue Johnson-Wendt and staff at the Midland Animal Clinic

Amy Barr-Tickle and staff at Four Paws Rehabilitation

Rogier Kuiper/FlexD Media who designed my website: www.annetteisraelauthorartist.com

And to my first readers:

Nancy Logan

Marquette Baker

Chapter

One

An emergency tracheotomy—those words slammed into me and almost knocked me over upon impact. All softness drained from my face. My ribs tightened against a breath. I frowned and searched the young veterinarian’s face. Surely this couldn’t be reality. She spoke again.

Do I have your permission to do an emergency tracheotomy right now? If I don’t, we’re going to lose her in a matter of minutes. She’s in severe respiratory distress and she can’t breathe on her own like this.

Dr. Kelley Jones paused to toss back a wisp of blonde hair that had escaped from an elastic hair tie. I don’t know how you even got her here without her collapsing, she said.

Once again Dr. Jones’ words hammered into me. They caught me off guard as if I’d snatched the railing just in time to catch myself from a fall down a flight of dark stairs.

Yes, I said. Do whatever you have to do.

How can this be?

It was almost too much to process. My brain tumbled thoughts and garbled emotions around and shot them straight down into the rest of my body. I felt both numb and quivery, all at the same time, from the jolt of that energy.

Dr. Jones and her team of three staff brought in the medications and instruments used to carve a hole through the heavy muscle and tissue of a horse’s neck to penetrate the trachea. They would insert a tube to restore breathing. They sedated my horse first and then injected medication to numb the incision site.

Dr. Jones sat on a stool near eye level right beside the incision she’d just sliced as blood spurted out onto the floor. I watched from outside the stall. Dr. Jones required room to work and I wasn’t needed. I wanted to be right next to my horse but I knew that I must not get in the way. My clogged mind closed out most of what Dr. Jones had said in the tense moments just before the tracheotomy question and during the procedure itself. Had I understood any of it?

I strained to listen to the medical team but only gleaned a few words as they chattered while completing the task. Their comments were quick and efficient.

Give me the other scalpel.

Yes.

Sponge.

I locked my hands on the metal stall rails. I felt far away and as useless as ice skates on a sand dune.

Okay, okay, Dr. Jones said in a relaxed, relieved tone. I’ve got the tube in.

Immediate calm and the doctor-manner of conducting business fluttered down into the stall with controlled purpose. I started to function as an ordinary human again.

I have the trach placed, Dr. Jones said. She’s able to breathe now. She’s breathing through the trach. Now we’ll have to scope her. If all goes well, she might be able to go home today.

I nodded. Shallow nods.

Dr. Jones ordered more equipment brought to her. A technician wheeled another roller cart into the stall. This cart contained intricate medical items, more drugs, and tubing they’d use to insert into each nostril, up the mare’s head, through the sinus passages and into the guttural pouches, one on each side.

A more potent sedation swirled into the horse. Her head coasted to her chest and her eyes closed to slits under the weight of their lashes. With steady hands, Dr. Jones inserted the special cable with a camera into the mare’s right nostril. She pushed and eased the cable up the sinus passages. The camera provided Dr. Jones with a view of the journey up the nostril and head cavity and into the guttural pouch opening. It all played out on a nearby TV screen.

I can’t get into the pouch, Dr. Jones said. She’s too swollen in there and I can’t get in. Let’s try the other side.

With gentle downward tension Dr. Jones slid the cable out of the horse’s nostril. Then she inserted it into the other one.

Okay, she said, never moving her eyes away from the task in front of her. I can get into this one. It’s not as swollen.

I almost collapsed under the weight of the minutes that took too long to pass. I felt that I alone shouldered the tonnage of time.

Dr. Jones remained seated on her stool beside the mare. Focused and intent, she watched the progress.

She has a huge buildup of purulent material in this pouch, Dr. Jones said. We will flush it and see if we can get this one cleaned out.

Dr. Jones tugged on the cable and it slid out of my horse’s head. The mare shook, tickled or irritated, and she wiggled her lips. She snorted. Dr. Jones put another rubber tube tip into the mare’s nostril and coaxed it upward. Then she forced the flush medications and solutions into the end of the tube with a syringe.

What we are doing here, Dr. Jones said, is injecting the solutions up the tube and into the pouch. What we want to see happen is the purulent material come out of her nostril. That’s how we know if this is working.

As the chemicals reached the target and circulated in the pouch, the mare lowered her head even more. White chunks dropped out of her nose. It looked like hunks of cheese, mixed with slime, falling to the floor.

That’s exactly what we want to see, Dr. Jones said. Victory notes rang clear in her voice. I think I’m getting this pouch pretty well cleaned out.

I watched in silence.

Minutes later, Dr. Jones removed all tubing from the horse. Her staff at the Saginaw Valley Equine Clinic, wearing lab coats and sterilized plastic wraps on their shoes, packed up the instruments, drugs, and tools they had used to assess and treat my horse. They steered the roller carts out of the large box stall. Only Dr. Jones and I remained with the mare.

I went inside the stall and stroked my horse’s face. I stirred my foot in a small circle in the pine-shavings bedding. It made a faint puffing sound.

She isn’t coming home today, is she? I asked.

No, Dr. Jones said. I know you want her home ...but she’s going to have to stay overnight. She’s been through a lot this afternoon. She may have to stay with us even longer.

I swallowed the kind of gulp that gets stuck in your throat when you even think of speaking. But I knew I had to ask the question. I scraped my other foot around in the shavings twanging an ingrown toenail on the hard flooring.

Is she going to make it?

Again, the moments hovered. I felt my heart thumping inside of me. Nothing more than four or five seconds passed but I felt the ache while waiting.

I don’t know, Dr. Jones said.

She hesitated. Her eyes lifted off to the right as she considered her words.

I do have to tell you that the prognosis is extremely poor for any horse with pouches this bad.

This is guttural pouch empyema, I said, correct?

Yes, Dr. Jones said. And this is bad. Usually they go into respiratory distress and have to be euthanized.

Dr. Jones sighed. She peeled off her latex gloves and stuffed one inside the other. She glanced at the mare and then cast her eyes to mine.

Let’s give it twenty-four hours, she said. If she makes it through the night without going into respiratory distress we’ll try to scope again tomorrow and I’ll see if I can get into the other pouch. But ...you have to understand ...how poor her chances of survival are. If she’s struggling to breathe, we will need to euthanize her.

I slumped. Shocked and stunned. I never expected that my horse might die.

Let’s give it until tomorrow, Dr. Jones said. I will text you in the morning and let you know how she’s doing.

Then Dr. Jones left us. I felt alone and isolated. I reached to touch my mare. I grasped and stroked the ear closest to me. When I let go of her ear it drifted off to the side of her head and hung. The drugs still held the horse captive. I hugged her thin neck. Bloody mucous slopped out from the tracheotomy tube. Around the opening to the tracheotomy a metal plate had been sutured into place. More crud dribbled from the mare’s nostrils. Confusion clawed inside of me.

I felt stuck. I’d been tossed against my will into some world that didn’t belong to me and then chained and left there all by myself.

How can this be?

Neffer. My little Neffer; the smallest of the three Arabian mares I rescued three years ago. She had always been my pint-sized, powerful fighter. She arrived that way. Now, just she and I stood together in a stall as we had so many times before. But this had a different aura from those previous times. On that day, in the stall at the clinic, joy dwindled to nothingness.

Chapter

Two

It began on a January afternoon three years previously. I received an email that had been sent to local horse owners about three Egyptian Arabian mares that needed immediate homes. The notice stated that all three mares had been severely foundered. I hadn’t planned to add another horse to my herd of special-needs rescues, but this situation more than piqued my interest.

I talked to God about it.

Am I supposed to do this? If you don’t want to me to do this, Lord, then you need to stop me, I said as I typed my response, I will take them.

The Lord didn’t stop me.

I sat at my kitchen table, a bit dazed, as I contemplated what I was about to do. Founder is without doubt one of a horse owner’s most dreaded conditions. It almost doesn’t make sense that if a horse overeats, or eats the wrong thing, that if can affect, of all things, their feet.

When founder occurs, heat forms in the horse’s hoof creating swelling and unbearable pain, lameness, and often permanent damage and disfigurement. Many horses do not survive founder and have to be put down. Now, I’d have three more horses—three more horses that just so happened to have this awful condition.

The next night I drove out to see the mares. The huge Moon turned everything beneath it blue, even the snow. The Moon is good company on night time excursions. I’ve never been able to locate the so-called Man on the Moon but I welcome the Moon joining me on night travels anyway. There is a tender serenity when the full Moon guides you and lightens the path ahead.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place . . . Psl 8:3

The three mares, all black, and all about the same size, had tiny white stars on their foreheads. The mares looked identical. They were introduced to me as Isha, Ali, and Neffer. Isha, the aged mare, is the mother of the two other adult mares, Ali and Neffer. They owned the definition of black. A starless night in the middle of a forest, void of any human invention, shares this hue. Shivers raced over my body. Even with winter hair, tangled manes, and bodies showing years of neglect these horses possessed striking beauty. The centuries of careful breeding that had gone into the mares resounded.

There are horses. And then there are Arabians. For those of us who love them, they are set apart and different. I was born loving horses. There isn’t a horse on this planet that I don’t love. They can be any breed, any age, and have any issue, and I love every one of them. They are all magnificent. But my first horse was an Arabian and that started the love affair. As a child, I daydreamed about Arabians and I read everything I could find about them. I learned that the Arabian is perhaps the only true, pure breed of horse still in existence. Their meticulous, ancient breeding in the desert eventually spread all over the world and has been used to create virtually all other light horse breeds. Yet, the Arabian, as a breed, remains pure. Thousands of years ago they shared such a close relationship with humans that they lived in the tents with the Bedouin families, cherished and guarded, as the supreme blessing.

The Arabian horse is the subject of countless paintings and sculptures throughout history. They possess exquisite features. They have gorgeous faces with a dished profile. They have dainty ears and muzzles and large expressive eyes. Their necks are arched and graceful. They carry their tails lofty and free, like banners. We refer to the tail carriage as flagged when the horse is racing the wind. Arabians are spirited and they are highly intelligent. It’s often said that Arabians are smarter than the people who handle them. They are intuitive. They are able to convince you that they know many things that other horses do not. They are able to convince you that they know many things that you do not know.

It is a mystical connection that those of us who love them feel and one that can’t adequately be explained. A bald eagle cannot explain how she feels when she opens her wings and soars toward heaven. She cannot give you the experience, and what she feels, any more than I can give you the explanation of the lure, the mystique that is the Arabian horse.

Close your eyes now and dream with me. Let your heart and your imagination carry you far away. Feel the heat of the desert sun wrapping you gently as the baked grains of sand tease and click against your skin. The breeze is warm and heavy with the scent and the feel of an ancient world and things you do not know, though you do know. You sense the beginning, the source, oddly familiar and ominous, yet so welcoming. Antiquity has a way of subtly speaking to you and drawing you close. You see a horse appear. Her nostrils are flaring. Her mane rises and falls like a wave caressing the wind as she canters toward you in deep sand. Her solitary backdrop is the gem-like cerulean sky.

With bullet speed and precision, the littlest mare whipped her head as far over the stall rail as she could with her ears flat against her head and her teeth barred. She struck for my face and snapped her powerful jaws. She missed her target. I saw it coming, just in time, and snatched my head to the side to avoid the bite. I jumped back. The sullen mare retreated into the darkness of the stall. I stood ice-still from the realization of what I’d just missed.

And that was my introduction to Neffer. Nefertiti.

I regained some semblance of order within myself. I crept two steps forward to the stall again and peered over the railing. Neffer had parked herself in the farthest corner of the stall with her butt turned to me.

Ali stood neutral, watching but not interested in me or her sister’s antics. Isha didn’t act aggressive and she was close enough for me to assess her condition. She was very thin. Somehow, she managed to balance her body on four disfigured hooves. The undersides of each granite-hard hoof curled under and stabbed into the sensitive soles. The intense pain, coupled with the stoic acceptance of life, radiated from the mare’s body and pierced my soul. Her front hooves had grown up into a wretched C shape. They reminded me of elf shoes you’d see in some weird Santa scene. Each hoof had grown a foot over correct length. The long hooves even wobbled as she tried to take steps.

I had never seen founder this bad in real life. I’d only seen photographs of horses foundered to this extent. The telltale ridges in the hooves of the three mares proved the severity of the condition. Usually, just the front hooves are affected. These three mares were foundered in all four of their feet. Many of the most experienced horse folk wouldn’t take this chance.

I drove home in the darkness of that January night talking to the Lord as I always do.

Okay. So, I believe you want me to take the horses. Stop me if that’s not so. But if I’m supposed to take them, please just work it all out. Just roll out the red carpet so I know I’m doing the right thing and bless this whole project. Keep them blessed and watch over them. You could make it so that I can’t get the horse trailer out of the barn and it gets stuck in the mud. You could make lots more mud to make sure that happens. You could cause the mares to refuse to go into the trailer. There are lots of things you could do to let me know that this is not what you want me to do.

The drive home that night gave me plenty of quiet time to reflect on the many rescues I have done during my fifty-plus years in the horse world. Whether an owner takes that first step and makes a call to find a home for a horse, or, if I purchase the horse at an auction, sometimes directly from a kill-buyer to prevent its slaughter, I’ve never felt it my responsibility to judge anyone involved in that horse’s situation. What’s important is that the horse’s life has been spared. Whatever the circumstances are that bring a particular horse into my life are irrelevant and I try to forget those details. I am happy that somehow it all worked out the way it was supposed to and that the owner, or seller, did the right thing at the right time and the horse is out of that situation and has a fresh start and a new life. All of the horses I have taken in have suffered emotionally and always physically from various forms of neglect and lack of stability and consistency in their lives. It’s not about me being in control of them. They have something to say about this arrangement as well.

There are many horse rescues that find new homes for the horses they take in. This doesn’t work for me. My friends have all heard me say many times, If it comes down my driveway, it stays.

One little Arabian mare I purchased at an auction always comes to my mind whenever I have considered finding another home for a horse. A petite, emaciated white mare described Mariah when I first saw her at the auction, headed for slaughter if I hadn’t tried to get her. Only a kill-buyer and I bid on her. The bidding stopped at $120.00 and she came home with me.

I’ve had Mariah for ten years now. I traced her owners back nearly two decades. She’s