Molly
Recently, and accurately so, I have been accused of being overly negative in my life, which also includes my blogs. This has been a manifestation of some personal turns in my life and I am going to make intentional attempts to turn away from that. I’m going to do that with the help of a chick. Not a female, a chicken. Well, it may have been a female chicken.
I have a very dear friend who is an AG teacher but also a rancher Near Weatherford, Texas. He is a working rancher and knows how to pull calves when it is needed and kill them if it is needed and buys and sells and is doing the types of things every rancher in America does on a regular basis; the ones who give us all that great meat under the cellophane. He is of course without emotion or empathy towards working animals – which means of course he has tons and tons. I saw this most poignantly in his treatment of Molly, an elderly mixed lab yard dog that rules all that she surveys. She sleeps with the cat, is friendly with the goats and the cattle and even the chickens as she is self-appointed keeper of the menagerie.
At the start of last week, they had chicks hatch and they were all doing well under a warm light – 9 baby chicks.
They were born at the first of last week but sadly on Thursday it was found that one of the baby chicks had died. He took this small body and he walked about 50 yards and threw it into a dense hedgerow.
The next day he went again to check on his chicks and unfortunately another had died.
And then he counted.
There were eight live chicks and one dead chick. Molly had somehow crawled through a very thick hedgerow to gather up that little baby and carried it back to be with the other chicks. He told me the story and I instantly teared up.
So why is this in a medical blog? Turns out it is because I want it in. But also – is this not the heart of medicine? To ultimately fail, always and 100 % of the time? Do not all of our patients die? But we can care, we can comfort. We can strive to be even a bit as awesome as Molly.
