Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

(Lindsey, R.N., Dr. Naomi Falk,Md.)

It was almost a year ago that I stopped seeing the tops of letters in the books i was reading, I was only seeing half. The ophthalmologists said there was a serious swelling – ruptured or “leaking” vessels in my left eye, caused in part by diabetes and heart disease working in tandem.

Untreated, it would spread quickly and dramatically affect my sight.

Just a few years ago, this would have led to blindness. Dr. Naomi Falk from Retinal Consultants in Slingerland, outside of Albany,  examined me. There were several options, including regular injections into the eye, laser surgery, special kinds of drops.

It was serious, Dr. Falk told me, the swelling had approached the eye and was affecting my vision. I didn’t care for the idea losing sight in one or both eyes, I am an avid reader, blogger and writer. People survive worse things, but we agreed on a course of treatment.

I wasn’t crazy about getting an injection in my eyes either, but I was prepared to do it.

I went to Slingerland, about two hours away four times, three for laser surgery.

When I went this morning, I was expecting another round of surgery.

But Dr. Falk said surgery was no longer necessary, at least for now. I’ve looked at these eye photos enough now to have my own sense of progress, and I could see how much the swelling had gone down.

(Images of my affected eye. Top right, image from last year. Bottom right, image from today, the red area is the swelling, much reduced and farther from the eye. Good news.)

The ruptures and swelling had  moved well away from the retina, the center of the eye. My eyesight is very good, and she doesn’t need to see me for four months. It was great progress, she said. I am pleased and relieved. I’m glad I live in an age where blindness was not the likely outcome, but if the swelling had spread.

As I get older, there is more maintenance, I keep my diabetes well under control, and my cardiologist loves my “beautiful” tests. For years, I ignored the idea of taking care of myself, perhaps I didn’t really want to live.  I love holistically, I see that western medicine can help my heart and my eyes, holistic medicine helps my spirit and my soul.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by our medical system – pills, tests, referrals, expenses. But help helps. I wish everyone could afford the kind of care I got in Slingerland, in a just world, that will be possible.

Dr. Falk is impressive, skilled, empathetic and  open. We have a lot of fun working together. Maria came to drive me – the eye drops leave me nearly blinded in sunlight.

I told her Dr. Falk was another good argument for female physicians. I always know what is happening and why, and I always feel like a human being, not a data point.

I don’t mean this in a glib or dismissive way, I know there are wonderful male doctors. I just need to feel I can talk with my doctors, and I need for them to know a bit about who I am. Most male doctors that I’ve seen don’t do that.

When Dr. Falk came into the examining room, she said right away, “oh, I suppose you’re going to want a picture of your eye, and of me as well. Okay, let’s do it.”

She pulled Lindsey, a nurse, into the photo.

We all started laughing. How often do you get to laugh with a big-deal doctor who has just saved my retina? Thanks, doc. I was surprised at how elated I was, it showed me how concerned I had been about my eyes.

We all celebrated a little bit in the operating and examining room. I remembered seeing those truncated letters in a book a year ago, and I wondered then if I would ever read again.

Guess what I’ll be doing tonight?

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate.

On the way home, Maria and I stopped at a Stewart’s Convenience Shop for our own celebration , we feasted on tuna salad sandwiches on wheat bread, a banana, carrots and celery, bottled water and some Lay’s 65 per cent fat-free potato chips that tasted like cardboard (she wolfed most of the bag down).

It was great.

I like to think of Bedlam Farm as a Peaceable Kingdom, almost every animal here has either grown up here or been here for awhile. Red is the King of the Peaceable Kingdom, he accepts everything and harms nothing.

We all get along here, and I often wonder why, if animals can do it, people can’t. But did not grow up in a Peaceable Kingdom, he is scrappy and dominant. He chases chickens, tries to push the barn cats around, challenges the sheep and tells the donkeys off every chance he can with his loud and persistent barks.

Bud had a rough time in his early life, he didn’t get the socialization workshop the animals here get. He needs patience and clarity, nobody really dominates anybody around here.

He is calming down. Minnie pays little attention Bud and is not threatened by him (Bud has never harmed any creature here, he just likes run his mouth a bit). Maria was outside sitting with Minnie on the back bench, and hopped out to hang out with the two of them.

I liked this scene, I thought the Peaceable Kingdom here is coming together again.

I love the start of a new day.  A friend told me the other day that my life defied the expectations society has of a 72-year-old man. I was shocked, and pleased to  hear this. It never once occurred to me that I am doing anything other people don’t do all the time.

I never think of myself in terms of my age, and I don’t do old talk.

Age is a construct, a state of mind. The elderly are the last fair game for bigots and people without imagination. Grandma Moses was right, life is what make of it.

I’m off this morning for laser eye surgery. I hate to share health and medical news, it just reinforces the stereotypes people have of aging, but I also don’t want to hide the reality. I am getting older, or perhaps am already there.

Aging well requires more maintenance than being younger does, it is the toll I pay for being active and as healthy as somebody with two chronic diseases can be. I feel strong, vital. My doctors always look at me and say the same thing, “you’re fine, you look so vital.”

I don’t know what that means either, but I’m glad to hear it.

I feel vital, and I love the morning sunrise sight of my wonderful wife, friend, lover and partner bringing hay out to her beloved donkeys. I know now to use the sun to bring light to my photos.

What a glorious way to start the new day. This morning, laser surgery on my eyes. I would have been dead 2o years ago on many counts, and blind too. But I am very much alive, just getting started.

I wish a great new day for everyone reading this, among the things I want to share, is joy.

One scientist wrote that  it was possible to view the online video of the dying Chimpanzee Mama’s farewell to the Biologist Jan Van Hooff and be changed forever.

I think I was. This book now only teaches us about the emotions of animals, it teaches us about ours. It sure touches some.

The video and Mama’s story begins Primatologist Frans De Waal’s new and landmark book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.

I believe the book will go a long way towards ending the debate about whether or not animals have emotions, and will soon be the talk of the animal world.

As Frans De Waal himself says in this remarkable work (I have a lot of reading to do this Spring and Summer), we may know they have emotions, but we have little understanding or certainty about  their feelings.

Everywhere I go in the animal world, people tell me what their dogs and cats and horses are thinking. de Waal doesn’t feed that beast.

We are constantly in touch with our feelings, he says, but the tricky part is that our emotions and our feelings are not the same.   We tend to conflate them, but feelings are internal subjective states that are known only to those who have them.

We communicate about our feelings by language. Emotions, on the other hand, are bodily and mental states – anger, sexual desire, affection – that drive behavior.

Anyone who claims to know what animals feel doesn’t have science on their side, he cautions. It remains conjecture.

But science has come a long way to prove that animals do have emotions, similar to ours in many ways, different in some others.

In this regard, animals appear to be closer to us to a degree that was unimaginable even a few years ago.

The  video of Mama’s last moments is extraordinary and deeply moving. Mama was a 59 year old matriarch who had formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. They had worked together for many years.

When Mama was dying, van Hooff went to visit her in her cage for a final hug. Their goodbyes were filmed and went viral. They show Mama happy to see him, and even struggling to comfort him. She welcomed him with a huge smile while reassuring him by patting his neck.

This story and many others like it form the core of de Waal’s argument, showing that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, guilt, joy, disgust and empathy.

That does not mean, he cautions again and again, that animals think like us, understand what we understand, and reason the way we reason.

What animals are feeling he reminds us more than once, is speculation.

The idea that animals have emotions that are much more complex and familiar than we thought fact, it is science.

And feelings are clearly less accessible to scientists than emotions, because animals don’t have a language we can understand or interpret.

“One day,” de Waal writes, “we may be able to measure the private experiences of other other species, but for the moment we have to content ourselves with what is visible on the outside. In this regard, we are beginning to make progress.

de Wall predicts that the science of animal emotions will be the next frontier in the study of animal behavior.

I haven’t finished the book,  I’ve only gotten through four or five chapters. It is perhaps the most exciting book I’ve read yet about animals and their consciousness and emotions, long a favorite subject of mine. And convincing. I know so much more about this subject than I did, and I have yet to read most of the book.

Mama’s Last Hug is impressive on many levels, but the rational tone is especially striking. We don’t have to generalize about animals just because we love them so much. And we shouldn’t.

How likely is it, de Waal asks, that the immense richness of nature fits on a single dimension.

Isn’t it to be expected, he wonders, that each animal has its own mental life, its own intelligence and emotions, adapted to its own senses and natural history. Why would the mental life of a fish and a bird (or dog) be the same?

Yet many people are quick to project our own emotions and feelings onto all animals, as if they were one and the same.

This is why I rely on scientists more than the mystics and amateurs who sometimes run amok on the Internet and publishing. The good scientists have to think about what they say, they can’t simply pander to the needs of loving, but often needy people. Scientists don’t tell people what they want to hear, they tell them what they believe is the truth.

Frans de Wall is one of the world’s premier primatologists and biologists.  He knows his stuff in a way very few people who talk about animals know their stuff.

He is rational, experienced, balanced and honest. I earned more about animal emotions from reading this few chapters than I have learned in the previous score of books I’ve read on the subject.

I’ll be writing about this remarkable book as I continue to read it. My head is already buzzing with things in the book that I want to write about and talk about. I’ll be talking about it for sure on the next broadcast of “Talking To Animals” on March 20. I won’t be doing the broadcast tomorrow, Wednesday the 12th.

Mama left a rich legacy, behind her. She is the perfect story to open us up to the subject, and to re-think what we know and believed.

I was changed by her story.

From the very beginning of my Mansion work, I’ve been focused on reading to and with the Mansion residents. I’ve learned that almost everything I thought and assumed was wrong, I’ve started from scratch a half-dozen times.

It was an engaging children’s book – the Wonky Donkey, that helped me figure out how to read to the residents at the Mansion in a way that is engaging, entertaining and valuable to them (as opposed to me.)

I had my own rather snobbish and elitist ideas about choosing books that I thought were serious, I didn’t wish to patronize or diminish the people I was reading to.

I dismissed children’s books a demeaning. I didn’t know that although we lump them together, elderly people are not all alike, that is just another form of bigotry and insensitivity.

The truth is children’s books are sometimes perfect for them, as are other kinds of books. It isn’t a question of infanticizing them, it’s a question of stimulating and entertaining them.

In the wealthier, more expensive and upscale elder care facilities – there are many in the affluent cities of Vermont  – I wouldn’t think of reading the Wonky Donkey, a funny work-play book by Craig Smith.

The residents there have a different history with reading.

In the Mansion, the residents were not rich enough to get to college in many cases, and they are sick, often with memory problems and other issues that brought them into Medicaid assisted care.

It is difficult for some to focus, or stay alert, or remember what they are seeing and hearing. I had to drop my own prejudices about reading and find books that they reacted to.

Some are children’s books, like the Wonky Donkey and HippoPotamus and Pirate Chicken, some are more adult, longer and more complex – we are reading a story about Maud, an 88-year-old woman who kills people who get in her way and is never suspected of murder. She is just a sweet old lady.

Other are short stories and poems designed for the elderly. I bring them all.

I have begun reading a ground-breaking new book to the residents called Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell us about Ourselves by famed primatologist Frans DeWall. This story, about an aging chimpanzee named Mama and her touching fare well to a biologist she had known for years.

The book has already ignited a wave of discussion and thought about animal emotions.

I’ve also been reading excerpts from Saving Simon, a book of mine detailing the rescue of a  savagely abused donkey.

Maria came to the Mansion with me today, the residents love her energy and enthusiasm. She was uncomfortable at first reading a children’s book to the residents, until she saw the smiles on their faces and heard their laughter.

She has a wonderfully natural way of communicating with them.

This is what I look for: a response. The most important thing is to show up, they are not critics, they are not dissecting my reading choices, or sniffing at children’s books. They want to trust me and Maria, to connect with us, to laugh, and get respite from their weariness and the inevitable monotony of assisted care.

I am there all the time. They know I will be back.

They want to be surprised, challenged a bit, think.

They love all kinds of stories, odd sounds and color and anything to do with animals.

I bring a mix of stories, and am no longer uncomfortable bringing tales of Pirate Chickens and Wonky Donkeys. Neither am I afraid to read a story about an 88-year-old killer, hiding behind the screen of her age.

I am connecting, I can feel it. The Activity Room is full when I come with Red,  the point is to show up. The stories are almost secondary. This is perhaps the most satisfying work I have done at the Mansion, I am also excited about my Meditation Class, which resumes Thursday.

That is also full up and I’m bringing meditation beads for everyone who comes.

The Mansion residents are important to me on so many levels. One is not what I am teaching them, but what they are teaching me.

If you wish to support this work, I’m planning all kinds of Spring and Summer stuff, boat rides, wagon rides, outings, lighter clothes.

You can contribute by sending a donation to Paypal, [email protected] or by check, Jon Katz, Mansion Fund, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. My readings and meditation classes will be regular weekly events.

I’ve got about $700 in the fund now, which is good. I also received a $500 check which will go to the boat rides I am planning in June and September on Lake George. Thanks for it.

Small donations are also very welcome. I love my $5 people.