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I forgot to tell you, but Shirley, Billy, Melvin and I went riding at the horse camp on Saturday. We had talked about going someplace farther but it's a good thing we didn't because we ended up having to call an ambulance to come take Shirley to the hospital. We only did the short loop and didn't ride that hard and had already gotten back to the trailers when he started getting real dizzy and then started throwing up. He couldn't even put his horse back in the trailer, much less drive back home. Luckily he just lives right down the mountain from the camp, so Billy drove his truck and trailer back because Melvin didn't know how to drive a manual transmission, and Melvin drove Billy's truck. I followed them both and called Shirley's wife to give her a heads up as to what was happening and to tell her that I thought he really needed to go to the doctor as soon as we got back.

Poor Shirley hung his head out the window and threw up all the way back. His wife was waiting in the driveway when we got there and helped him in the house and called an ambulance. It was kinda funny because when it was all said and done there were like 6 or 8 rapid responders that showed up, one guy in a car, another guy in a truck, then a lady in another car, then 2 or 3 guys in the ambulance, then to top it all off, another guy in a small fire truck. I was kinda joking with his daughter-in-law out in the yard and said "Hell, he's sick, he's not on FIRE!". He looked like death warmed over when they brought him out on the stretcher and I was really worried about him. They took him on to Decatur General instead of the little hospital in Moulton.

I called and checked on him yesterday morning and his wife said that they had done all kinds of tests on him and determined that it was inner ear trouble. I sure was glad to hear that because I was thinking of all kinds of other things that it could've been. He'd just had a colonoscopy on Thursday and had 4 polyps removed from his colon and even though he said he felt fine and had no trouble at all with it, we were afraid that maybe something had started bleeding inside or something like that. Or it could've been a heart attack. Throwing up is sometimes a symptom of that I think. Inner ear is no walk in the park, but it's nothing compared to what it could've been. I'm just glad it happened back at the truck and not somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. I don't know what we'd've done then, except maybe throw him over the back of his horse and haul his butt out. ;o)

I won't get to ride this coming weekend because it's Mother's Day and we're taking Mom out on Saturday because my sister-in-law's Master's Degree Graduation from UAH is on Sunday (of all days) and we wanted to be there for her too. So that was my excitement for the week. I sure as heck hope we don't have any more rides like that in the near future!