ANIMAL, ANIMAL | Emily McNally

Clancy looks at me with a wide-open jaw, his lips are pulled back and his ears are pinned. It’s about as clear a warning as you can get from a horse. I’m a novice rider, but even if you just told me that horses exist, and introduced me to this one a moment ago, I would understand the message. Fuck off. I take a step back, not out of fear but to let him know I’ll proceed respectfully.

After a lifetime of longing to ride a horse, I’ve only recently started taking lessons. I decide I want to ride not long after I’m diagnosed with breast cancer. My daughter, a talented rider of ten years, says my best quality for being with horses is that I’m never afraid. Horses are intuitive. Your fear makes them wary, so it’s lucky that I’m stupid confident.

While brave with horses, I’m squeamish about illness and medical procedures. In one pamphlet they give me after my diagnosis, but before my surgery, there is this sentence: Most women will look normal in a bra. I keep circling around this one line. Who wrote it? I wonder how they thought it sounded. Practical? Hopefully not comforting. I cannot imagine any woman reading this and then breathing a sigh of relief. What makes this sentence upsetting is what it leaves out, which is what your breast will look like out of a bra and, let’s be honest, that’s mostly when boobs matter. I obviously have more urgent things to absorb my attention, like will the surgeon get clear margins around the tumor and whether or not the cancer is in my lymph nodes, which would mean chemotherapy and a higher stage of cancer. But this one sentence crouches in the shadowy corners of my fogged, stressed brain, pouncing at inconvenient moments to remind me my body is in a transition that I have only the barest control over in procedure or outcome.

One of my favorite pictures of myself was taken at Lake Michigan when I was about three. I’m in a sagging swimsuit and I’m sharing an ice cream cone with a large, black dog I just met. I spent my teen years trailed by faithful cats who sat in my lap while I read and curled up next to me purring at night. I’ve always found animals more straightforward than people, even in their betrayals and slights. An animal person, you might say, though since humans are also animals, that’s a weird expression. An animal animal. When I’m diagnosed with something threatening to strip me to the bones of my biology, I feel more like an animal than ever. A creature made up of all the same particles and most of the same impulses as a ranch horse.

Clancy is a ridiculously handsome horse, a liver chestnut, red gold in the sun with a bleached mane. If you were casting a horse as a romantic hero, he would be your man. He’s muscular, with a large head and an elegant trot. But around the time I’m going through cancer treatment, Clancy is diagnosed with navicular syndrome, a degenerative condition of the tendons and ligaments of the feet, causing pain and a shortened stride. The condition can be managed but not cured. He stops being able to take riders. Mimi, his owner and my riding instructor, tends to everything. There are pills and shots, many sessions with the farrier to safeguard his front hooves. During his initial recovery, he is often in his stall, while other horses are turned out to pasture or groomed and saddled for lessons. He bellows his frustration across the arena.

During the time of our respective recoveries, I visit Clancy in his stall while my daughter rides. He’s sensitive to grooming, so I go slow. I always show him the brush first, makes sure he knows what’s happening. I try to let him know he can choose what to do. Which is kind of hilarious when you consider he’s over a thousand pounds and I’ve dropped down to my driver’s license weight due to constant, grinding anxiety. Sometimes I sing to him. Sometimes I ask him questions about his day and tell him about mine. If he walks away, I’ll leave his stall, assuming he needs space. Sometimes we play a game where he puts his nose to the spot he wants me to scratch. His front legs are often his choice, sometimes his side by his ribcage. One day, I’m scratching his shin, just below his knobby knee and he starts to very lightly nibble at the top of my head, eventually pulling my hair out of its ponytail. It feels good, like a head massage. Then, I realize he’s grooming me back.

Weeks after surgery and radiation, I get vivid memories of the early days of diagnosis and treatment. They swoop in at vulnerable moments and hijack my nervous system. Things that happened weeks ago suddenly feel more immediate than my actual surroundings.   

The radiology tech moving the ultrasound back and forth over the lump I found in my breast, his face falling, his chatter silencing. Finally, he said what I could feel hovering, though I could only catch it in pieces through my panic, probably cancer, small, not in lymph nodes, lumpectomy, radiation. I was shaking so hard my teeth were rattling. I wish I’d thanked him; it would be the most information I’d have from anyone for weeks. 

The assistant to the radiologist looked so young she made me think of my twelve-year-old twins. She wiped tears from my cheeks that I hadn’t realized I was crying, murmuring over and over, I’m so sorry. 

A woman with black eyeliner and cold hands shoots a titanium chip into my breast with a gun that reminds me of getting my ears pierced when I was twelve. 

Yet another woman, this one confusingly wearing a flowered dress, leads me back to the mammography room and puts my bloodied breast into the machine to make sure the titanium chip is visible. 

I text my husband from the changing room haltingly, my fingers shaking, my mind fumbling to find words. I finally settle on, “Call me.” 

The next time I visit Clancy, he’s particularly bad tempered. Pacing back and forth in his stall. Coming to me, then walking away. Agitated. Pent-up. I tell him I get it. You’re standing here looking out at the world and you can’t join in. You’re not sure if you’ll be ever be back out there again. The self you used to be seems to have vanished into thin air. So, what would it even mean to return? Our bodies have changed. We have new pain. We know things we wish we didn’t and we can’t unknow them. I start to cry. Through tears, wiping my face, I apologize for making it all about me. He walks over and puts his black velvet nose by my ear and huffs quietly. His warm breath feels like a secret and the hair on my arms raises.

There are so many clinical experiences when you are a cancer patient and I struggled to find the humanity in ordinary interactions. While I’ve never had cancer before, those handling my treatment have seen this a million times. It creates a disconnect that’s hard to overcome. When I go for my first checkup a week after my surgery, I bring my surgeon a box of candy and a thank-you note. What is the etiquette when someone skillfully removes a poisonous lump of flesh from your body? I also leave candy and a card for the nurses in surgery, though I regret I don’t know the name of the nurse I want to thank most. When I woke from surgery, my leaden body was flaring in pain, but the hot regions felt like distant continents, places I could name, but they weren’t where they should be. A nurse, the nurse, put her hand to my shoulder and said, “I had this surgery for the same diagnosis as you three years ago.” The warmth of her hand floated down to me through layers of fog, and then she said, “I’m fine now. You will be too.” As I was coming out of the swirling dark, she held me steady with these words and her hand on my shoulder. 

When Clancy’s body has recovered, he struggles to get back into routine. He spooks at bells and flashes of white he catches out of the corner of his eye. He’s annoyed when saddled, worried when groomed. The confident heartthrob has turned moody and unpredictable. Mimi works with him patiently, making sure all of his physical ailments are tended to so his rehabilitation goes smoothly. But one day, when I’m getting him ready to ride, she takes over to tighten his cinch and his teeth connect hard with a nerve in her elbow, bringing her to the ground. She tells me to ride while she’s recovering. When I take him to the mounting block to get on, he hangs his head low. He does everything I ask him to do before I finish the motion. It’s hard not to see his submission as apology or regret. “You’re a good boy, Clancy,” I say to him softly, scratching the side of his neck from the saddle. He twitches an ear in my direction to indicate he’s listening. I don’t know what’s going on with Clancy and every supposition can only go so far. But it’s hard not to see him lashing out at the person he loves the most as fallout from whatever demons he’s fighting in his head, maybe thready memories of searing pain, maybe the constant dread of not knowing what comes next.

A few hours before my surgery, I had to go to a nuclear medicine appointment. I had a very vague outline of this appointment, which was described as injecting a radioactive dye that would make my lymph nodes visible, so some of them could be removed to make sure no cancer had spread. My mind was occupied with the knife sliding into one of the most delicate parts of my body in a few hours. This appointment seemed like a blip. My husband stayed in the waiting room as a gentle male nurse led me down the corridor. We turned down another corridor, empty of people, and he indicated a room at the end of the hall, then quietly said, touching my arm lightly “This is very painful.” Hand to heart, this was the first time anyone had given me the indication that this was anything other than an innocuous appointment. My knees went a little weak and my stomach soured. He chatted to me gently as he prepped my skin and his needle. Then he held me by the shoulder and slid a thick needle into the center of my nipple. I went to a place deep inside myself, a place large enough to contain the pain but small enough to hold me. I breathed out every particle of oxygen in my lungs. Over the course of the next two injections, he told me I was very brave; he told me I was amazing. I tried not to scream. It only occurs to me later that maybe that’s why it was the last room at the end of a very long corridor. 

Clancy is still struggling to find his equilibrium taking riders, so we decide to do some ground work instead. During ground work, you lead the horse on a halter around you in a circle, keeping your center in line with the middle of his body. If your shoulder comes level with the horse’s, he’ll turn in to you, thinking you’re releasing the circular motion of the hold. What I like about it is the feedback is immediate. The twitch of an ear, a quick breath out, dropping the head—these are little things that let you follow a horse’s mood and attention. I send Clancy around me by raising his lead in my hand and pointing. He starts to walk in a circle and I release a little tension in the rope. I pivot tightly in a circle, keeping our bodies lined up. A little click of the tongue, a slight swing of the rope, and he moves faster, almost a trot. He needs so little encouragement. He understands what’s being asked perfectly and it seems to relax him to give it. Tension drains out of him in a lowered head and a snorting exhale. I accidentally break the hold by turning too quickly and getting a little ahead of him. Mimi admonishes me, “Start up again and do three laps, then bring him in like you mean it.” I nod. Clancy gets back into his rhythm in a couple of breaths. “You were a dancer,” my teacher says, “well, this is a kind of dance. It should have some elegance to it.”

My pulse quickens when she says this, because it feels like a doorway. We can control so little of what happens to us and, even if everything goes well, we’re not here for very long. The fear of how my body has failed me and how everyone’s body will fail in the end, is too overwhelming to take in whole, but cold tendrils of its reality have slid right through me, and now there’s nothing to do except try to find a way to live with it. I’m struck in this moment, not by how wobbly Clancy and I are in finding our old footing, but by how hard we’re trying in spite of the constant stumbles. Grace may slip away from us at any moment and we’ll be humbled again, but the moments we find our flow offer a slender path forward, a fragile promise of meeting the next moment alive and whole.

I keep my pivot as tight as possible, but try not to hold too much tension in the rope or my body. I take a deep breath and release it slowly; Clancy slows in response. I turn towards him, breaking the hold. I take three steps back and he walks right to me. I hold my hand out and he sets his velvet nose in my palms. He’s relieved. Something he was fighting in himself has been resolved for today.

Emily McNally is a writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Flights, The Sunlight Press, HerStry, Red Typewriter, PUNCH Magazine, The MacGuffin, Sensitive Skin and Chariot Press. She holds a master’s degree in theater from San Francisco State University and teaches drama to middle school students in the Bay Area. Find more of McNally's work at emilysmcnally.com.

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