4. From Wales to Portugal Part 3 (Final)
For part 2 click this link https://heartbreakandhappiness.medium.com/3-from-wales-to-portugal-part-2-dd4ad89bf730?sk=74048841f7e728c695e82b023a2e4b90
The next few weeks were awful and I watched countless videos of dogs giving birth, all screaming and panting, I made Leon watch them too so that we were as prepared as possible for when it happened. Lola grew fatter and fatter and at one point her nipples were nearly touching the floor. Leon had been given some work with one of his friends, it wasn’t exactly legit but it was good money and we were able to start saving some money for some land of our own. The situation with Gareth was terrible and what had once been our heaven was now becoming a living hell, he would hardly speak to us when we saw him and it upset me so much as we had done nothing to warrant this attitude he was now giving us.
After the wedding I’d tried to communicate with Leon’s mum and wanted to send her pics of the day but she ignored me and then both his mum and his sister unfriended us on facebook, we thought they had decided to close their profiles down but a few weeks later we had a friend request from them both again. We thought this was really odd until we looked at their profiles and realised there had been a big family party for his mother’s birthday and we hadn’t been invited. His sister who was still good friends with an ex of Leon’s had apparently been responsible for organising this and wanted to apologise to me for the snub but I’d lost patience and told her to forget it, it was obvious I wasn’t their cup of tea just as much as they weren’t mine, I was sick of trying to make an effort and getting nowhere, I felt so sorry for Leon always trying to please them and nothing he did was ever good enough, they weren’t going to affect me the same way, I had more important things to focus on.
We watched Lola like a hawk through the remainder of her pregnancy and one night she wanted to go out but it was really late and I wouldn’t let her, I put some paper down at the front door and if she needed to go to the toilet she could go on the paper rather than out into the field where I wouldn’t be able to see her. We had made a big box in the living room to prepare for the birth with towels and I had a suction thing in case the pups were born and not breathing, I was as prepared as any novice could be and was expecting the worst. She was behaving weird so I carried her into the box and sat with her, I could feel her start to strain and didn’t think she was in labour as she wasn’t panting or screaming like the dogs I’d seen on the videos.
It was 3am and Leon was fast asleep in bed, I looked at Lola’s foof and could see she was trying to push something out, I shouted to Leon to wake up, if he wanted to see the pups being born now was the time. She gave a big push and out came the first one who we called Missbizz, Lola was supposed to lick and break the sacks but she was completely freaked out so I broke it after a minute or so and rubbed the little pup, it seemed fine, a few minutes later there was another one much bigger than the first, Obsidian had entered the world, we call her Sid for short and again I broke the sack, straight away another one, this one was a boy and we called him Yoda, then came Walter and finally Alfie, it was about 7am by this point and both Lola and I were shattered, she popped them out like smarties and I was so proud of her, I touched her stomach and felt another one inside her. I pulled her up from laying down and told her we weren’t finished yet, one more to come, she was using me to lean into and finally another one came out. This one wasn’t moving and I knew it had been in there too a long time, I broke the sack but she wasn’t breathing, I got the suction cup and that was rubbish and didn’t work, I used my logic and put my mouth around her nose and sucked and spat out the crap then rubbed her like crazy until she started to move and breathe, all 6 pups not 7 as we thought were successfully delivered and the last one had little white feet so we called her Socs.
Lola was a useless mum for the first few days and I had to keep moving them all around so that they were all feeding but after the initial period she became mum of the year and wouldn’t even leave them to go to the toilet, we’d have to force her outside to pee. Bizzy would come and look over them, I think he knew they were his and he looked sort of embarrassed but proud at the same time, Sunny was so excited and wanted to be mum too but we kept her away from them as they were Lola’s pups and she had to accept that. Little Socs was really weak and I spent so much time making sure she was feeding off Lola as the others were so big and greedy. After about 10 days Lola started acting really weird and throwing herself into the washing pile and we knew something was wrong, it was midnight and bank holiday Monday when I called the emergency vet, they told us to bring her in immediately.
We raced through the fields with a box of puppies and Lola in my arms, there were lumps appearing all over her head and I thought she was going to die in the car, we banged on the vets door and they opened but told us they needed to know we could pay before they would treat her and it would be at least 600 pounds, Leon said it didn’t matter we had the money, help her, so they rushed her inside and we waited for what seemed like hours in the waiting room with the box of puppies on our lap. The vet finally appeared and told us she had Eclampsia the pups had drained all her calcium and we got her there just in time. They said she’d be ok but would need to stay on a drip for a few days and the pups couldn’t feed from her anymore, the vet didn’t think they would survive as they were so young and needed mum’s milk. I asked for puppy milk and bottles and told them they would survive I would make sure of it.
Lola stayed at the vets for a few days and the final bill was thousands of pounds, it wiped out nearly all our savings but she was more important than money. The pups were such hard work and needed feeding every two hours, Leon was constantly mixing up milk and I was trying to feed them, they didn’t like the milk and it was a battle to get them to drink it, we got a little weighing scales and would put them in a cup to weigh them and make sure they were gaining weight. Socs was a problem as she was so weak and so she had constant attention and I kept her close to me all the time. I’d closed down my recycling company by this point so I was able to devote all my time to them and Lola. We planned to rehome all the pups and Walter and Alfie were already promised to our friends, I told Socs if she became a strong girl and made it she could stay with us and if we went to Portugal we would take her with us.
They started to accept the milk and became strong little pups, I was totally exhausted and drained, they were thriving but I was on my knees. Then a few days later Bizzy started to become sick, he was vomiting and stopped eating and drinking, we again went back to the vets with him, this time our normal vets and not the very expensive emergency one we had taken Lola to. They weren’t sure what was wrong with him and started to run tests, he had every test they could run and nothing was showing up. The main vet took on his case and over the next few weeks he operated on him countless times and sent off samples to everyone he could think of but the diagnosis was blank, he became weaker and weaker. We tried him with every type of food we could think of but nothing would make him eat. Our big strong boy looked like a skeleton and I spent hours researching trying to find out what could possibly be wrong with him but to no avail. I even contacted a famous animal communicator to see if she could help us but she never replied in time. He was staying at the vets and we would go every day to see him, take him for a walk or carry him half the way as he was too weak to stand, by this point all our money had gone on vets fees and Leon took on more work and bigger risks to keep us going and to keep our dreams of finding our own place alive.
I was beside myself, Bizzy was my rock, my child, my friend and he had been there for me through all my tough times, I was going to fight to the end to save him and fight I did but it was a battle I lost. He came home to the fields with us for one more night, spent the night with Sunny, Lola and the pups and then the next day he vomited so badly with blood I knew it was the end. I carried him out of the fields and up to Leon who had rushed home from work to the car. We drove with him in silence to the vets and all gathered around him as they gave him his final injection and he went to sleep forever. I can hardly write this, the pain is still so severe. We brought him back down the fields and Leon dug his grave in his favourite spot, we wrapped him in my wedding dress and Leons wedding waistcoat, put his favourite sticks in with him and covered him over. We put stones all around his grave and I carried a little chair over to the spot so I could still sit with him. We never discovered what killed him but a little voice inside me tells me Gareth, he was angry when Bizzy would go over to his polytunnel to catch the rats and Gareth didn’t care about animals at all, I can’t prove it but something tells me he fed him something or left something out for him to eat that poisoned him, if that is the case then I wish nothing but misery on that man.
My world fell apart and I couldn’t stop crying, I was trying to take care of the pups, Lola and deal with my grief from losing my best friend. Our perfect life down the fields was over and I just wanted to leave but how and where would we go, moving back to the city would be the end of me and I knew it. Our relationship with our families was awful, Leon’s parents were horrible to me which made it very difficult for Leon, his ex girlfriend kept contacting him and he had changed his phone number many times but she still somehow managed to get the new number, the only people that had his number were his best friend, his parents and his sister. One night a text came through while Leon was asleep and I looked at his phone, it was again his ex-girlfriend. I woke Leon up and we had a huge argument and he stormed out of the shed.
He wouldn’t answer the phone to me all the next day and I was just stuck down the shed with the pups and found myself once again totally lost in life with nowhere to turn but this time was much worse as I was totally alone and without money or hope. We had tons of booze left over from the wedding so I started drinking and kept drinking, I was drowning in grief and hopelessness. I called my friend and asked him to send someone down to collect the pups in the morning, I didn’t plan on being there and put the phone down. I sat back down and continued to drink. I’m not sure how much I drank when the shed door opened and there was my friend who I’d taken Sunny from. My other friend had called her and said he thought something was wrong and she had come straight down there. Her and her husband picked me up and walked me out of the fields. They secured the pups and left food and water for them before taking me to their house. They made me vomit and put me in the bath to sober me up and kept walking me around the house. I eventually fell asleep and woke up early with the realisation of what had happened the night before….
My friend had been calling and texting Leon but he wouldn’t answer the phone to anyone, he had pulled down his shutters and stuck his head in the sand, we were both drained, physically, mentally and financially. I insisted on going back to the fields early in the morning, my friend’s husband drove me and we spoke in the car, I promised him I wouldn’t do anything stupid again and I meant it, somehow I would find a way through it all and I was a fighter, not someone who would give up. I was in such a state but my strength was still there although buried underneath my shattered exterior. When I got back to the shed Leon was there, he’d been at his best friends and finally read my friends messages and come back, he was so sorry for not answering me and didn’t realise how much I was drowning. He said he’d had enough of all of it and we should just pack up and go to Portugal. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from him, he was serious, he really wanted to leave Swansea. He said we’d rent a place out there rather than buying, he could come back and forth to work every few months and he was earning enough to keep us going. I went from feeling like there was no hope left in the world to seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
Losing Bizzy hit us so hard and we had his little babies with us, Alfie went to his new family and they renamed him Marlon, Walter went a few weeks later and we started to look for homes for the others but they were all we had left of Bizzy and we decided to keep them. All 4 would stay with us, we couldn’t save Bizzy but we could ensure his children had the best life possible with us so our 2 dog pack became 6. We started to search for houses to rent in Portugal, we bought a little caravan so that we could transport our stuff and the dogs over there, we knew that we would eventually buy land and we could live in it when that happened. Leons van wasn’t powerful enough to tow the caravan so we swapped it for a Land Rover. Money was so tight so we did everything in stages over the next few months. Leon didn’t even have a passport and when we filled in the forms to get one we needed his parents’ details, they refused to give us the information we needed and I couldn’t believe how difficult they were being. I rang the passport office and explained, they were great and told us to write this on the forms and they would do it without their information. Leon’s passport came through a few weeks later and the vet who had been so wonderful with Bizzy sorted out all the passports for the dogs at a fraction of the cost. We had found a house to rent for a few months in central Portugal which looked beautiful, we paid the deposit and a few months rent in advance and we slowly started to organise all our things ready to leave.
We asked Conor to come with us but he didn’t want to and I thought long and hard about leaving my mum but I knew that she would want me to live my life just as she had lived hers when I was small. I organised care workers to come daily to look after her, modifications were going to be made to her house, my brother and his boys were living with her and my two sisters lived close by so it wasn’t like I was leaving her on her own. We booked the tickets for the ferry crossing, the earliest time they had was February and on Valentine’s day of all days. Once we had booked the ferry tickets we were on a countdown. The Land Rover could be temperamental and would often just stop, we’d been to the garage countless times to get Mandy as we affectionately called her fixed, I finally asked the mechanic to show me what he kept doing so that if she broke down on the way I’d know what to do to get her going again. He showed me a tiny little adaptor that regulated her fuel, he took it out, sprayed it with WD40 and put it back in again and hey presto Mandy would start. He’d been charging us 40 quid a time to do this over the last few weeks. We had parked the caravan at our friend’s place just over the fields and would go there to fill it up with some more bits and pieces we had to take. We didn’t have any furniture to take just our personal possessions and the dogs. We saved every penny we had and I was doing the car boot sales to sell what we didn’t need and whatever was left from the recycling company.
We were sailing early in the morning from Portsmouth so we planned to drive up the night before and sleep in the caravan in the car park before boarding the ferry. We said our final goodbyes to everyone that mattered and made our way over to hitch Mandy up to the caravan, we hugged our friends, secured all the dogs in the back of the car and started Mandy….Nothing, she wouldn’t start. I got out, lifted the bonnet and did what the mechanic had shown me and again nothing. I looked at my friend, it was 5pm and the garage was about to close, we jumped in her car and drove like the wind to the garage, we grabbed the mechanic and threw him in the back of her car and drove him back to Mandy. We begged him to fix her, he whacked the air filter and thankfully she sprung into action, we hugged him and our friends again and finally set off on what would be our very long journey to Portugal.
The pups had never really travelled before so we had to stop every so often to clean up the vomit from the back of Mandy. Lola and Sunny were super excited as they loved car journeys but the pups hated it. We had been so stressed getting everything ready that halfway through our journey we remembered our solar panels and generator which were still down the fields. It was too late to go back and get them so we just put their loss down to experience and carried on. We arrived at the port late that night, we were so worried to turn Mandy’s engine off in case she wouldn’t start again but we had no choice. We all climbed into the back of the caravan to try to get some sleep before the ship sailed in the morning. Leon slept on one side and me on the other with 3 dogs each, we took it in turns to walk them around the carpark so they could go to the toilet and finally morning arrived. We were so tired and stressed but we were finally in the queue for the ship. The dogs all had to be muzzled and they were going crazy with them and pulling them off all the time. We boarded and the ship was full of people and there were so many dogs, Leon and I wondered how we were going to get them all to the ship’s kennels in one go. We took 3 dogs each and headed for the elevator, it was rammed and two men started to argue, they began pushing each other and I got straight in the middle of them and told them to grow up and pack it in or I’d whack the pair of them, my patience was non existent at this point. They shut up and finally we were out of the lift and were able to put the dogs into their stainless steel kennels. We gave them their blankets, water, food and had no choice but to leave them there. They started howling as soon as we left them.
Leon and I went down to the bar on the ship and ordered a well deserved drink, we were still concerned about Mandy and the massive journey ahead of us, Leon was worried sick about leaving the dogs in the kennels and we could hear them howling from a few decks down. We hoped they would settle down at some point but every time we went to check on them we could hear their dog’s chorus before we got near. Leon went off to bed and I decided to stay in the bar and listen to the awful entertainment. I ordered myself a great big gin and tonic and sat looking out at the dark waters of the sea and thought how far we had come to get to this point and how there was nothing about the UK I would miss. I heard a commotion at the bar and saw two women fighting, the two bar staff had no idea what to do and just stood watching them, I drank my drink and made my way to the elevator, the elevator took me down to my floor and as it opened the two fighting girls were outside on the floor, they’d punched each other all the way down the stairs and by this point were both naked on their top half, their clothes were strewn up the stairwell, normally I would have jumped in and pulled them apart but this time I thought no, dodging their punches and kicks I just smiled to myself, brits and booze, it’s a wonderful combination and I was leaving all that far behind.
The next morning Leon and I went up on the top deck, the dogs were still howling, we cleaned up the copious amounts of poo they had left for us and got them ready to go back to Mandy. We went out onto the deck and looked at the Spanish coastline, we felt the warmth of the air on our faces, it had been freezing when we left Wales and we could feel the temperature change. We hugged each other, this was the start of our new life together, away from all the bullshit the UK had to offer us. We took 3 dogs each and made our way down to Mandy and both prayed that she would start, we were one of the last to board the ship so we were first to get off and I looked behind at the queue of cars that wouldn’t be able to move if she didn’t start. Leon turned the key and Mandy started immediately, we were so relieved and drove off the ship. This was it, we had made it, all the stress, planning and organisation had finally paid off and we were here, our new life was about to start.
This is the final instalment of ‘From Wales to Portugal’ the next part of our blog will be about how we found our dream farm and the start of our animal rescuing journey.
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