Update at bottom of post 15:19 MDT
In Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley wrote a chapter about a horse suffering colic. When the owner discovered the horse, he reflected that everyone ought to decide whether to pay for colic surgery before calling the vet. I’ve gone one better: I’ve decided in advance for our four horses. My husband knows the decisions, and so does my trainer. It’s a grim little list: who to try to save and who to let go. Colic surgery outcomes have gradually improved over the years, but it is still a costly procedure with a guarded prognosis for a full recovery.
It was a good thing that I had planned to stay at the barn all day. I rode Lily in the morning. My trainer was doing a class for her small horse camp. Lily was very good for me – we warmed up a little, then jumped some cross rails and a small verticals. I joked to my trainer that it was the sort of session that Lily liked – a five minute warm up followed by jumping, with none of this boring flat work. My trainer hoped none of the kids had noticed, since she stress the value of properly warming up the horse before you jump. “Just tell them it is because Lily is young and very fit unlike these middle-aged horses.”
After lunch we played horse charades before going out to the barn to do something else with the horses. I worked helping one of the older kids clicker train a horse to stand still while she mounted. The rest of the kids started learning how to braid a horse’s mane properly for a horse show.
We decided to finish up with a little bareback riding. I had just brought my Hap horse in from the field when my trainer said – “I think Callie may be colicking.”
Callie is a hardworking little chestnut roan Arabian mare. She is smaller than most Arabians, the size called a medium pony. At nineteen, she is my trainer’s hardest working school horse, and has helped teach a lot of kids to ride over the years. She had worked well that morning, and been standing quietly while the kids braided her mane.
I took Callie from my trainer so my trainer could work getting the kids settled. I led her to some grass, and Callie showed no interest. She glanced at her flanks. Annoyance at the flies or pain? Then she did a strange stretch, one that I have only observed in colicking horses, and I told my trainer it was colic. We gave her a painkiller called banamine, and my trainer started walking her. Spasmodic colic, caused by gas, will frequently be relieved by these actions. For her horses, my trainer’s procedure is to give banamine, keep watching and walking the horse, then call the vet if they don’t show signs of responding to the banamine within an hour. So far, this looked like a mild colic, like a dozen others I have observed and worried about over the years in my own horses and those belonging to friends.
I rode Hap with his bareback pad, keeping an eye on my trainer and Callie, and also trying to keep an eye on the kids. They were more subdued by worry than the heat. Callie wasn’t the first pony they rode, because she can be a little too quick for beginners, but she was usually their second.
I saw Callie do one thing that I had never seen a colicking horse do before, a kind of squatting move, and decided to put Hap up. I was about to tell my trainer that I thought this was a bad colic, when my trainer announced she was going to call the vet. It was less than half an hour after we started the banamine.
I quickly turned Hap out and started walking Callie. It was hard to keep her on her feet. Only my trainer and I could do so. It takes a lot of determination to keep a horse up who wants to go down. The one time we called a vet for Hap, he tried to bite his handlers while walked, but most horses seem to go deeply inside themselves, focussed on the pain in their gut.
The vet was there half an hour after we called her, which was forty minutes after Callie started presenting the first faint symptoms. By then, her back legs were buckling and her trim little mid-section had become grossly distorted with gas. She still fighting though. Whenever we headed toward the mare field she would increase her step. She seemed to think that if she could just get to her home she would feel much better.
Although the wait for the vet is always agonizing, this was one of the worst. At one point, neither my trainer nor I thought the little mare would be alive when the vet got there. The vet pulled in a minute later.
Vets have good drugs. When her injections didn’t help alleviate the pain, we knew it was very bad. The vet siphoned off some gas but couldn’t get any water down into Callie’s stomach. She tried to do a rectal exam to identify a twisted intestine, but couldn’t get deep enough. Several times, the mare nearly went collapsed on the vet or the handlers. The vet asked if my trainer was interested in a surgical solution. The only ethical alternative was euthanasia. There is no suffering like a horse suffering torsion, an intestinal twist, and it looked fairly obvious that this was a twist.
My trainer decided that Callie deserved a chance in repayment for her years of hard work, even if she could never return to work as a school pony. I ran to hook up one of the other boarders horse trailer to my truck since my trainer’s two horse trailer was not big enough. I was passionately grateful that I had my truck, since I don’t like pulling larger trailers with my trainer’s truck. Our truck, an 1989 F250 diesel, is a bitch to drive normally, but is a dream tow vehicle. Trying not to rush, since a badly hitched trailer can have fatal consequences, I drove into the arena within less than ten minutes later. Every minute counted, since the outcome for colic surgery improves the earlier it happens, before necrosis can set in for the twisted intestine. The vet was calling ahead to the clinic: the principal of the practice would do the surgery with her assistance.
We had failed to keep Callie on her feet. She lay like a dead thing on her side for a bit, than rolled vigorously several times. Horse people used to think that the rolling caused the twist, but now it seems more likely that the pain of the twist causes the horse to roll. Callie gave up and lay on her side again.
We tried to get Callie to her feet, pushing and pulling. My trainer kept yelling at the kids and other onlookers to stay a way so they wouldn’t get hurt. I had hold of Callie’s lead rope at one point. I pulled as hard as I could and yelled, “get up, you bitch,” forgetting the impressionable young minds. This got through the fog of drugs and pain, and startled, Callie scrambled to her feet.
I kept her walking until we were in the trailer, and undid her lead rope. My trainer was shouting at me to hurry and get out because she didn’t want me trapped by Callie if she started flailing about. I removed the lead rope and hopped out. The vet told us not to worry if Callie went down in the trailer: that was the reason for getting the biggest trailer without partitions we could find. Five minutes later we were on the road, and in fifteen minutes were at the equine clinic. I drove a little faster than I usually do when towing on those country highways, about as fast as I would drive a car. I was slightly encouraged that Callie was on her feet when we got to the clinic, though we felt her go down several times on the trip.
Callie was being prepped for surgery as I started writing this in my paper journal. My trainer watched through the observation window. I have watched a fair number of procedures over the years, but decided I wasn’t up for watching abdominal surgery. I sat in the waiting room, wrote this, and read a book that I happened to have in the truck.
It takes a long time to close after the surgery. My trainer kept reporting “they are still stitching.” Finally, two and a half hours after we unloaded the mare, a little before eight, the principal came out of the operating room. He reported that Callie had suffered a 360 degree twist of the large intestine. He didn’t see any necrosis, but that the gut did not look as healthy as he would have liked, though it continue to improve during the surgery. The prognosis is very guarded for the first 72 hours, not least because endotoxins may develop and cause founder.
My trainer and I were both exhausted and there was still horses to care for her at her place. I had called Jack and told him what was going on so he could care for the critters at our place. Another boarder was there when we got to my trainer’s barn, and she helped us get horses in. Fortunately, though it was past their usual feeding time, none seemed particularly worried or frantic, and it was still light enough to see.
I had a late supper of pizza, the first food I had in eight hours, at my trainer’s before driving home in her car. With hellish timing, we plan with some friends to take some trucks and trailers and pick up some hay this morning. This is hay at a very reasonable price from a guy who hadn’t planned to cut it unless he had a buyer, and hay is expensive enough right now that it seems worth hauling it ourselves.
15:19
When I saw my trainer early this morning, she told me that the vet called her at 11:30 the previous night. He had been with Callie since she came out of anaesthesia. She came out in the same dreadful pain which no painkillers could touch. It did not seem that the gut had retwisted which occasionally happens. Everything he could feel up to the stomach felt normal. His tentative conclusion was that there was something else going on that caused the lower intestine twist. He was prepared to keep trying, but concurred with my trainer’s request to administer euthanasia.
Life really sucks at times.