Stu’s Colic

This is a depressing follow up to my last post. I actually never imagined that this would happen to me, but here we are, with a thankfully doing-well-now horse, and a dent of over $6k in my wallet. 

My horses have been mostly healthy. We’ve had a few minor colics, one gross cut, and that one time when Berry got stuck on a fence. I truly think that’s because they are out on pasture 24/7. It is the healthiest way for a horse to live. And incidentally, the cheapest, which is very nice for my cheapskate self. 

So it hit me like a stack of brickish pianos when Stu ended up with a medical emergency.

To set the scene, it was Friday. I had been texting my trainer earlier. Stu has been in training for a few weeks now, and the following day was going to be my first lesson on him.  

“For pete’s sake, BRING IN HIS NOSEBAND!!!” she had said (I’m paraphrasing). For you see, I had lost his noseband when I moved him, and he’d been using a Frankenstein bridle made of up parts of my trainer’s other bridles. Well, really just the noseband, that was the only piece that was missing. But I could have substituted some other parts in there for the giggles. 

By the way, I did not bring in the noseband, and still haven’t.

When she called me later that day, I assumed it was about the noseband again. I would have rather it been about the noseband. But it wasn’t. It was the first call to tell me something was wrong with my horse. 

He was choking. He’s never choked before. My trainer tried to clear it, and then called the vet out. When the vet arrived, she was surprised to find that my trainer had actually managed to clear it. But now Stu was colicking. 

They tried to treat him at the barn, but they couldn’t get it resolved so they shipped him to our local emergency equine clinic. 

I arrived at the vet clinic minutes before he did, so I got to see him step off the trailer. He was trembling and definitely in pain. They weighed him and he topped off at a solid 1300 lbs. He’s a big boy, although he did end up losing some weight after this. He lost at least 50-75 lbs from this experience, impressive weight loss for only a week. (The diet industry doesn’t want you to know this one trick!)

They ran tests on him, with nothing definitively saying what was wrong. The good news was his heart rate, originally 80 (which I’m told is very high), went down with sedation. The ultrasound wasn’t showing anything wrong, but the vet explained that he’s a huge horse and realistically it can only see so far inside of him.

It wasn’t until the final test that they figured out something was wrong: He was uncomfortable because someone stuck their arm up his bum. He even had a second person join in! 

In what seems like an incredibly unscientific method, the vet literally stuck her arm up his bum and felt around. Equine medicine sure is amazing. Before all the fancy machines, it was just one person sticking their hand up where it didn’t belong. Why does that seem like some weird witch doctor stuff? Are they going to throw some leeches on him now too?

But ultimately, yeah, sticking the arm up the butt made the vet realize that the small intestine was too high. Was that causing the distress? Unfortunately impossible to know if that’s exactly what it was, but it may have been. The sad thing is that sometimes vets just don’t know. There’s a lot of uncertainly. 

As for what caused it… we also don’t know. Did the choke cause him enough distress to colic? Was he colicking before the choke, and the colic caused him to choke? Was it something that has been sitting inside of him his whole life and this is the moment it chooses to flair up? 

Literally don’t know. There’s a language barrier, and we can only guess at what’s going on. 

Ultimately the vet said we had two basic options. They could do surgery to figure it out, with the estimate being about $20,000 to fix a small intestine problem. Then afterwards, he’d have to spend three months in a stall, with his tummy in a custom sling because he’s too giant for any sling that’s on the market (didn’t know there was a market for horse tummy slings, I’m learning so much every day.)

Or they would do their best with medicine, and hope it helps. 

My trainer pulled me aside to discuss this with me. As someone who had been through it before, she wanted to give me some of her wisdom, mainly explaining the practical side of things. I think our hearts would always tell us to try anything to save the animal we love, but we have to look at it from another side, too.

$20,000 is a lot of money. There’s no guarantee it would even work, and even if it does, there’s a long and painful recovery. The horse may never be the same again. It may not be rideable the way it used to be. It may die of complications later on anyway. 

It’s a depressing thought, but it’s true. It is a really expensive surgery and there might not be a horse at the end of it. I think it’s admirable that people are willing to take the risk on their horses, but to be honest, it wasn’t even an option for me to begin with because I don’t have $20,000 that I can spend on a horse in any way. That saved me from having to literally make the choice between money and saving a horse, because I literally did not have the money to pay for it, it would have been impossible. I had to pick the medicine.

Everyone was very understanding of this choice. To be fair, I don’t think they were going to try surgery unless Stu got even worse, and at that point he seemed to be doing better anyway. But I had to make a decision before I left him in their care, just in case something happened overnight (because of course this happened in the evening, on a Friday, on a holiday weekend. Impeccable timing.)

The good news was I did not get any phone calls overnight. No phone calls is very good news!

When they gave me their check in report, it was mostly positive. He had recovered from the colic overnight, and was now resting comfortably. The bad news was he now had pneumonia from the choke. But the good side of that was he was more certain to recover from that than an uncertain, vague but painful colic. Pneumonia was treatable. It just required gallon sized IV bags and medicine. 

It was relief at this point. He may still be in the hospital but he’s stable and not dead, so that’s a pretty big improvement. He was in there for a total of 4 days, but he recovered. He wasn’t even coughing when he left. The next phase was just rest and recovery.

We are now at the point where he can be ridden at a walk and adding in some small trots. We don’t want to trigger any coughing. But it stinks that I’m paying for board at a training barn where very little training will occur for the next month.  Between that and the large vet bills, it’s been an expensive month for me. 

I’m really hoping that this is just a little blip. Once he’s recovered, he’ll both be working hard, and he’ll become the well trained horse I know he can be. Literally everything was going so well otherwise. The trainer really liked him, think he has a great brain, and he tries really hard. Theoretically, it shouldn’t be long until I have a horse I trust. 

But who knows what the future holds, as I certainly didn’t expect this. I might be bringing him home a lot sooner than I planned, since I won’t be able to pay the board anymore. Hopefully I’ll be able to hold on for a bit. They times I’ve ridden him the incident have made my day. My trainer gives me so much confidence that I know we’ll be progressing fast, as long as nothing else terrible happens.

Fingers crossed!