Tack Box Talk
Tack Box Talk
Serious Injuries: The Stories of Holly, MIcky, Pinky and Chester
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Krishona Martinson, Carrie Williams and Colleen Brady share their experiences with serious medical issues with their horses. From eye injuries, fractures and neurological issues, they share how they coped with making difficult decisions in face of potentially career ending issues with their horses.
This is Hackbox and this is horse stories with the purpose. We are Decoin educators, but we are owners, we are judges, we are competitors, we are collected, we are volunteers.
SPEAKER_04We are we are horse owners just like you. And we want to share our horse stories with a purpose. Welcome to Extension Horses Tech Box Talk Series, Horse Stories with a Purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Heine from Oklahoma State University, and with me today is Dr. Chrisona Martinson from the University of Minnesota. Hello. Dr. Carrie Williams from Rutgers University. Hello. And Dr. Colleen Brady from Purdue University. Hello, everyone. So today we're actually being uh going to share the stories of Chester, Holly, Pinky, and Mickey. And unfortunately, well, we're going to be talking about serious horse health problems. We all know that they can happen. Talk a little bit about what they went through, the costs involved, and just what do you gotta do when you're facing some pretty serious issues with your horse? So, Krishona, you're gonna get us started off with the tale of Holly.
SPEAKER_02Yes, so Holly is my children's rock star, little pony. And um for several months we were fighting an eye issue. Uh we couldn't figure it out. The veterinary would come out, he would look at it, she still had vision, but we could start to see some changes like in her eye, like it appeared to be some growth. So something was growing out of the eye. Yeah, there was some, like you could visually see that something was changing in her actual eye, not around her eye, but in her eye. Um, and you know that that's I mean, you just know that that's not right. So we ended up going to an equine eye specialist. Luckily, he oh, go ahead.
SPEAKER_04What does that cost to go to an Where do you find an equine eye specialist?
SPEAKER_02So I'm very lucky that the equine eye specialist came to a clinic that was 10 minutes from my house. I did have to wait a month to get in to see him, and during that month her eye did get progressively worse. And he ended up biopsying the eye because he did not know what it was. Oh wow. Eye heals very quickly, actually, so the pony didn't um didn't seem to bother her. I would say you could tell the eye was painful because she was squinting quite a bit. Um, and towards the end, you could just tell she was uncomfortable. Well, when we got the biopsy back, it was cancer. So it was a so horses can get cancer in their eye? Well, she's a gray pony, so it's actually very, very common that they get they're going to get cancer of squamous cell carcinoma, and eye is a very common area. Now, if it was in the eyelid, like the third eyelid, they just take out the eyelid, but it was actually in her eye. So there was some fairly aggressive and expensive and expensive treatments we could have done with less than a 50% success rate, and we put the pony through a lot, or we could just have her eye removed.
SPEAKER_04Oh.
SPEAKER_02Yes. So it was the appointment in the biopsy to see the specialist was about $600 by the time it was all said and done. And the eye removal was a little over $900. And the pony actually came through it wonderfully. I was incredibly uh devastated myself to make that decision to go through with the surgery. Um, but the pony adapted, I mean, you know, they can still see. I mean, she can see with her other eye. And we were lucky that it was on the opposite side of which you lead the pony. So I noticed this for the first week while she had her eye patch on. We kept her in a separate pen and she would every now and then bump her nose. But within 10 days, she was clear to go. She was a performance pony, a speed event pony. And my kids were lightly riding her 10 days after once the veterinary removed the stitches. I did opt to put in a globe in her eye so that she didn't have the sick eye? Yes. But it color is it? But no, no, they actually sew the skin over it so that she doesn't have the sunken in appearance. I didn't so that was my that was just me being she's a beautiful pony, right? I just didn't want her to be teased by the other ponies. Of course. Yes. And I didn't want people to always be looking at her because from a well, the problem is from a distance you can't tell. So a lot of times people will rush up to her really quickly and not realize that she doesn't have an eye until they're uh upon her. But luckily, she is a saint and she's never spooked or been scared or kicked or anything. So she it was it it was a very excruciating decision for me personally because I just felt so bad and you know, I just felt so bad for the pony. But the veterinarian and the techs, and even all of my veterinarian colleagues were like Krishna, it's a very, very simplistic surgery, and it actually was. Yeah. So I was lucky, no complications.
SPEAKER_04So would she have um so if you hadn't done anything with her, what what would have happened?
SPEAKER_02I she would it would it would have been inhumane. Okay. It was like the the cancers actually growing out and you could see it. Um, I mean, not what you I mean, I could visually see it.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_02And I think it would have been inhumane to not do anything to her. Gotcha, because it was hurting her and it would just and she was squinting and it was constantly weeping, and even though we had a fly mask on her, you could see the trail of you know, just tears and goop coming out of her eye.
SPEAKER_04So pretty, pretty good outcome then for yes.
SPEAKER_02So now we have a one-eyed pony. Okay. But you know, I guess there's been I've heard a lot of stories of one-eyed horses that have done really well. Even some very prominent um, you know, performance horses, even stallions that were maybe injured as a two-year-old and then just adapted. I was worried because the pony is in her late 20s, which for a pony is I mean it's not end of life, but it's getting up there. Sure. Um, but she adapted very easily.
SPEAKER_04Well, it sounds like a good outcome for everybody involved then. So so Carrie, do you have uh so we're gonna talk about Baby and Mickey?
SPEAKER_01We're gonna talk about Mickey first. Well, let's do Mickey because I think it's a really good add-on to what Krishna just said because I dealt with a lot of the same issues with an eye injury in my thoroughbreds. Your horse had cancer too? No, not cancer, a totally different eye injury, completely different eye injury, but I can relate to the debating of do you take the eye or do you save the eye? Um, so just really briefly, my horse came in from the field one day. Mickey came in from the field one day, really squinting, you know, really kind of tearing up eyes. And, you know, I'm sure everybody here has had something like that in their horse at one point. So you don't think too much of it, you know, hit it with some ointment. Two days later, still the same. Called the vet. The vet came, gave me more ointment, set me on a path. A week later, same thing, nothing's changing. Week, month later, same thing, nothing's changing. So finally, the vet said, I think you need a specialist. So there we go again with getting an eye specialist. Fortunately, we had an eye specialist. She actually did all animals at an emergency vet clinic, small animal vet clinic nearby, but she did farm calls. So she actually came to the farm and we found out that what we were treating it for was a bacterial infection called a uh a bacterial abscess. Just like a hoof abscess, horses can get abscesses in their eyes, kind of like cats. When they get scratched, they can abscess. Anybody can abscess. She actually had a fungal stromal abscess, which is a fungal abscess within the cornea. So fungus had gotten in because the eye heals quickly, like you like Masona said. And something got in, the eye healed over, and then the bacteria or the fungus, because it was fungus, started to just grow inside the eye. And because we were treating it for bacteria, it wasn't fixing the problem. So a month had gone by with this this abscess in her eye, and nothing was working. So we started with the fungal ointments, nothing was working because we had waited so long. So, kind of to make the long story short, we ended up shipping her to um the University of Pennsylvania, New Bolton Center. They had an eye specialist there that could actually do the surgery. And you know, this kind of makes me cringe too. But what they had to do is basically go into the cornea, scrape out the abscess, and clean everything out, and then basically patch up the eye. They sew the eyelid shut, medication around the clock every two hours. Um, two weeks later, they tried to open the eye to see what it looked like, and it still wasn't healing. So they had to go in for a second surgery. Oh my god, they had to put corneal graft over the eye so that they can actually heal it. Where do they graft it from?
SPEAKER_04Like, do they have a donor cornea?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they had donor cornea. Are they alive or dead? Uh donors? Yeah. It's a cornea. It's it's not a live animal, it's like pieces from a dead animal. Okay, so pieces of dead cornea. They have a dead horse and they donor, yeah, like organ donor horse, I guess. Who knew? I didn't know that was a thing. Hey, until I had it happen, I didn't either. So let me just say, meanwhile, this whole time is okay, if none of this fixes the problem, we're taking the eye. But let me say I went through so many lengths because she was a highly competitive event horse. And while, yeah, I probably could have done more Dursage or you know, done some other things with her, the type of jumps at the level that we were jumping, I didn't feel safe with a horse with one eye. And actually, when it was all said and done, this was a four-month issue from start to finish when I was able to ride again. Um, I ended up retiring her. Oh, yeah. Granted, she can still ride and jump little things, but at the height we were jumping, I mean, we were going preliminary and you know, trying to move up even higher, I decided that it was it was not safe at that point. Um, granted, she still jumps today. You can look in her eye, she's got a little bit of a cloud, which is the the graft. Um, and the way the vet said is they equate it to like a human's cataract. Like you're looking through kind of a cloudy patch. They can still see, but it's just you know a little cloudy. That was when she was 14. She's 22 now, and we're still riding her, and I think she can still see, you know, all of the eye tests we do, she can still see.
SPEAKER_04So, when did you know? I guess you went through all of that to do the surgery with her, so she still could jump competitively, but she she didn't get her vision back what you thought she was gonna get.
SPEAKER_01She became a little bit spookier with that eye, like things in the shadows made her spooky when the light, like if we were riding through the woods or forest when the light was low, she would be a little bit looky with that eye. Um, so yeah, I think it just got to a point where I was like, I just didn't feel comfortable. And you know, maybe I could have pushed it, but um yeah, I didn't I didn't feel like it was worth it. And you know, she was 14, turning 15 at that point.
SPEAKER_04So, Carrie, how much did all of this cost with caring for Mickey's eye?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um I will say I had her insured, and if she wasn't insured, things might have been very different. Um, because my major medical was capped at 10,000. They paid me the 10,000, plus I put in an additional five. So it was out of pocket, at least 5,000 on this. So the whole thing all said and done was $15,000. Oh my goodness. Yeah. It you know, and yeah, you look back in hindsight, should I have just removed the eye, knowing now that you know I basically had to retire from competition anyway? Right.
SPEAKER_04Um would her life really been that much different? I mean, at least it sounds like from Holly, she's like, game on, just got one eye.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know if you can really totally tell what's gonna happen when they don't have an eye.
SPEAKER_00Well, and I I think you can't necessarily, and I think a lot depends on the horse's personality because I had a friend who had a horse who had a fungal infection in their eye, like yours, and um, she decided to do the eye removal, and um he really uh was not, let's just say he was not a saint like Holly. Now he was a little difficult before that, he had his own opinions, he would spook at things and stuff like that, but definitely she actually she was an adult amateur, and she ended up um deciding that she didn't feel safe riding him anymore or comfortable selling him to somebody else. So she actually found a vet, a large vet clinic that took him on as a donation as a blood donor horse, and he's doing great in that job, but um was not one that probably was gonna be much fun for very many people to ride with only one eye.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I guess you really don't know, and it depends on what the financial constraints are. Like I said, I don't I don't know if I would have been able to do it without the insurance. So, you know, I'm a firm believer in e-coin insurance now.
SPEAKER_04So I hate to ask after all that with Mickey, but so you have another story with Pinky, and and our listeners may remember Pink. Pinky has appeared on this podcast before, right? So we are Pinky with getting weight on Pinky, Pinky with ulcers. So what is happening to Pinky?
SPEAKER_01So Pinky's my off-the-track thoroughbred mare. I've had her about four years now. Um, we were doing great this summer, going second level Dursa. She was really doing really well. And she had one of her, I call her um, yeah, her thoroughbred mare moments. Um, she spooked at something, reared up in the air, she lost her balance and she fell down onto her side, but she had her leg underneath her. So um it basically her leg was folded and she crushed one of the bones in her knee. It's a bone called the accessory carpal bone. So if you go uh next time you go look at your horse and you look at their knee, it's the bone that sticks out the back side of their knee. And it is a major attachment site for all of the flexor muscles that run down the back of the leg. So it's an extremely painful bone to break.
SPEAKER_04So did you see like she fell over and then was like, ah, I can't use my leg? Or did somebody tell you about it?
SPEAKER_01Adrenaline is an amazing thing because she hopped up and trotted off as sound as could be. Um, got her home, uh, or you know, got her inside, and then five, ten minutes goes by and she was like, ow, now I really hurt. And that's kind of when I knew something was wrong because she's usually pretty hardy, kind of stoic, I'll go through anything horse. So had the vet out. They did the x-ray. It only took one shot of the x-ray, and boom, I mean, the whole bone was basically uh not totally shattered, but it was pretty well shattered in that particular dropped. Um, the only good thing is I had a my vet said I I know a vet in the area who is an orthopedic surgeon and he has dealt with a case, even though this is an extremely rare injury. Um, she said he has uh dealt with cases like this. So we've been this whole time, it's been six months now, this whole time we've been consulting with him. Um I will say um she has had she did have to have surgery, um, but it wasn't to stabilize it or fix it. They really couldn't put any pump pins or bones or plates in it. It's not the kind of bone that does very well with that, but she did have a fragment break off, so they had to go in orthoscopically and remove a fragment. Um, so that was about two months into her her, you know. Basically, you can't cast it either. It's a knee. They can't not move their knee. So, really, the only way to keep them quiet enough to get that bone to heal is stall rest. So, yeah, I know you're thinking thoroughbred mare off the track. Wow, stall rest. I was really lucky. My vet said she is probably the best horse she's ever seen on stall rest. You can walk her out of the stall after a month of never seeing, you know, the outside of a stall on the end of a lead rope, and she will quietly walk out, no questions asked. Um, so I don't know what happened in her little brain of hers if she all of a sudden decided, you know, I think I'm done being crazy. Maybe I'm gonna be good now. Um, but yeah, you know, she's she's now finally on very limited turnout. We are giving her a little bit of sedative to turn her out just because I don't want her to like take off bucking and kicking and break it again. I mean, it's been six months. I don't want to start over. I don't want to pay any more than I have to again because yes, fortunately, Pinky is also insured. Thank God. Um, and I have about a year on this injury, so I'm about halfway in, and again, it's a $10,000 cap. And that's $6,700 right now.
SPEAKER_04So you're counting the dollars in the vet now.
SPEAKER_01Sure am. Yeah, and it's just, I mean, really, right now the vets just said keep doing what you're doing. And really, it's just starting to do a little bit of therapy with her, start to move the leg. Um, basically, you know, start getting it flexing, walk her over poles, start making her do it herself. When she lays down to roll, she gets up pretty sore, but she works out of it, so that's positive. You know, unfortunately for this podcast, I don't have an end of story because I'm in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_04But they giving you a prognosis at all? Like, is she gonna can you ever ride her again?
SPEAKER_01Or so the the the positive is that the surgeon, the orthopedic surgeon who did her surgery said, you know, they they also did cat or uh a CT and they looked or an MRI, they they looked at the knee to look and see if there was any other injury anywhere. And he said there was nothing else wrong with the knee. So he says that's positive because if she heals the way we're hoping, and if everything goes the way it should, knock on wood, um, she should heal and I should be able to ride her again. Granity said you're looking at like a year plus. Wow. So I'm in this holding pattern of keep doing what you're doing and keep crossing your fingers that it's gonna go the way it's.
SPEAKER_04Is she gonna be a show horse again or is she gonna be like your companion horse, your I guess time will tell.
SPEAKER_01I'm I'm hoping to at least ride her again if I can compete her great. But um, you know, right now I'm just hoping to at least be able to ride her again.
SPEAKER_04So how's your weight in her ulcers?
SPEAKER_01You know, believe it or not, I don't think ulcers have had had had, I don't think they've flared up at all. I've really been cautious in checking that. Her weight has been great. Um, you know, we're still feeding her, you know, more than the average horse would need at this point. But um, yeah, I I I think I've been lucky again, knock on wood, no other problems.
SPEAKER_04Stay tuned. Definitely an advocate for horse insurance, then. So we might need to have this episode on horse insurance. So so I do have to ask, like, you know, if you went in to get another horse insured, do they just run you out of the door and like, oh, Carrie One is too high of a risk factor.
SPEAKER_01Well, um her insurance is supposed to be new in April. So I will I will let you know. All right, we'll check back in. What's that premium these days? We'll see.
SPEAKER_04So, Colleen, uh, again, this is the the podcast of what can go wrong with horses. So you have uh the story of Chester, and Chester you've had for for a while, right? So you and Chester have been partners for quite some time.
SPEAKER_00For quite a while, yeah. I got Chester when he was eight, and so um, and he was 17 when this situation came up that I'm gonna talk about, which was actually just this past um spring and summer when we started seeing problems, and it has nothing to do with his eyes, it has nothing to do, he didn't break any bones, um, anything like that. But um Chester had he's he'd never been a particularly graceful horse. You know how some people are elegant to never trip and others trip all the time. Chester has always been a horse that was a little likely to trip. He had big flat feet and sometimes just wasn't paying attention to where he put his feet. And so I actually had had him long enough that I probably got a little more used to it than I should have. The fact that it's like, oh, that's just Chester. He's tripping a little bit. Um, but one day I got on him for a lesson with my instructor, and I was just starting to warm him up, and I'm like, he feels really weird. And she's like, and I said, Can you watch him? I said, he feels like like his back end isn't connected to his front end, and it's really strange. And she watched him too, and and she said he and this was in uh June, probably late June, and it was hot outside, and the outdoor arena had white sand on it, which she says it almost looks like he's walking like it's too hot, like the sand is too hot for his feet. She said, Why don't you walk him around the field and you know, see if he gets any better when he comes back? So we went for a walk around the field and we came back. And it was still not right. So we're like, okay, we need to have him looked at. And this was a horse that in the past had had issues with his stifles. So we've had to have his stifles injected and that sort of thing. So I thought, well, we haven't had the stifles injected for a while. Maybe we need to have his stifles done. But he was seeing a new vet for we did, so we did a full exam. And she decided to do a neurological exam, which he actually hadn't had done before. And well, he failed with flying colors. Oh what does that mean to fail with flying colors? And in every way that you can fail the neurological exam, Chester failed. Um the big test was they do one where they pick up a hind foot and they cross it over the other hind leg and see how long it takes for the horse to correct himself. And they should correct themselves pretty much when you get across midline. Well, Chester with his left hind almost let him set it down on the other side of his of his right hind before he tried to correct. And then they do a test where they like um blindfold them and turn them in really tight circles to see how they step and do, and they do a whole variety of the vets do a great job of really pretty simple horse eye tests to try to identify neurological issues and they back him up and try to back him over stuff. And well, he he got a lot of Fs. And so I went from thinking we needed to just do maintenance injections, which we had done several times, to going, oh my goodness, you know, we might have something serious going on here. Um, so uh we decided to test for EPM because I live in the Midwest, there's opossums everywhere. I don't care how many cute little posts they put on Facebook with the baby opossums on the top and how many ticks they eat. They also are one of the primary uh intermediate hosts for the protozoa that caused that that causes EPM. And so I may be one of the few people that was actually hoping the EPM test came back positive because I thought, well, at least if it's EPM, we know we can treat it. Well, it wasn't, and so that's where the big decision for me came in because um we actually did there's both a uh blood test and uh central nervous system test to do for EPM. But the blood test, most horses test positive in the blood, and a lot of you probably know that already. And so, really, the best test to do um is the serum test, where you actually take a sample of the spinal fluid and check that. Well, as you can imagine, unlike people that when they take a sample of spinal fluid, they just tell you to kind of lay on the table and hug your knees and hold really still when they stick the needle in your spine. Um, for horses, they have to be fully sedated and it's guided with ultrasound. And so you had to go to the hospital, then you had to go to the hospital. Fortunately, our clinic that's five minutes away does this, so I didn't have to take him up to the university or anything like that. But um, I had set a budget um because of his age um and some other, you know, so you weren't insured.
SPEAKER_04Is that what you're telling?
SPEAKER_00We were not insured, we were insured by my checkbook. And the husband who doesn't always totally understand is how do these horses cost so much money?
SPEAKER_05I've heard that thing.
SPEAKER_00It's amazing how much it can add up to um and so I had decided that I would spend a thousand dollars on diagnostics, and then we would decide from there where to go. So once I had spent $1,500, which I'm sure a lot of us have also done, and they still weren't here's just laughing over here.
SPEAKER_04So $1,500, whatever.
SPEAKER_00That's fairly nice. Um, but uh the the EPM he came back negative for EPM, and actually his his cerebral spinal fluid was perfect, no indicator of any kind of infection, um, anything else. So I said, so what's the next step? What do we how do we figure out what the problem is? So the next step was to do a bone scan, which costs several thousand dollars. Like the estimate was five to six thousand to do that. Was for the procedure. That didn't count hauling him to a clinic, which our clinic, we have an excellent clinic near where I live, but they don't do bone scans. I would have had to take him down to Kentucky, um, to a clinic there, probably, or up to the university. Um, and that didn't include the cost of hospitalization and all that other stuff. So I said, okay, so what let's say we get the bone scan comes back and says that the lesion is in this place in his hind quarter? Because the she was pretty sure from the um the exam that it was someplace in his upper left hind quarter, someplace was the lesion based on on the um other testing. And she said, really? She said, You're probably not gonna be doing anything about it because of the mass of the body that the spinal um column doesn't heal particularly well. Um, if it was an impingement of bone or pinching a nerve or something like that, there might be some surgical opportunities, but it would probably not ever be ridable again. And so um I made the decision. She says, but at least you'll know you might know what it is. You also could spend six thousand dollars and and they'll still say, Yeah, we we have no idea.
SPEAKER_04And so they get your money back if they don't know the answer.
SPEAKER_00Uh no, you don't get your money back if you they don't know the answer. That would be something to maybe suggest to our veterinarian friends. That would help. That would be wonderful. We should put the insurance companies on negotiating that. But so then I had to make the decision of what do I do now? Because now I have a horse with a neurological issue that's unsafe to ride. And to try to figure out what the problem is, is for me was not financially reasonable. And even if we did find out, probably weren't gonna be able to do anything about it. Um, but where I got really fortunate was I was able to actually, because I work at Purdue University, I called our vet school and said, Have I got a deal for you? I have this horse, this wonderful horse, easy to handle. Anybody can halter and lead him, groom him, pick his feet up, do anything. And I a hundred percent guarantee if you use him in your neurological labs to do to teach the vet students how to do neurotests, he will show them what a neurologically deficient horse looks like. And they were willing to explore having him become a teaching horse. So I actually took him up to the vet school. They met him, of course, they loved him because he was he's just he's a lovely chap. Um, he was there for a week and I got a note that said he's fit in perfectly. He's been accepted into our teaching herd. And so now at the barn, when people ask it how he's doing, I say, Well, Dr. Chester is doing really well, and he is teaching Professor Chester. Professor Chester, yes. Professor Chester is teaching vet students um all kinds of things about horse handling, and most importantly, um how to do a neuro exam and how to um interpret the results on a horse that that actually has a neurological exam. And what it looks like when it's positive, and what it looks like when it's positive. So instead of them having to take a horse that doesn't have a problem and say, if this horse had a problem, this is what you would see. They say, Well, here, do that test on Chester, and this is what you will see with a horse that has a neurological problem. So there were a lot of tears until we sort it out because I was going, Oh my gosh, do I I bored so I don't keep my horse at home? So bored for a horse you can't ride is the same amount as bored for a horse that you can. Nobody ever thinks about that. And um, what if, yeah, you know, and so I think he's happy not ever having to work again a day in his life because uh getting fed peppermints by vet students is not the worst thing that ever happened to you, and getting your foot picked up every once in a while, and and so it's actually, all things considered, probably worked out about as well as that situation could be.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_00So not really a happy ending, but uh I think Chester I think Chester might say it's a happy ending because um he didn't think trying to do second-level dressage was a good idea, he thought training level and first level were about right, and and so I think he was pretty happy to be retired to living in a pasture with other horses and uh getting loved on by a bunch of college students.
SPEAKER_04So so apparently Krishona and Colleen are the the medium outcomes here, and and I just feel bad for Carrie.
SPEAKER_01I don't feel bad yet, you know. We don't know the end of Pinky's story, so you know I'm I'm I just want everyone to, you know, think positive thoughts for me and and pray for Pinky that she does make a return that you know we can get back to work.
SPEAKER_04So so you know, I don't even know if there's a a moral to these these stories, but you know you're all professionals, right? So you take really, really good care of your horses, and sometimes it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_01Stuff still happens, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04So when you buy a horse, you kind of have to go in going buyer beware.
SPEAKER_00The year before Chester started having the neurological problems, he did he was turned out in the pasture playing with his buddies, came in on three legs, had torn a suspensory ligament. Oh wow, also extended stall rest, but he came back sound, took time. He only tore 13% of it, it healed after stall rest. Well, and you never know.
SPEAKER_02And I mean, things happen. Things happen in life, things happen to people, things happen to horses. But I will say it is critically important to set a budget. I also had a budget. If your horse is insured, you still have a budget over insurance. And I really relied on my veterinarian, my colleagues that are veterinarian, and my experienced horse friends. Um, because it's a very difficult decision when you have these scenarios. I mean, all of us struggled with what do you do? It is, and did we do the right thing for the horse? Um, and no matter how much you love the horse, everybody has a budget. Right. It could be a million dollars, it could be a hundred dollars, but everybody has a budget.
SPEAKER_04And not everybody can do a GoFundMe page, right?
SPEAKER_00Well, and I and I think too with that is, and and this was part of my decision-making process too, is that at what point will I get enough information to make it worth the investment? If I would invested another six or seven thousand dollars on this bone scan and not know any more information, or say, yeah, we can now tell you that, but we but the outcome's probably not going to be any different. You know, if it's not gonna potentially change the outcome.
SPEAKER_01So that's where I'm at with Pinky is you know, she has the potential to make a full recovery and I could be riding again. But if the vet at the very beginning would have said, I'm sorry, there is no chance that this horse has a suitably sound future, even pasture sound future, yeah, then we'd be looking at a totally different set of decisions to make or tough life decisions that Christiana's walked us through.
SPEAKER_02Well, and I think, and and Colleen, right? Like you really have to keep the horse's welfare in mind. I mean, Holly is an older pony, and somebody had said, well, what if you just don't do anything? I mean, she's older, but there's no way you can leave that poor pony in all that pain with a squinty, weepy eye. I mean, that is just not right. So I think you really have to consider, you know, the horse's quality of life, you know, their pain level, and then just, you know, you make a decision and you hope it's the best. And if it's not the best, well, you gave it your best shot with the information you had available to you.
SPEAKER_04And your friends will support you, they will tell us tales, and we will commiserate with this as we go through this. You are not alone.
SPEAKER_00Everybody who's owned horses for any period of time has dealt with this um some way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and what the listeners should probably realize too is you know, yes, we are experts, you know, in our own universities and we are experts in our own fields, but when it comes to our own horses, we're horse owners, and we do have to make tough decisions that are very emotional. And that that's I think hard for me to look at my horse the same way as I look at any of my school horses. I've got research horses, I would look at them a completely different way than I look at one of my own horses, right?
SPEAKER_04So you have that connection and all your hopes and dreams that might alter sometime. Well, thank you guys for sharing your experiences of some pretty dramatic horse injuries. So kudos to our group here of having lived through and uh some pretty bad scenarios with their horses. And Kiri, can we come back and visit with you to see what happens to Pinky? Sure.
SPEAKER_00Let's let's all hope it comes out positive and I will be back. Well, fingers crossed for a quick recovery for you and Pinky. The name of the podcast will be Bringing Them Back from Injury. That's a whole nother one we could read.
SPEAKER_04So, well, that's all for this episode of Extension Horses Pack Box Poxy for series for purpose.
SPEAKER_03Thanks, guys.