Trouble in the Woods

Tonight Coconut has left this world, and Ken has three cracked ribs.

There's a big storm coming (so they say). This could be the two-footer again. When it snows, it dumps sometimes. The day before last, that would be Thursday morning at about nine o'clock, Solveig called to say she was having trouble with her little horse, whom she found lying down and cold. With some trouble she got him up, but he wouldn't eat or drink. She took him up to her neighbor Claire's house and Claire brought him right in the kitchen to warm him up.

Solveig called me, and they started to walk him up and down the road like you should with a colicky horse which it looked like he was. I brought "Dog Butt," our animal thermometer, and the box of outdated Banamine, Bute, and Pennicillin with miscellaneous syringes I keep in the fridge. She'd been on the phone with Jennifer, her vet from Ely, getting some instructions on what to do. We rigged up an enema for him twice, the second time deeper than the first, which produced only three small pieces of poop and a string of mucous. Since I have never really tubed a horse, we tried to pour some canola oil down his gullet, of which we could only get him to swallow about a pint. He had a temperature of 101.7, which is very slightly above normal. In between procedures, we offered him water and feed and hay, none of which interested him in the least, and we walked him up and down the road all day long. About dark, we decided to borrow Claire's wonderful two-horse trailer and head for the Twin Ports Equine Clinic, where we had spoken with Dr. Stacy, and she told us it would cost three or four hundred dollars to examine and treat him for colic.

We arrived there about 8:30 and without a word Dr. Stacy began the exam. After listening all over with a stethescope she sedated him and tubed him, pumping most of a three gallon bucket of water down, in stages blowing into the stomach and smelling what was there. Then she put the glove on and palpated inside carefully clear up to her upper bicep, producing one tiny piece of manure. Then she discussed her observations matter-of-factly, asserting that he was severely dehydrated, and should be on I.V. fluids, and that he may be surgical, meaning that there may be a displacement of the intestine, or an obstruction, which could be $2,000-6,000.00 worth of surgery in Anoka or at the University. She offered to try to biopsy stomach fluid, and attempted to do so, producing no fluid at all, which told her that he was so dehydrated that there was no stomach fluid. We asked her if she could set up an I.V. for him, and she did, but the Lactated Ringer's froze in the needle and you could see it freeze up the coiled clear plastic tube toward the five liter bag. She had inserted a catheter into the jugular vein, which had a rubber stopper to receive the needle, but it would have to be flushed with 10cc of saline (I found out later it should have been heparinized) and then the I.V. line needle inserted. Solveig jumped right in to the conversation (as if she hadn't been in the center of it all along) and said, "We can get him into a heated space and do the IV ourselves, right?" "Yeah," said the vet, "You could." So she sent us with the apparatus and the catheter stitched in, and wrapped around his neck with Vetwrap to cover and protect it, and three 5 liter bags of solution. "Good Luck" she said, charged $430-some bucks, which seemed pretty reasonable. It was somewhere between 0 degrees and 10 below, and a little before midnight.

So we loaded him back up on the trailer and headed back for the Shore. That's Jim and Solveig in the pickup and me and Kari in the car. We had some experience, this same exact company, just about ten years ago, in the freezing subzero barn at Lutsen when Solveig and Coconut rolled over, before there was a lot of snow as I recall, caving in a fist-sized section of Coconut's skull around his right eye, not hurting Solveig somehow at all...TO BE CONTINUED...