Coconut Continues

I'm back from more-than-full-time sleigh rides and repairs--did ya miss me? (I'm chillin' at the coffee shop with a pair of reading glasses John was so kind as to loan me) That time ten years ago when Solveig and Ashley were out helling around by the sewer ponds at night, there was just enough snow to make it slippery, and one misstep sent horse and rider head over heel.

That night ten ears ago we were there in the barn at Lutsen, Jim, Kari, Me, Solveig, and Coconut with a bashed-in head, we called the vet in Cloquet and he sent us The Bute and Banamine he needed to reduce the pain and inflammation. We had laid some triple-antibiotic eye ointment and bandaged the eye with gauze and tape which had to be changed every day for a month, and pumped a bunch of Penicillin into him for a few days to keep it from getting infected.

It all went pretty well, considering how severe the trauma was, and we saved the eyeball, but he lost the sight in that eye from having that part of his skull caved in. The old piece of cloth taped to the section of his halter that covered the eye was a trick I had learned from our farrier friend Bruce Campbell which had saved a scratched eyeball on Jose', another of the "original Mexicans" who were the blue-collar bedrock of our saddle-string at the time. If you can get them some antibiotics, use some of that opthalmic ointment, and change the dressing every day, you can often save an eye that would otherwise be lost.

You should have seen how that eye was bugged-out and the whole fist-sized section of his skull was caved in, and how Coconut just was so tolerant and never fussed over all that treatment and pain, and how you never really bond with a horse like when you have to help them get better from something like that, and how they never really bond like that with you until they need you to help them, and they know it. It's all pretty hard and scary and rewarding if the outcome is positive. But my old buddy Byron the vet from Bigfork always says to me, she'll either live or she'll die and you can either help her or you can't.

It's hard to find a good old-school large-animal vet in rural Minnesota any more. We had a guy here for a couple of years who was great, just like Byron, there to help you do what you could do, and not charge you more than the horse was worth to do what you couldn't. Carl Wall, I sure miss him at times like this, with the colicky horse. Those folks are a treasure, not just there to skim the cream off of the dog and cat market, never being available even when your dog is poisoned on the weekend. It's rare to find a vet who'll give a "farmer" credit for knowing what he/she knows and being able to do what they can do for themselves. Here on the North Shore there are a lot more horses than you would think there would be, but I'm sure there are not enough for a large-animal vet to live on for sure. And now I still can't finish the shaggy-dog story yet 'cause Ray needs help with a sewer-pipe job...