Help Gracie Fight Her Way Back to Health After a Life-Threatening Medical Emergency

Hello horse community - I am creating this GoFundMe on behalf of my friend Lauren Yandell. Lauren has been an active professional of the horse industry for many years in the Atlant and North Florida areas. She has spent years serving clients and their horses, and now in turn needs your help. This incident with her horse Gracie happened last month, in a time where she also had to navigate the hospitalization of her husband earlier in the year.

Fellow horse people know: when a horse goes down medically, you don’t ask how much it costs, you just do what they need. Your stomach drops, your heart stops, and you move into crisis mode. That’s exactly what happened when Gracie, Lauren’s beloved 10-year-old Thoroughbred mare, developed an unexpected medical emergency turned that into a complicated, multi-system fight for her life.

What started as mild colic symptoms suddenly escalated. There was no apparent cause of this gastric distress but they kept recurring. When intubated for one of these colic episodes Gracie developed a nosebleed so severe she nearly bled out in her stall. She had a seizure due to the unstoppable blood loss, and became lethargic, dehydrated, and severely anemic. Lauren trailered her straight to the Equine Medical Center of Ocala from their home in Jacksonville FL, not knowing if she would be alive when they arrived.

Over the following days, Gracie underwent just about every diagnostic and stabilizing treatment an equine hospital can provide, including:

IV fluids & electrolyte therapy

Multiple rounds of bloodwork tracking severe anemia

Endoscopy due to repeated epistaxis

Abdominal ultrasound, thoracic ultrasound, and rectal palpation

ECG

Gastric ulcer treatment (Grade 2 squamous ulceration)

Colic management, including NG tubing

Anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and corticosteroids

Continuous monitoring for internal bleeding and metabolic collapse

Anyone who has managed a sick horse knows what this means. Sleepless nights. The dread of every update. Watching numbers drop and praying they turn around. Hoping today is the day the horse starts eating again. Gracie did fight — hard. Slowly, her appetite returned. Her PCV began climbing instead of crashing. She perked up. And after intensive, round-the-clock care, she was finally stable enough to come home.

But as every horse owner also knows, emergency hospitalization is financially devastating, even when you make all the right decisions. Gracie required full-spectrum critical care, invasive diagnostics, and multiple days in the hospital. The bills reflect the seriousness of her condition and the gravity of the interventions required to save her.

Lauren is doing everything in her power to give Gracie the follow-up care she needs, but this was an unexpected and overwhelming financial blow.

We’re asking the horse community — the people who understand what it means to fight for a horse you love — to help ease the burden of:

❤️ Emergency hospitalization

❤️ Diagnostics, imaging, and specialist evaluations

❤️ Medications and supportive care

❤️ Continued treatment as she continues her recovery at home

Gracie is a sweet, gentle mare who has been through more than her fair share. She’s an OTTB with a big heart and a bigger will to live. Lauren adores her, and she fought for Gracie every step of the way during this emergency. If you’ve ever stood in a clinic hallway holding your breath, praying for a horse to pull through — you know what this means.

Any donation, share, or kind word helps more than you can imagine.

From one horse person to another: thank you.

Bailey Coulombe Elliott