- P
EVERY HORSE OWNERS WORST NIGHTMARE:
EMERGENCY COLIC SURGERY.
And that's where we found ourselves Monday night, January 25 at the barn, my beloved rescued American Saddlebred and I. The typical "everything was fine" kind of evening. Mountain and I were in our routine of handwalking during a beautiful night, when suddenly a dramatic swishing of his tail alerted me to something terribly wrong, his legs buckled, and he was down. Within minutes he was in a pool of sweat that had soaked his fur flat. Fighting rush hour traffic, our vet made it in record time and spoke those dreaded words "you need to get him to a hospital now, or put him down." An hour later in the equine hospital, I overheard the surgeons saying "we are running out of time" and I watched as my dear boy was hoisted into the air, placed on the table and about to endure 5 hours of surgery. Several hours in, the surgeon came out with the grave news that he in fact had a hole in his diaphram that he was probably born with, and his intestines had burst thru. "50/50 chance of survival" were good gambling odds to me, so I said, please save him, and he did.
As I write this, he is in his first 24 hours of recovery after the removal of 15 feet of intestine. We do not know if his resection will work. The doctor could not repair the hole because he could not reach it, and there are still more procedures that may be needed to get everything rebalanced and working these next 5-7 days , which I will have to face when it comes.
(I had looked into insuring him this previous year, but because of the paperwork trail we had left of trying to diagnose why he kept stumbling and falling up to this point, etc, he was not insurable.)
I have created this funding page to attempt to arrive at a solution to pay for this first daunting uexpected surgery bill and for Mountain's imediate hospital aftercare.
It is only as far as I can think right now.
Thank you in advance if you feel at all moved to help us. I am in shock. Our lives just changed...
EMERGENCY COLIC SURGERY.
And that's where we found ourselves Monday night, January 25 at the barn, my beloved rescued American Saddlebred and I. The typical "everything was fine" kind of evening. Mountain and I were in our routine of handwalking during a beautiful night, when suddenly a dramatic swishing of his tail alerted me to something terribly wrong, his legs buckled, and he was down. Within minutes he was in a pool of sweat that had soaked his fur flat. Fighting rush hour traffic, our vet made it in record time and spoke those dreaded words "you need to get him to a hospital now, or put him down." An hour later in the equine hospital, I overheard the surgeons saying "we are running out of time" and I watched as my dear boy was hoisted into the air, placed on the table and about to endure 5 hours of surgery. Several hours in, the surgeon came out with the grave news that he in fact had a hole in his diaphram that he was probably born with, and his intestines had burst thru. "50/50 chance of survival" were good gambling odds to me, so I said, please save him, and he did.
As I write this, he is in his first 24 hours of recovery after the removal of 15 feet of intestine. We do not know if his resection will work. The doctor could not repair the hole because he could not reach it, and there are still more procedures that may be needed to get everything rebalanced and working these next 5-7 days , which I will have to face when it comes.
(I had looked into insuring him this previous year, but because of the paperwork trail we had left of trying to diagnose why he kept stumbling and falling up to this point, etc, he was not insurable.)
I have created this funding page to attempt to arrive at a solution to pay for this first daunting uexpected surgery bill and for Mountain's imediate hospital aftercare.
It is only as far as I can think right now.
Thank you in advance if you feel at all moved to help us. I am in shock. Our lives just changed...