View from the North 40: When tragedy stalks the house

As truisms go, it’s not very catchy, and it’s pretty unsavory, but after last week, I can vouch for its truthfulness: The night isn’t really dark until your horse starts vomiting.

Since I’ve already given away the gripping plot twist, I might as well tell you — in case you’re too tenderhearted for the suspense — that everyone survived the equine medical emergency. Myself included.

Now with the ending out of the way, we can roll back to beginning when I found one of my horses showing signs of colic at 1 a.m. Friday of last week. I had intended to just check on them, throw them a bit of hay, take a shower and go to bed. I had an alarm set for 6 a.m. to start my Friday officially.

But a colicking horse is a not good thing.

Chica, aka Squirrel on happier days, was colicking. Unlike human babies, for whom colic is neither dangerous nor harmful, in horses it can easily be fatal so it’s a drop your plans and focus on keeping the victim alive kind of problem.

That’s not me being melodramatic, it’s just a statistics-based fact that makes me feel melodramatic.

For the next seven hours I was walking and trotting with the horse with very few opportunities to slow to a standstill — despite that I’m fit enough for about one hour of that on a good day.

The first two hours we were in near-constant motion because the number one treatment and diagnosis response to horse colic is to keep the horse moving. This gets the digestive tract active, which is good, and the activity helps keep the horse on its feet so it doesn’t lay down and roll, which can cause a twist in the intestines, which is bad. Bad, bad, bad.

During good moments I stopped her to put my ear to her belly to listen for gut noises, hoping to hear the healthy sound of a gurgle before I could count to 60 — healthy horses produce at least one gut noise each minute, in case, y’know, you ever need that info for a horse or a trivia contest or a bet or something.

Since we’re taking a moment for random info, here’s a thing I find interesting in the middle of a tragedy: The beautiful things.

We had moonlight on a clear, relatively warm spring night and the occasional owl or meadowlark calling out in the dark. At one point a fox started in with its screechy bark a few hundred yards away.

Eventually, Chica did poop, which is good — four times, which is really good — but after each time her level of distress rose. Which is really bad.

I finally called the veterinarian to come, so the third hour was like the first two hours, but with more guilt over getting our vet up in the night, more pained distress for the horse and zero opportunities to stand still long enough to listen for gut noises.

Here’s another the thing I find interesting in the middle of a tragedy: The funny moments.

At this point, though the horse couldn’t stop for more than 20 seconds, I needed a bladder break, 60 seconds for personal relief that we had to work out somehow. So we walked to the secluded corral, I waited for a moment of peace, dropped trow and turned the waterworks on full. And 15 seconds into my pause to refresh, Chica started to lay down. Where I was squatted.

So there I am, in the beautiful moonlight trying to shut off the waterworks, cluck my horse into motion, stand and yank my pants up high enough so I don’t trip while I hop around trying to both get out of Chica’s way and shoosh her forward.

That was some next-level horsemanship right there. If it had been a video game I definitely would’ve been awarded a token or tool or whatever the equivalent of a get out of jail free card the kids have these days.

Shortly after that, the moon set and we entered hour four, the first half of which was spent with the vet examining and treating Chica. It was a mixed bag of good and bad that meant she had a 50/50 chance of living through the day. This was very bad news.

The last treatment he gave her was to tube a gallon of mineral oil into her stomach for a kind of laxative.

As the vet was packing the last of his things to leave, Chica, head hanging low to the ground because of the sedative, had a significant glob of mineral oil reverse course and gush out her mouth and nose.

It was disconcerting. Horses are not built to vomit. And yet she did.

“That’s not good,” the vet said, in his understated way dropping her survival odds significantly below 50 percent.

That was very, very bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.

I had to hold back a different kind of waterworks for that.

The next 30 minutes I spent in the bright light coming from the shop, watching more mineral oil drain from the wrong end of my horse — and making her end-of-life plans.

At the start of hour five she gurgled up one last disconcerting gush of mineral oil, blinked and picked her head up. Suddenly awake from sedation, she looked around to get her bearings, coughed and sneezed her passages clean and tried to eat a clump of clover.

Not how I expected this to play out.

I couldn’t decide if it was a good sign or just a sign of the typical horse obsession with food even in the face of death. I decided, though, that she was going to get food either to survive or to die happy. The next three hours I spent walking her and gradually letting her eat more food.

In a completely anticlimactic end, I spent the next four hours checking her every 20 minutes until she proved all her bodily functions were, in fact, functioning.

I also finally got a shower and clean clothes because those things seemed appropriate to wrap up this tragedy.

——

She’s mercifully and annoyingly fine. My heart is still in recovery, though, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .