We asked our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown of Missoula, to come out today and put our blind horse Chance to sleep. After almost two years of battling lymphosarcoma, the time had come … and we wanted Chance to go peacefully, quickly, and gently, surrounded by people who loved him. And that’s how he died this afternoon. Alayne took this photo of me with Chance a few minutes before we let him go.
Chance had held his own through the summer — we had done chemotherapy this past spring, hoping to keep the cancer at bay — but by this fall he had begun showing signs that the cancer was truly getting the better of him. He really began going downhill in the past several weeks. Although he was still eating, every day he seemed to drop more weight. He began to look angular, and his ribs were beginning to stick out. (I’m just glad that Alayne’s photo doesn’t show you just how skinny he really was.) He was becoming listless. Bill was surprised today by how much weight Chance had lost in just the two weeks since he had last seen him.
We knew Chance was already on borrowed time. The veterinary literature says horses with lymphosarcoma typically live no more than 6 months after the initial diagnosis. Chance had survived more than 18 months so far. With the changes we were now seeing, we realized any day could be his last.
We didn’t want to come out and find him dead in his stall one morning … or down and struggling. We’ve been through that before. Our old blind mare Beauty, dying from chronic renal failure, went down in her stall one night. She had spent hours lying on the floor in manure and urine, alive but unable to stand. That’s how we found our beloved Beauty the next morning, cold and wet and struggling to get up. I had already scheduled the vet to come out the following day to euthanize her, because I wanted to avoid exactly the situation we walked into that morning. So I was distraught to realize I was one day too late. I never wanted any of our other horses to go through what Beauty went through.
Over the past two weeks Alayne and I had wrestled with the question of "Is it time?" Every morning we’d walk out to Lena’s Barn and hold our breath until we got to Chance’s stall. But this week we realized he was just not himself, that he was deteriorating at a rapid clip, and that we needed to make the fateful decision.
Thus late this afternoon I cried as I clipped a lead rope to his halter for the last time. I led him out of his corral, and we trudged down the drive together and through the snow to the grave site. Bill gave him a light sedative first, then the euthanasia drug. Chance stood on his feet for a few moments — it seemed like an eternity, but was probably no more than 5 seconds — before dropping to his knees and then keeling over on his side in one fluid motion. And with that, Chance was gone. Bless his heart.
(Click on photo for larger image.)
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