I went to the vet hospital in Missoula today to pick up Copper Kid, our young Quarter Horse who went down in the pasture last Friday. Copper came to us three years ago because he had a neurological condition called cervical vertebral instability, more commonly called Wobbler Syndrome. You can read his original story here. In the past two years his condition had dramatically improved, and he was able to gallop across the pasture like a regular horse. He would even rear up on his hind legs in the corral while he was playing with another of our sighted horses. We didn’t consider him disabled any longer.
So when he went down on Friday, we were stunned. What an incredible, devastating setback. We found him lying on the ground on his left side, his right legs pawing at the air. He was able to get up finally, and we slowly walked him back to the barns and loaded him into the horse trailer. But he was clearly struggling to maintain his balance; he didn’t know where his feet were in space.
Since Friday night he’s been under the wonderful care of Dr. Erin Taylor, a board-certified veterinary surgeon, at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital. Today I also took our blind mare Lena in to see Dr. Taylor for a respiratory issue. Here is Dr. Taylor listening to Lena’s breathing, prior to performing some other tests. She diagnosed Lena as having a mild case of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As a result, we now have a treatment plan for Lena to follow.
Once we finished Lena’s exam, we moved on to the main event … getting Copper home. As you’ll see in this video below that I took of Dr. Taylor and her vet tech, Courtney, walking Copper out to the trailer, he remains very compromised. Look at how he crosses his feet, sways, drags his hooves, and generally seems not to know where his feet are. (Courtney is holding his tail to help him balance.) These are the classic signs of cervical vertebral instability. This condition is classified into five grades, ranging from one — barely noticeable — to five, where the animal is down and unable to get up. Copper is now a four. Very, very serious. And he’s only 6 years old.
We have three options for Copper. One is euthanasia, which we don’t think is necessary because he’s not in any pain and he is still clearly ambulatory … if very wobbly! The second option is spine stabilization surgery, which is an $8,000 to $10,000 procedure performed by an equine surgeon in California who specializes in this particular neurosurgery. Yikes! The operation would be done at Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital in Pullman and the surgeon would fly in there to do it. The third option is strict stall rest and a regimen of anti-inflammatories while we wait to see if he improves with time. Time can do a lot to help.
Erin said the neurosurgeon would want to wait a few weeks anyway to see if Copper stabilizes a little more on his own. If we proceeded with the surgical option, we would have to take Copper to WSU for a myelogram first. The WSU vets would send the myelogram images to the neurosurgeon in California for review, who would then decide if Copper was, in fact, a good candidate for surgery. It’s possible he might conclude that surgery wouldn’t really help, given the severity of his condition. Dr. Taylor said the goal of the surgery would be to lower his grade by at least one and hopefully two levels, i.e., from a Grade 4 to a 3 or even 2. Can we afford that surgery? Can we justify it? I don’t know. Like I said: Yikes.
So that’s where we are at this point. We’re really hoping that nature will ride to the rescue again and re-stabilize this handsome youngster all on his own. But he is so much worse than when he first arrived, that’s unlikely. Despite how he looks in this video, he was still standing in the trailer when we got home!
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