Any time Kate calls me in my office late on Fridays, I want to duck under my desk. Normally she will text me during the day with brief updates or if she comes across something she thinks I should know about. She saves the rare voice calls for … well, horsey disasters. So when my cell phone rang about 3:30 p.m. Friday, I was already thinking "Uh oh…" when I answered. It was Kate: "Your boy Bridger has cut his face open and he's bleeding badly," she said.
I thought, "Well, of course, it's Friday afternoon!" As I said in the blog post about Lena's fence wreck a few weeks ago, these things never occur on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. or at any other more convenient time. I headed out to Bridger's corral and found him bleedly profusely, with a huge gash across his face running through his nose and down across his upper lip. It looked like a big chunk of flesh was missing. He was trying to eat the hay that Kate had just put out in the feed tubs, and with every bite he took, blood would squirt out for a foot or more.
Kate and I looked around the shed and corral that Bridger shares with blind Cash and blind Hawk, yet we couldn't find any obvious place he could have cut himself on. There was no sign of horse hair or flesh. But cut his face open he did. This is why, long ago, I turned the common expression "If there's a will, there's a way" into the equine version "If there's a way, they will."
I called our equine vet, Dr. Steve Levine, but found he had just had back surgery the day before and was unable to travel. So Steve talked me through what I needed to look for and how to treat the wound, and what our options were if we decided Bridger needed emergency care at an equine hospital. Based on my description of the wound, Steve told me he was pretty confident it would heal just fine without needing to be sutured, and that the gaping hole would begin granulating in. The key thing was to stop the bleeding, clean it out and disinfect it.
Alayne went to find our toolbox of equine medical supplies while Kate left to bring Bridger up to the barn so we could treat him indoors. Alayne took these photos, and in the one at top we're getting ready to clean the wound. I'm holding a spray bottle of Betadine while Kate is keeping our patient still.
Here's what the wound looked like after we started cleaning it (click on photo for larger image):
(I can't believe Alayne is letting me post that photo on the blog. Over the years she's censored a number of my "medical action shots," my favorite being a post-enucleation one: the entire eyeball freshly removed in surgery from one of our blind horses, still encased in the peri-orbital fat, eyelid and eyelashes attached. I thought it was fascinating; she said it was "disturbing." I conceded the point.)
As bad as Bridger's wound looked, and as much as it had to hurt, he was a very good patient. He became agitated only once — and understandably so — when I put my a finger in his mouth, under his upper lip, and probed to see if the wound had cut deep enough to go all the way through. Although the remaining skin felt barely paper-thin, fortunately it was still intact across the entire breadth of the wound.
It wasn't long before it stopped bleeding, and pretty soon we had him back out with his friends.
On Saturday morning, Dr. Steve called to see how Bridger was doing, and I was pleased to tell him the wound was healing just as he had predicted. I also told him that I doubted he could have sutured the wound closed in any case, since there was so much flesh missing it would have left Bridger with a permanently curled lip. Now that would have made for an interesting photo, eh?
As of Sunday, Bridger continues to do well. As for next Friday … we'll have to see what that brings. I think I'll be out of town.
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Shelter Challenge Voting Problems
Yes, I've been getting emails all weekend from people telling us they haven't been able to vote in the Shelter Challenge. Not sure what the problem is, but we don't have an "inside track" to communicating with the folks who run the contest. Hopefully it will get fixed by Monday.
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Please Keep Voting!
The new Shelter Challenge started on Monday, January 10th, and ends at midnight on March 20th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000. There are no second- and third-place prizes this time, but new categories … please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.
And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.
You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.
Please note: Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.
Because of your votes, we came in 2nd nationwide and won $5,000 in the Shelter Challenge that ended in December 2010. Please help us win this round of the contest by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!
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