This is a cautionary story about a woman …Catherine and a little LINGH FOAL named Ellinghton that together are not giving up. Eating the wrong foods out in pastures and fields is becoming more and more common. It is difficult to become an expert on every tree and grass in your neighborhood, but if its possible….become your own expert….get a book, ask your local farm expert….become “all-knowing” about the edible life on your horse farm. Our heartfelt best wishes go out to Ellinghton for speedy recoveries…..our horses are soooo fragile!
I have been in touch with Catherine for a few days. I asked her if she would share her story about this amazing young Lingh colt. It’s a long story, one that many of us have lived through in our horse lives. What makes this story a bit different is that the doctors have preformed three surgeries. This is one tough colt.
“Yes…little Ellinghton has been in dire trouble for about 2 months, including 3 back-to-back colic surgeries. Started with me building him a beautiful pasture, so that he could grow up really stretching out with plenty of room to run and build strong limbs. I built the pasture fence to include three beautiful old oak trees inside, for shade. Our Santa Ynez Valley horse county is filled with millions of beautiful oaks – everyone has oaks in their pastures. Before the resulting crisis with Ellinghton, I didn’t know anything about the dangers of acorns – or that some horses like them enough to eat tons of them! Seems acorn colic is a well known problem in the veterinary community, but none of my many horse friends, all with oak trees in their pastures, knew anything about it until now either.
One morning in November, three days after turning Ellinghton out into his new pasture, I noticed that he was not enthusiastic about his breakfast. I called my excellent farm vet immediately. By the time my very experienced vet arrived 30 minutes later, Ellinghton had gone down twice, laying down and stretching out onto his back. Not quite a normal colic look, actually.
But that’s what I assumed it was. The vet did all the usual diagnostic tests for colic; then prescribed a special soap for Ellinghton’s skin, as he thought Ellinghton was rolling to scratch some itchy skin on his back. He did have some spots of itchy skin, and yes perhaps he was just trying to scratch his back on the ground. I wanted to believe, but wasn’t convinced, and camped out by the pasture the rest of the day, and checked him every two hours throughout that night. He ate some of his hay off and on, then didn’t.
The next morning, Sunday at dawn, I put him in the trailer and hauled him to renowned Alamo Pintado Equine Medical Center, nearby. The incredible vets there put him through all the same colic tests, and a very careful ultrasound which I watched intently. I had to agree, all his vitals and blood work and ultrasound checked out perfectly. But I just knew he wasn’t himself, I’d spent so much time with the little guy since he was born. They tube-oiled him to be on the safe side. Then they sent us home with him, since everything looked fine.
That afternoon at home, I couldn’t stand it any longer. He was rolling, and I didn’t think he was just trying to scratch his back. I put him back into the trailer, and took him back to the Alamo Pintado hospital. They ran the tests again and although everything still looked perfect, they agreed that he was displaying some obvious colic symptoms by then. They kept him under close observation, continued oilings and started enemas. Because he seemed so healthy and perky, and hope ran high he would start pooping, it was three days before the decision to operate was made. No one wanted to operate unnecessarily – he was so alert, acted so normal most of the time (apparently he is just a super tough little boy, who just doesn’t want to show anyone his pain. Or at least at that point wasn’t ready to).
The surgery was incredible. The Alamo Pintado vets really are the best in the west. They pulled his large intestine out onto the table. It was
impacted with 36 pounds of acorns and acorn shells – a dry impaction that most certainly never could have cleared on it’s own. I watched them carefully flush out the dry mass of starch, and watched the shells roll down the table into the waste bins. They sewed him back together. He was up on his feet and as sturdy as usual a few hours later.
But he had a hard time getting his peristalsis going again. By the time he started pooping again four days later, he has also developed post-surgical adhesions, we later learned, that had begun tugging and crimping at the outside of his intestinal wall. None of this showed up on ultrasound. As always, all his ultrasound and blood tests came back absolutely perfect. But he was in full colic display again, and after more days of no more manure, they opened him up again, removed an adhesion, and another impaction including more acorns that must have been still in his stomach during the first operation, then sewed him back up. As before, he was raring to go as soon as the anesthesia wore off.
The poop wait resumed, days passed and he was rolling as much as he was standing. But even when rolling, he was so perky, and if I came into the barn he would jump up and whinny for me. There was no clear moment to put him down.
Four days later still no poop, and this time he had swollen with gas to where he could hardly breathe. They punctured his side two days in a row to release the gas buildup. It was all about tranquilizers and pain killers, all of us waiting for him to start pooping. He pooped and then no more poop. It seemed the time had come to put him down. A third surgery had been ruled out by most everyone. Then one of the main older vets there finally said why not try a third surgery, “The third time just might be the charm,” he said with a big relaxing smile on his face. I was sobbing every day by then, of course, seeing this bright little boy off and on acting completely normal then in intense pain. I was walking him day and night since we had first arrived there, endlessly around the hospital perimeter, struggling to pull him along. It was an exhausting, stressful ordeal, not knowing exactly what we should do.
I kept telling the vets to let me know if I should put him down. I didn’t want to put him down, of course, but didn’t want him to suffer. They insisted the obvious moment to put him down just hadn’t yet arrived.
We all decided to do this crazy third surgery, if nothing else to see what we could learn, possibly to resect him, and of course to put him down on the table, since he’d already be anesthetized, if he did not look good inside.
Two of the main vets worked on him with a large staff of interns helping. They didn’t charge us for the third surgery. They opened him up, immediately saw that the cause was yet another post-surgical adhesion that had completely crimped him. They decided that a resection was again not necessary. They removed the adhesion, uncrimped his intestine, and sewed him up. He looked healthy inside, and since they didn’t need to cut open his intestine to drain it this time, they hoped he’d heal even faster this time.
He jumped right up as usual after the drugs wore off, happy as a lark, until he began eating again and blocking. No poop. Four more days went by. He was again swelling with gas, finally looked like a helium balloon about to take off. We knew that within hours he would be down again and struggling to breathe. I was dragging him up and down a hill behind the hospital, trying to force him to trot, hoping to release some gas naturally, as they had decided not to do anymore punctures to his side this time around. We also tried the old cowboy colic remedy, with the vets’ agreeing it was worth a try. We put him in a trailer and hauled him to a terribly rough dirt road,
and raced around a long loop in circles, bumping and jolting him all over the trailer for an hour. I rode in the back with him hanging on for dear life.
We brought him back to the hospital, no apparent luck. That was a Sunday evening. The vets agreed he was to be put down that night, since he was quickly swelling hugely with gas again and we knew that in a few hours he would be in great distress. I sadly went home to feed the other horses dinner, before coming back to be with him when they put him down. While I was feeding, my cell phone rang, the vets were yelling on the other end of the line, he’d started pooping. By the time I got there, he’d pooped 11 times. Within another hour, 22 poops total.
A few days later he was blocked again, despite daily oilings of a gallon of mineral oil, and all sorts of IV drugs to keep his peristalsis going. The vets finally discharged him. I think he’d been there 10 weeks at that point. They shot him up with tranquilizer to get him in the trailer, as he was trying to roll. I guess I was to be hospice. They loaded me up with Banamine and tranquilizer shots, and waved goodbye. That was a couple days before Christmas.
I brought him home, and started hand-grazing him only, as nothing else had ever seemed to pass through him, no soaked pellets, no soaked hays, nothing. I decided I had always envied shepherds in other countries, and it was time to become one myself! The grass seemed to barely slip through, not as fast as it went in, but some passed. As he nevertheless continued to back up, the nights seemed to be all about flashlights and cold weather, trying to find the right spot to inject the tranquilizer while he rolled around on the ground, on my own, I was scared to death. But I was supposed to make the decisions now, as nothing else had worked. Either his peristalsis wasn’t kicking back into normal function, or he was partly kinked, or both.
The vets came out every 2 to 5 days to tube a gallon of oil down him. He would be good for another day or two before he was blocking again. This continued until just last Saturday, when he suddenly started pooping normally, for the very first time since all this began. It just happened overnight. The change was dramatic, almost from one moment to the next.
Last Sunday, the following day, he started leaping and frolicking, and kicking up his heels, just like a normal colt. It is like a miracle.
The vets now think he indeed likely had a partial kink from another post-surgical adhesion. We had been waiting to see if it would fully kink (death, since further surgery would be pointless), or if by slim chance his insides might re-arrange themselves, of their own accord, and unkink him. They told me that was not unheard of.
Apparently that’s what happened. I thought we were in for a much longer haul, to tell you the truth. This oiling every few days was working to unplug him, and so I thought that might just go on indefinitely. It was so scary, each time wondering if it would be the last time it worked.
But now he seems totally normal.
I really can’t believe it. I am crossing my fingers that things don’t re-shift in there, to re-kink him.
A tremendous thank-you to Dr. Greg Parks, Ellinghton’s primary vet throughout the crisis, and Dr. Mark Rick, both of Alamo Pintado Equine, who together performed the surgeries. Alamo’s staff of 40, including many more veterinarians, interns, and assistants, all took shifts at one time or another to work on Ellinghton during his six weeks in the intensive care unit. Ellinghton needed the help and kindness of every one of them. Dr. Parks, Ellinghton’s primary vet at Alamo, worked on him at all hours, and later took my frightened calls even over his holidays on Christmas and New Years days. Dr. Parks is also the breeding specialist who handles the breeding of my mare to Lingh. His colleague Dr. Mark Rick, a longtime Alamo Pintado veterinarian, urged us all to consider the third surgery, and along with Dr. Parks, offered to perform that intensive third surgery at no charge. I am so grateful to him too.
This is an acorn, most likely impossible to digest
The also-great-news is that I sold my almost-Grand-Prix pony (an incredible dynamo!), just the day AFTER we took out several loans to pay for the 6 enormously expensive weeks in hospital. To the first person who ever tried her. I knew that would happen, she is amazing. Her sale completely paid for ALL of Ellinghton’s struggles, and we were able to immediately pay off our Ellinghton bank loans. I can’t think of a better resolution – whether he lived or died, – we didn’t have to carry such a heavy financial burden into our future. Whew!!!! :)))”
THE NEXT DAY
“Right now I look at him and seem him fast forwarding into a big beautiful loyal stallion, and can’t imagine this too won’t pass…
So far it always has.
He’s the toughest little man I’ve ever seen.”
“Ellinghton apparently began vacuuming up acorns – perhaps in this very picture. His lengthy colic ordeal began three days after I took this photo.”
THE NEXT DAY
A little sunshine therapy – he loves sunshine.
"He loves Sunshine"
“We’re out grazing. Vets said I could go ahead and let him enjoy an afternoon of eating. He’s on three pain killers and so is a little bit hungry at the moment, off and on, but still in some distress. Last night was very bad, had to tranquilize him every few hours. This morning vets decided again to wait just a little longer, until the next time he starts to roll, probably this afternoon. Meanwhile he gets to be out at his favorite spit. He got a fouth morning of oil and enema today, no luck still. Any other horse would be so long gone….
He was a dream for so long, then when he was born he was more wonderful and fun than I even imagined. We are even more bonded after these last couple months of struggle…”
Ellinghton
What Breeding Dreams Are Made Of
