The dreaded phone call...

This morning at 7:15 my phone rang and it was Brandi. SHe answered the phone by saying "it isn't my horse, it is Boomer". Oh shit. She told me he had a cut on his withers/shoulder. I aksed if it was bleeding, she said it had been but wasn't now. I headed out, expecting to apply pressure, rinse with iodine, and do a cold water rinse. I didn't go out there prepared for this:

For size comparison, look at this:

Here is a close up at a different angle which shows how deep the puncture is:

So, as you may have guessed, I called a vet. Now, I didn't actually have a vet, so I had to call around and find one. I had heard that Dr. Luftman (sp?) was the best, so I called his office and it turns out that the has a new partner who could come out. Dr. Hawkins turns out to be great. Though his first words were "Oh, yeah, this really is very bad." He sedated Boomer, numbed his muscle, and cleaned the wound. What you can't see in these picture (more to come, don't worry) is that the cut on the deep tissue/fatty part goes up further under the skin flap. So, he sutured up the deep tissue with 5-6 sutures and then sutured up the flesh with about 15 more sutures. He then gave Boomer a tetnus shot and some Banamine for swelling. He gave me a powdered antibiotic which I feed once a day. He said to keep Boomer inactive for 10 days. Hosing his shoulder once a day is a good idea. Handwalking ONLY if he gets stocked up or gets rowdy. If all goes well, he will come back in 7 days and check it out and take the top sutures out. If all doesn't go well, there could be infection or worse- Boomer could pull out his sutures, which is actually not unlikly because it is in such a high action area.

So, he left and I moved Boomer to the round pen and put some water buckets and hay out there. He drank well all day and napped and grazed. I sat in a lawn chair and read a book. I was out there for a total of over 12 hours. Nothing excitng happened, thankfully. When Brandi got off work she helped me set up some of her fence panels around Boomer's shed so that he could be confined but not totally shut in his shed. I will take pictures of that tomorrow. I gave him a big bucket of water and he already had hay.

We walked around for a while and finally found what did it to him. I will record video of how exactly this happened, because it was random and totally up to chance and hard to describe. Between Boomer's paddock and Chief's paddock is a support post of steel. Chief's back gate is bolted to it. The bolt sticks out on to Boomer's side of the post. Boomer must have been scratching on the fence and the wire supporting the fence panel broke, popping the panel away form him and slamming him on to the post and unfortunatly, on to the bolt. The bolt was about 1.5" long. I know this is the culprit because there is hair caked around the base of the bolt, dried blood all over it, and the top of it had dried, crispy, yellow fat stuck to it. Don't worry, I have pictures of that too. Seeing that bolt made me so sick. My horse was impailed on a freaking bolt. John is pretty upset too and wants to saw the bolt off and file it smooth.

I will keep updating and will have pictures as soon as John gets home.

Oh, I quit my job.