My Life Altering Experiences

My Jade Experiences   

            There are many things that my beautiful Arabian mare has taught me over the years and one of the most important ones in my eyes is the will to survive. In October of 2008 a small horse epidemic hit the area around where I live. It was called the Rhino Flu, and it was brought to the farm where I worked and boarded my horse by a new horse that came in for training. This particular illness has a fourteen day incubation period and you don’t even know it is there until the symptoms appear. The first of many symptoms is a runny nose, the snot is usually green or yellow. Then comes the cough, a dry hacking cough, the horse usually gets very listless and doesn’t have much energy.

            That year nearly every horse on the farm caught it, and my mare was one of the last and the worst. It started off with the running nose and coughing like I had grown used to hearing from the other horses in the last few weeks. It progressed into the listlessness, but after a few weeks she seemed to get over it. That was the usual process, the Flu would usually run its course in the span of a few weeks and the horses would go back to being completely normal.            

            I was overjoyed when my Jade got better, it seemed like she was totally back to normal and I went through my usual routine of grooming and riding her. All seemed to be well for a few days and then I noticed that she started to get really lethargic, and when I ran my hands down her neck there seemed to be this hard lump in behind her jowls, right below her ears, all the way down on the bottom of the neck. At the time I didn’t know or think that it was anything serious, but over the next few days she seemed to get worse. This lump was growing and we felt it was time to call the vet.

The vet came out and took a look at her, he gave her a shot to boost her immune system and left me a tub of Icthamol, a black tar like substance that was to rubbed on her neck to try and draw out the heat in her neck. I used it for a few weeks and nothing seemed to be happening, in fact it almost seemed like it was getting bigger. She was getting more and more listless and didn’t seem to want to do anything. At this point she was banned from coming into the barn because the other horses had all gotten over the illness and we didn’t want her to re-infect the healthy horses.

Since I did a lot of horse training whenever I went out there I had to do all the riding and training before I could go out and see her. Since it was already well into December by this time I would go out to see her in the field and it would be pitch black outside. I couldn’t see much of her because the barn lights didn’t reach as far out as her pasture. She really didn’t seem like she was getting any closer to recovering. So I had the farm owner call out the vet again. He looked at her throat and felt the hard lump that was there, he said it was most likely all pus in the lump and we needed to get it to come out, I asked the vet why he couldn’t just lance it like you would a pimple and squeeze all the pus out. He gave me some cryptic answer that didn’t give me any hint as to what we could do.

The vet also left me another tub of some stuff called Fura-Zone, this new stuff was supposed to heat up the lump and help it to burst open faster. I used this new stuff for a few weeks and she still only seemed to get worse. It was the beginning of January when I came out to see her and I knew that something was terribly wrong. She was standing with her nose to the ground and with her mouth open, struggling to breathe. The lump had gotten so big that it was very nearly cutting off her entire airway. I was so scared, that she was going to die. I talked to her and I pleaded with her not to leave me alone. I spent a lot of time with her, as much as I could, just brushing her and telling her how much I loved her. I tried to ease her pain and discomfort the best that I could.

She would hold her head just above the ground as she struggled to breathe, but as soon as she saw me walking out of the barn and in her direction she would nicker at me the best that she could and shuffle slowly and painfully closer to the gate so that she could see me all the faster. This little horse was slowly and painfully suffocating to death day by day and all she wanted was to see me. I came out every day, hoping and praying that she would get better, that the lump would burst and abcess out of her skin and relieve the pressure on her airway.

After a few days of this she stopped eating, she just couldn’t chew and breathe at the same time. I was so terrified that my baby, the animal that my whole life revolved around was going to die. I knew that I had to do something, if only to relieve her of her pain. I talked to the woman who owned the farm and she said we can tie her up outside and fill up a bucket of extremely hot water and dip towels in it to wrap around her neck. I decided that anything was worth the try.

She went into the house and filled a large bucket with water as hot as she could get it. Then we grabbed a few towels that I always kept in my tack box. I tied her to the fence post outside the field and went to work. At this point in time the lump on her neck was swollen to nearly the size of a football. I dipped the towels into the hot water and wrapped them around her neck. She had this look in her eye as I rubbed and massaged on the painful lump. The look that said, ‘Help me mom, I know you can help me and I trust you completely’

I had to do whatever I could to help my beautiful horse, I repeatedly dunked and wrapped, massaged and scrubbed her neck until the water seemed to get a little cooler. I think that doing this is the key point in what helped her recover. The next day when I came out the best and the nastiest sight met my eyes. The lump had started to burst out and was oozing pus all down her neck. Now that she was oozing I definitely wasn’t allowed to go near her and then go into the barn with the other horses.

Over the next few weeks I went out to see her day after day and apply more medicine to her neck. It took weeks for all of the pus to drain out of her neck, everyday it had to be checked and if it froze over or clogged up we had to pull the scab or the crust off so that the rest of it could continue to drain. It was well into the beginning of February before I was allowed to bring her into the barn. By the time she was healthy enough to ride it was near the end of the month. Then it was like starting back at square one.

We had to re-learn how to do many things and we had to re-build our stamina and strength. It took me many more months before we were back to our full strength. When I talked to the vet after she got better he told me that she went from getting the Rhino Flu, to it progressing into what was called Bastard’s Strangles. It is one of the most deadly viruses a horse can contract and it is highly, highly contagious. The vet said that he didn’t tell us what it was at the time because there wasn’t a very high chance that she would survive it.

Bastards Strangles is a mutation of the Strangles virus, that does just that, strangles the horses. It affects their lymph nodes and fills them with pus and fluids that literally ‘strangle’ the horse to death because they enlarge the nodes so much. He said that the original outlook was that she wouldn’t survive the illness.  This only proved to me that she is one tough little horse, will a will to live and survive that is greater than the illness in her body that was trying its best  to kill her.

I know how much that mare loves me because she fought to survive and even though it cost her so much to move those few steps closer to the gate, and to make the small and weak nickers that were coming from her throat she still wanted to see me and she still wanted my love.