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Celebrating Life - Vermilion
Vermilion
Vermilion was born on March 17, 1986. I should have known that a horse with a St. Patrick's Day birthday was going to be trouble. I rode horses when I was a kid; I knew nothing about taking care of them. When visiting a co-worker's horse in a local boarding stable, she showed me the new horse that just came in for sale. It was love at first sight and I bought him.
We were quite a combination, I did not know a thing about taking care of a horse, hadn't ridden in a very long time and Vermilion was barely broke to ride, he had just turned three. Somehow we managed to work things out and he quickly taught me what was going to be required to take care of him. I even remember one of the times when I first went to ride him, he started yawning. I assumed that he was tired and put my saddle and bridle away. He always yawned every time I brought the saddle and bridle out, he had learned very quickly that I might just take him to graze instead of work.
I brought him with me to New Jersey when my husband and I got married in 1992. He was in various boarding stables. It was when he turned 11 that he experienced his first bout of founder due to excess grass in the spring. The boarding stable had switched the horses from their winter turnout hours of approximately 6 hours a day to the summer turnout schedule of at least 14 hours a day. For Vermilion, this was heaven, all that extra lush spring grass. He foundered and I quickly started to learn how serious this was. I was able to get him through this episode as the summer heat quickly burned up the grass and things settled back down.
We finally bought a home where we could keep our horses on our own property. At last I would be able to ride whenever I wanted to. Vermilion started to experience founder every spring, I learned quickly how to manage him with all of the lush grass and thought that I had everything under control.
Then came that fateful day, December 13, 2004; Vermilion foundered, now there was no grass and yet his front hooves were hot and painful and he had assumed the rocked back position of a horse in great distress. Our veterinarian, knowing his history of founder immediately reached for the Pergolide, 1 mg. capsules to start with. He knew that with this horse he did not have the time to wait for the founder to resolve and do the appropriate testing for Equine Cushing disease. The founder seemed to stop; unfortunately rotation of the coffin bone was apparent on x-rays. Vermilion was confined to his stall for 4 months, on very high doses of bute to manage the pain and the abscesses that follow this condition. As his hooves began to grow out, the abscesses got worse and I had to pack his front hooves with a drawing salve and use diapers with duck tape on the bottom of them to keep everything in place.
About mid April, 2005, Vermilion was getting extremely agitated with stall rest. The abscesses had resolved to the point that he did not need the diapers any more. I took the plunge and let him out. He must have been the happiest horse in the world at that moment in time, rejoining the other horses and letting them know that he was still the boss.
Subsequent testing for his Equine Cushing disease has increased his dose of Pergolide to 2mg once a day; he has been on that dose now since October, 2005. I manage and watch every blade of grass that he eats, no 24 hour turnout for him even in the nice weather. He will be 26 this St. Patrick's Day and I plan for him to have many more birthdays after that.
