Contrary to the title, Kit may in fact be the luckiest of horses. I’ll let you decide.

Kit, like most thoroughbreds, was bred to run. Unlike all my other event horses, Kit is fine boned – a byproduct of the racing industry’s focus on breeding for speed, not endurance.

Kit, like most racehorses, started his career at two. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t a half bad racehorse, which meant that he spent four years on the track, which took its toll.

When he was 6, he was purchased by an advanced level event rider. He wasn’t going to be an advanced horse, but she saw a compliant nature in him, and purchased Kit hoping for a fast resale and profit.

As with all resale horses, two considerations are paramount – time, i.e., the cost of keeping the horse until it’s sold, versus the skills the horse develops under the rider. Obviously, the longer one keeps a horse, the more he learns, and the more you can charge for him. But the longer you keep them, the more money you spend on them. Speed of learning is also a deciding factor. In Kit’s case, he was a quick learner, so his rider pushed him hard and fast up the ranks. Within a year, he was being marketed as ‘ready to move up to preliminary,’ which is where our lives intersected.

My preliminary horse had recently broken down, for good I was told, and my younger horse, his replacement, got injured competing; at the time Kit came to my attention, I wasn’t even sure if the younger horse would survive his injury. For the first time in over 40 years, I had nothing to ride. So I was primed for a new horse.

I watched with interest as Kit’s current owner – who called him "Twig’, put him through his paces. He was a beautiful mover and jumped everything she put in front of him. By the time it was my chance to ride him, she had jumped everything in her field with the exception of a big table. I made up my mind that if he jumped it, I would buy him.

I approached the fence tentatively; I wanted to see if he would take it on his own, or if he needed encouragement. One of the things I have learned over the years is advanced riders tend to ‘hold’ horses together; as such, the horse then depends upon their rider to safely navigate courses. While that’s great for an advanced rider, I was not an advanced rider. I needed a horse that could think for itself and take care of both of us.

So I gave Kit time to figure out how to jump the fence. As I approached the fence, I could feel him begin to question my lack of direction. His ears were turned back as if waiting for instruction from me. He didn’t get it.

Kit jumped the fence, but it wasn’t pretty. On our second go, his ears were pointed at the fence and I could feel him move forward towards the table. It was a better jump. But it was the third jump, a breathtaking bascule that sealed the deal. I handed him back to the owner and simply said, "Yes."

Unfortunately, Kit flunked his pre-purchase exam (similar to a grueling physical). An old ‘chip’ on the outside of the right ankle was the ‘official’ reason, but the vet, who knew all my prior horses, took me aside and told me that he frankly didn’t think Kit could stand up – "he’s just too fine boned for Eventing."

So with reluctance, I opted not to purchase him, and the next day Kit left for Florida with his owner.

That evening, I sent the x-rays to my regular vet, a fellow event rider, who gave me some sanguine advice: "the chip is on the outside of the ankle, and that should not cause him an issue—but the question you need to answer is: ‘how lucky do you feel?’"

Two weeks later Kit’s owner called me and offered to cut his price by 1/3rd, to $16,500.

Try as I might, I was unable to shake the feeling of Kit over the table on that third go at it, and figured, ‘what the hell, why not.’ He was going to be my last horse, and if he could give my a few years of those jumps, I was willing to risk it.

On December 2, 2014, I agreed to buy him. Kit spent the next month in Florida, on my nickel, with his old owner continuing to school him.

In January of 2015, Kit was shipped to Aiken, South Carolina, where my coach, Katie Wherley, took possession of him and continued to compete him. A phenomenally talented rider, with a great feel, Katie began to retrain Kit to think for himself, something that would be critical to he and I successfully working together.

As the winter went on, Katie began to notice that as she asked Kit to hold himself together, as opposed to her holding him together—something she knew I could not do—Kit stepped down a level and began showing with her. He successfully competed at Novice and Training throughout 2015.

The following winter he headed back to Aiken, SC with Katie. As she continued his training and competing he began to show inconsistencies and weakness that led to him losing his confidence over fences.

And so began what I called the ‘Winter & Spring of injections,’ where we systematically injected all of Kit’s major joints to root out the issue. Hock injections, led to stifle injections, which led who knows what… each helped, but none was the cure we all hoped for.

When Kit returned with Katie from Aiken, the plan was to let her compete him through the summer, move him up to Preliminary, and I would then take him out in the Fall for a few runs at novice and finish the season at Training, and if all worked out, try my third run at Preliminary in the Spring.

That was the plan at least.

My first and what would turn out, my only time to watch Kit compete ended before it really began. Kit put in a lack luster dressage test at the 2016 Spring Morven Park Horse trials, which had Katie worried. Show jumping warmup went downhill quickly. His first few fences were spot on. But a refusal at the oxer, was followed by a refusal at the vertical warm up fence (which he had already jumped three times). When he refused the X, we knew he was trying to tell us something.

Katie’s suggestion of another round of injections conflicted with my old school philosophy. In the old days, when a horse came off the track, they would be given a year off to let their bodies recover from the pounding of the race world. As I watched Kit stop at the X for the umpteenth time, it occurred to me that he hadn’t been given that time off. Instead, he had been yanked out of the racehorse world and thrown immediately into, in many ways, the more grueling Eventing world. Injections were not going to fix what ailed Kit; he needed time off to just have fun and remember what being a horse was all about.

Having gone from one barn to another, from Maryland to Florida, to South Carolina, back to Maryland, all in a matter of months, Kit, was physically shaking as Katie untacked him. He looked like he was having a nervous breakdown. And only time could heal that. So he got it.

I brought him home, introduced him to my other two horses, and told him he had a year off. As I watched him walk away, his old name ‘Twig’ accurately described him. A year later, he was fat and happy and ready to once again have a rider on his back.

Alas, my career took an unexpected turn, and I was given an opportunity of a life time – so instead of retiring and enjoying riding as planned, I spent the next three years on an airplane, tele-commuting to the west coast. When I was home, and had time to ride, Kit was always my third option, so he never got ridden, and a saddle on his back became a distant memory.

By the time my work assignment was completed, ‘Twig’ would be the last term one would use to describe a now thoroughly plump Kit. To say he was a happy horse would be an understatement. He didn’t have a care in the world.

When I finally did get on him in the Fall of 2019, he was everything I had hoped he would be. Once again I was sitting on the horse that had wowed me over the table fence five years ago.

I spent the Fall working with Kit, cleaning out the cobwebs in his brain, working with Katie tuning up his jumping skills. As winter approached, Katie and I planned out my Spring season and Kit was given the Winter off.

Everything went south from there.

When the Spring thaw came, and I hopped on him, he was decidedly off. My hopes that I was just dealing with an abscess hit a stone wall when my vet diagnosed the issue was ‘ring bone,’ a career ending bone disease.

I was devastated. I had yet to compete him, and now I would never have that chance.

While some owners would have passed him on to parts and fates unknown, Kit still had a job: to be a companion horse, the horse that keeps another horse company when its buddy is gone. With two other horses, I needed a companion horse when one was taken away. So that was now Kit’s job.

On the positive side, the ringbone Kit had was called ‘high ringbone,’ which meant it affected the upper part of the pastern joint. Typically horses with this type of ringbone, once the bone ‘changes’ are finished, the horse would be rideable again—maybe not sound enough to show, but rideable. Until that occurred, I could still get on Kit and ‘ride him sound’, which allowed me to exercise all my skill sets—which my other two horses didn’t need.

By the Fall of 2022, his ringbone had entered a critical phase. Kit was so uncomfortable that riding him was out of the question. It was about this time that I crossed paths again with the vet who flunked him during the pre-purchase and we got to talking. He suggested a treatment called ‘Shock Wave Therapy’. Shock Wave Therapy works by blasting the bone, tissue & nerves in the affected area, and in the case of the nerves, ‘numbs’ them, so Kit would no longer feel the pain of the bone changes. With nothing to lose, I had the procedure performed the week of Thanksgiving.

The change in Kit was amazing. Within five days he was once again sound. On the Thursday following the treatment I turned Kit out, and as I watched him trot away decided I was going to get on his back that evening. Eight hours later, when I went out to get him, I found him standing on three legs. He was unwilling to put any weight at all on his front right leg, the leg that had been shock waved.

My first assumption was that he had developed an abscess, so he was treated for that, but after the fifth day with no sign of improvement, I asked a local vet friend who was over for dinner to look at him. He too thought it manifested as an abscess – that is, until he pressed into the tendons on the backside of the pastern.

"I don’t know, Mike, he is definitely sore there—something is not right. You need to get that spot ultra-sounded."

Three days later, my regular vet was staring in disbelief at the screen of her ultrasound machine. "There are major holes in both his deep flexor and superficial tendons, and all the supporting ligaments…. are …. well …. Just not there anymore. He did something bad, really bad. We need to immobilize him and get him to Leesburg (Virginia Tech. Equine Emergency Medical Hospital (EMC)) ASAP."

As luck would have it, as I was a member of the EMC Board, I was able to get an expedited appointment for Kit. The assigned Vet, Dr. Jennifer Barrett, confirmed my vet’s diagnosis and gave me the bad news.

"Yes, we can save him, but the chances of you ever riding him again is next to zero, and even if we can get him to that point, his road to recovery will not only be long, but painful, and expensive. No one would fault you if you decided to put him down.".

"On the other hand, if we get lucky, and everything goes perfectly, you could have a hacking horse, but more than likely you’ll end up with a very expensive pasture pet."

While I appreciated Jen’s ‘get out of jail’ option of euthanizing him and using the money saved to buy a new horse I could compete, I seized onto her last statement of getting lucky.

I did like the horse and wanted to give him a fighting chance to live out his life. So Jen drew up her battle plan, and I checked my bank account.

I sat in numbed silence as Dr. Barrett laid out her plan. From what I got out of her briefing, without the support of the tendons that ruptured, Kit’s pastern joint, which usually has a three-degree range of motion, now had a 20-degree bend in it, and it was only going to get worse. Unless and until the joint was stabilized, any effort to repair the torn tendons would be a waste of time, because, with the bend in the joint, Kit would simply re-tear them and we would be back to square one.

The only way to repair the joint, however, was to fuse it by performing an arthrodesis: a surgery where all the cartilage in the joint would be scrapped out, screws inserted to pull the two halves of the joint together, and a plate inserted on top of the upper and lower pastern bones to take out the bend.

While that may sound evasive, I kept having to remind myself that the joint only had a three-degree range of motion, and that the loss of the that motion as a result of fusing it, would not have that much effect upon his gate. I drew solace in the fact that I had had another horse which had a fused ankle, which has a much larger range of motion, and that that horse lived a long and happy life.

That evening, as I sat with my regular vet, I got a warning message: "the surgery will be no big deal, but the recovery is going to be [tough]. Horses don’t tolerate casts very well. I’ve had to treat one too many cases with casts that went south very, very fast. Be prepared for some [awful] sores. And if that is the only complication you get, count yourself lucky."

As my vet talked, I realized I picked a bad time to give up drinking…

On January 4th, six weeks after the shock wave treatment to make Kit rideable again, I dropped him off at the EMC for his surgery the next day. He barely made it to his stall, he was limping so badly.

Normally, I watch my horses’ surgeries—yes, surgeries. I’ve had that many at the EMC, but for some reason, I opted not to watch Kit’s, which was fortunate, as it proved to be the longest of them all.

When Dr. Barrett called me with the results, I could hear concern in her voice. "The surgery went well. The joint came together nicely and the plate was perfect, we got the bend out of the joint and the two halves of the pastern joint are now aligned straight as they should be…"

But there was a ‘but’ in her voice … and it came next. "Kit had a hard recovery. He didn’t want to get up, and I had to go into the recovery stall and get him to stand up. Because he was lying down so long, I’m concerned there might be muscle damage, so I got him on heavy duty fluids and we are watching his liver enzymes. We’re not going to take any chances."

When I hung up, my veterinary nurse wife interpreted what had just been told to me – "Kit is tying up, (a term every event rider worries about after a hard cross country run) which will release toxins into his blood stream, that unless diluted and flushed out of his system, will cause liver failure, and they will lose him."

My mind immediately flashed back to another horse I had once taken to the EMC, alas too late, who died in his stall there, in front of me, due to his body’s inability to cope with the release of muscle toxins. But unlike that horse, Dr. Barrett was way out ahead of the issue and was leaving no treatment option off the table.

Knowing she had her hands full, I waited five days before I went down to see Kit. I was not prepared for what I saw. Kit looked like a ghost. In just a few days, he had dropped an enormous amount of weight. But bad as it was, the sight of five IV bags hanging in the overhead and hooked to a catheter in his neck, and a machine pumping God only knows what into him made me question if I had made the right decision. But there was no turning back now. The old saying "in for a penny, in for a pound" soon became my mantra.

It would be seven days before Dr. Barrett breathed a sigh of relief and I was told that he was out of the woods, and the staff could now get on with actions to help him recover from the surgery.

Before Kit was taken off the table following surgery, Dr. Barrett had put a fiberglass cast on his leg to help minimize movement of the joint. And while doctors can tell their human patents not to move around after surgery, horses don’t comprehend not moving. Add in the fact that Kit was on heavy duty pain killers, including a fentanyl patch, 60 Tylenol tablets a day, and bute, he wasn’t feeling much pain, so he moved around. But with no ‘padding’ between the caste and his leg, as predicted by my local vet, he quickly developed sores, [awful] sores, that Dr. Barrett struggled to contain.

No matter what she did, no matter how many times she took the cast off and reset it, the sores grew. Soon they were oozing. It was now a race between getting the joint to stabilize enough to allow the hard cast to be replaced with a soft cast versus the complications that were beginning to manifest from the sores.

While Dr. Barrett did her best to reassure me things would be ok, I struggled with the nagging feeling I had made the wrong call. But I had thrown my lot in with Dr. Barrett and trusted her, and in the end, that was what kept me going.

It would be amiss if I didn’t mention I always had one eye wearily on Kit’s ever increasing vet bill, and while I knew all the money was being well spent, at times I felt like I was hemorrhaging money, and the only way to stop the hemorrhaging was to bring Kit home.

After three long weeks, Dr. Barrett determined Kit was stable enough to come home. Dr. Barrett’s decision was based in part on my wife’s and my 90 combined years of horse experience – a huge chuck on my wife’s a result of her being the head of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Equine Emergency Hospital. Everyone, including my wife and I, felt Kit would be in safe hands with us.

He walked out of the EMC looking good. Yes he had a limp, but given all he had been through, it really wasn’t of any concern to me.

Everyone was happy Kit was finally home, especially Kit. Unfortunately, he wasn’t happy when his stable mates went out during the day and he was stuck in his stall, but that’s why drugs are a horse owner’s best friend.

My wife’s time was spent tending to Kit’s wounds from the cast rubs. I spent my time throwing grain at him to help him regain some of his lost weight. Everything was going as planned …

…Then Kit rolled in his stall…

Anyone who has watched a horse roll in field, knows that upon getting up, horses tend to ‘leap’, or ‘rear’, upon getting up. I was sitting in the tack room and saw him go down to roll, but thought nothing of it. The next thing I knew was his head was nearly touching the ceiling and he was standing on his back legs. As Kit came down, I found myself thinking: "that can’t be good," but as Kit went back to eating, I didn’t give it any more thought.

The next morning, seven days after he had come home, Kit walked out of his stall clearly lame, and my mind flashed back to the leap in his stall the night before. Figuring he may have just tweaked the joint, I opted not to call EMC’s 911 and instead just watched him for the next few days hoping a now very noticeable limp would go away.

By day five, with no sign of improvement, I called my vet and asked her to come look at it. She offered to take an x-ray, which I concurred with, figuring it would just prove everything was OK. But when she let out a gasp, I knew I was in trouble.

"Mike, it looks like he broke one of the screws in the plate…"

"What???? You’re kidding, you have to be wrong."

She was. Kit didn’t break just one screw, but two of the three screws holding the plate. And to make matters worse, the x-ray clearly showed that the bend in the joint, the bend the plate was meant to correct, had returned.

Within minutes I was on the phone with Dr. Barrett, who like me, could not believe it – then I sent her the x-rays.

"Bring him down tomorrow, I need to take my own x-rays and figure out what to do," said Dr. Barrett.

So two weeks after he came home, Kit was once again headed to the EMC.

I was greeted by grim faces all around, which got grimmer as new x-rays were taken. Not only were two of the 3 screws holding the plate broken, but one of the two screws pulling the joint together appeared to be backing out.

X-ray showing the upper screws where broken, and the plate was clearly bent. To make matters
 worse, one of the two screws holding the upper and lower pastern joint together - which was
 necessary for the joint to successfully fuse, was backing out.  Only one screw held it in place.

Dr. Barrett immediately ruled out re-performing the surgery. "Even if we could go back in, the screws broke below the bone surface so there is no way to extract them, and without them out, there is no way to put in new screws. Not to mention that we we’re lucky he recovered from the first surgery. I’m not risking another. He’s going back into a cast and he’ll have to tough it out."

Needless to say, I drove home with an empty horse trailer.

Now the fact the ‘E’ in the EMC’s title stand for ‘emergency’ means that horses that come to the center don’t stay long; most come in and leave on the same day. A week is considered a long stay. Kit’s second stay, at 30 days, proved to be one of the longest in many staff members’ memory. With horses coming in and out, staff members rarely develop a bond with the horse under their care. Sure, they treat them well, but that’s a far cry from developing a bond. But in Kit’s case, the staff clearly developed a bond with him.

I can’t remember a single instance when I was in his stall grooming him, that one of the staff members didn’t drop in to say hi to us. Everyone had something positive to say about his demeanor and caught up with me, or caught me up on them.

As it just so happened, the cartoon strip ‘Peanuts’ was running a series were Snoopy was laid up in a cast after he broke his leg after tripping over his water bowl. I would clip out the strips and tape them to his stall door for everyone to read. Yes, I knew I was ‘junking’ up the appearance of the barn he was in, but no one objected and soon the wall in front of his stall was covered with cartoon strips of Snoopy ‘toughing it out,’ as Kit was doing.

During what can only be called one of the longest months in my horse owning life, Dr. Barrett, along with Bruno, the intern who had assisted Dr. Barrett in the surgery and the initial recovery, would always stop by to offer words of encouragement.

For Dr. Barrett, it was a never-ending fight to prevent the sores from the cast becoming a bigger issue than Kit not putting enough weight on the leg, which would not only slow down the rate of fusion, but risk him foundering in the left front, which, had it occurred, would have left us no option but to put him down.

For 30 days, everyone held their breath. How Dr. Barrett and Bruno put up with me I’ll never know, but they did, and they did a great job managing a nightmare situation. In a desperate effort to slow the progression of the sores caused by cast, Dr. Barrett hit on the idea of cutting Kit’s cast in half, and then just putting the back half on – like a splint, and securing it to his leg with vet warp. The trick worked and the sores slowly began to clear up.

Kit’s progress was excruciatingly and painfully slow, but it was still progress. When his x-rays began to show fusing in the joint, the conversation once again turned to Kit’s long-term rehabilitation.

After our first attempt at taking him on, neither my wife nor I were insane enough to try again, so the hunt began for a suitable facility to send Kit too. Kit needed a place that could provide the supervised stall rest to allow the joint fusion to finish, but also a facility with the equipment and experienced staff to rehabilitate the injured tendons.

Once again, Dr. Barrett came to the rescue.

"I want to send him to Dr. Stephanie Davis, in Warrenton," Barrett said. "Stephanie only takes on a few horses and gives them 100%. Your best chance of getting Kit to a point where you might be able to hack him is with her. The problem is – a spot has to open in her barn. The good thing however is I have a dedicated spot and the horse that she is currently taking care of for me is getting ready to go home. So I told her not to fill it with anyone, that Kit will be coming her way."

Almost two weeks would pass between the conversation above and the phone call from Dr. Barrett that the stall had opened, and Dr. Davis was ready for him.

So once more, I hooked up my trailer and headed to the EMC to pick up Kit. Unlike six weeks prior, Kit walked out of the EMC noticeably lame. At the sight of his gate, my heart sank. This was not going as planned.

An hour and a half later, Kit was being off loaded at Dr. Davis’s. Stephanie and her staff greeted me as I was undoing the tail ramp. As they say, first impressions are always lasting impressions, and my first impression of Dr. Davis and her staff was simply ‘wow.’

She and her staff were all wearing matching uniforms, something I had not expected from a small operation like hers. The barn where Kit would be spending the next five months was impeccably clean and well organized. Her staff, which I only know by their initials as MG and JH, took Kit’s lead shank from me in a way that clearly said, in a very nice and reassuring manner – "he’s ours now – we’ll take it from here."

I really didn’t get a chance to look around the facility, or talk to Dr. Davis, as I myself was going in for a surgery the next day and had to get home. So I patted Kit a farewell, thanked the staff, and left. Hoping all the way home that Dr. Davis and her staff were as good as every side they were.

As time would tell, they were not only good; they would prove to be the best of the best.

________________________________________________________

While I was impressed by Dr. Davis’s operation, another vet had recommended another rehabilitation facility about an hour north of me. As Dr. Davis was two and a half hours away, the facility closer to me proved it was worth looking into, as it would allow me to visit Kit weekly—not to mention, it was a quarter the cost.

After my surgery, I took an afternoon to see if the 2nd facility was worth considering – it wasn’t. Unlike Dr. Davis’s, the second facility had over 40 horses being cared for by two people even older than I was. All the horses were in stalls that could best be described as caves and no light made it into their stalls due to 30 years of cobwebs blocking the light from the overheads. As I would later tell my wife, I only had to take four steps into that barn to know I would never send a horse there.

And yes, while Dr. Davis’s was in fact more expensive, her price was ‘all inclusive.’ Where the other barn provided services ‘al carte;’ Change a bandage? That’s $15, laser treatment of a wound? $20, Aqua treadmill? $30. All that, as well as the full suite of rehab treatments, was included in Dr. Davis’ single-fee structure.

The next day, I drove down to visit Kit, and as soon as I walked in, any doubt of keeping him there evaporated. The staff immediately greeted me and brought me up to date on Kit’s progress. Yes, he still moved around painfully, but he was well groomed and was beginning to show signs of putting on lost weight.

I sat down with Dr. Davis, who laid out her battle plan—which basically was to keep him as quiet as she could until the joint fused. Unlike the EMC where Kit would get excited by horses coming and going, which resulted in Kit hopping up and down, which put everyone in a panic, Kit was surrounded by horses at Dr. Davis’ that, like him, were confined to their stalls. Kit also had the advantage of having an end stall, so he could also look out to see bright green fields.

As I was leaving, my eye caught a large LCD screen with all the horses’ names on it and their daily schedule. Dr. Davis pulled up Kit’s record on the screen where I could see everything she and her staff had done for him since he had arrived. When I asked if there was any way I could have access to his daily records remotely, I was told yes. She had just had the system installed, and I would be the first owner to try it out.

Not a day went by that I don’t end the day by logging in and reviewing Kit’s day. The staff, knowing that I am doing that, often leaves messages to me in the notes section of every activity– from his daily grooming, to his massage treatments, telling me how he did. It was almost as good as being there myself.

But the question that hung over my head, and that no one could answer, was, "Is this worthwhile?" Yes. Kit continued to make progress, but like at the EMC, it was painfully slow.

"Until the joint fuses," Dr. Davis said, "we are not going to see much progress, and we can’t begin to do any rehabilitation of his tendons. All we can do now is work on keeping his spirits up and getting him to put weight on the bad leg—and hope."

Once again, I dared to hope.

As I drove home that day, I found myself reflecting upon an old horseman saying that one can judge the quality of a barn and how the horses are treated by whether the horses hang their heads out their stalls and look around. Do they show interest in their surroundings?

When I walked into Kit’s stall that day, I noticed he barely took the time to look at me, even my bag of carrots did little to get his attention—but when he heard the voice of Dr. Davis and her two vet techs Santiago and Marielle, he almost ran me over to see them! I surely didn’t matter to Kit, but his caretakers did—and that’s the best testimony any horse could give.

Two months later, Kit was shipped to the EMC for a pre-scheduled progress checkup. I was prepared for the worst. To be told the joint was not fusing and work on the tendons would be delayed even more. To once again see Kit once again limp into the EMC treatment barn.

Instead, I was greeted by an almost-sound horse. Yes, if I closed one eye and squinted while tilting my head at a 30-degree angle, I could pick up a lame step every now and then. But I found myself saying, if this is the best I get—then it was worth every dime spent.

Kit not only walked great, but he looked great and he was clearly happy.

Dr. Davis told me that the transition to soundness had started to happen the week prior, and she suspected that it was because the joint had finally fused enough to stop moving, and in doing so, removed the principle source of pain.

Dr. Barrett’s X-rays confirmed Dr. Davis’ suspicion. The ultrasound of his tendons brought even better news—the tendons were well on their way to healing. "I’m not going to do anything to them," Dr. Barrett told me. "Anything I do will only screw his natural healing process up."

Upon the completion of her examination of Kit, Dr. Barrett turned to Dr. Davis and told her he was ready to begin his rehabilitation.

What I got out of the technical, exchange between Kit’s two vets was simply—"Kit was going to make it," and for me, it was finally time to write this story, a story I had put off writing for seven months because I didn’t know what the last few paragraphs would be.

Today, as I write this, Kit’s schedule includes a 15-minute hand walk, hand grazing, a 15-minute massage, grooming, time in an aqua-treadmill, and a host of other things to occupy his mind and body to get him ready to once again run free and play with his buddies.

How soon he would come home was anyone’s guess—where months before I was eager to get him home, now I wanted him to stay; for the longer he stayed, the stronger the tendons would be when he did come home, and the sooner he can rejoin his pals in the field.

If he comes home too soon, and the tendons are not fully healed, all the progress over the past seven months could be lost. So to play it safe, I told Stephanie that she, and she alone, would make the call as to when he could come home.

Time was clearly on Kit’s side—as was Dr. Barrett, and the EMC nursing staff, and Dr. Davis and her staff. They all worked to make sure Kit would be able to live out a long and happy life. For me, that’s a win.

Epilogue

On September 14th, ten months almost to the day, from when he suffered his career ending injury, an injury that sadly few horses would survive, Dr. Davis pronounced him "good to go," and for what I thought would be the last time, I hooked up my trailer and made the long trip to Dr. Davis’ facility in Warrenton to pick Kit up.

While I was happy Kit was coming home, it was also a bit sad, as Dr. Davis and her staff were having to say goodbye to an animal they had come to love. So, I gave them time to do just that. As I would soon discover, they had brought out a part of Kit’s personality I had never seen before. He has a kindness in his eyes and way of going now, as if he knows something special was done for him. For developing that in him, I will be forever grateful to Dr. Davis and her staff.

Don’t ask me how I knew, but it was clear to me that when Kit got off the trailer at home, he knew his long ordeal was finally over. He was greeted with whinnies from his two stalemates and when I closed the door on his stall, he gave me a look that said, "I’m finally home."

Getting Kit home, however, was only the start of what would prove to be a long re-introduction process. While his joint had fused, we needed to keep him stay ‘quiet’ for as long as we could so the tendons could slowly get used to being back in work again.

To accomplish this, Kit was turned out in a round pen for two hours in the morning, and two hours in the afternoon. All while being heavily drugged. As he needed companionship while in the barn, my other two horses had to come in with him as well, which made my life a living hell on non-stop stall cleaning.

Kit was warmly greeted by his old field mates upon returning home. They refused to leave his side
while he was confined to the round pen, including mandatory nap time.

Everything was going to plan, and just when I thought my vet bill paying days were behind me; ten days after Kit came home, Scotty, my oldest and most talented horse was stricken with septic cellulitis and had to be rushed to the EMC. I had flashbacks of Kit’s emergency trip ten months earlier, but in the case of Scotty, they were not sure he would survive – but he did, and as I write this, Dr. Davis is performing her magic on his recovery as well, but that’s a story for another time.

Now, one would think having to deal with only two horses would make my workload bearable, it was anything but. Kit and Wesley, my middle-aged horse, became inseparable, and I suddenly found myself trying to manage getting Kit out as much as I could, so Wesley could get out.

I eventually came upon a routine of putting Kit in the round pen in the morning – with Wesley in the pasture surrounding the round pen. Repeating the process in the evening, but with Wesley in the round pen and Kit outside of it. The first time I did that I held my breath, for it was the first time in 10 months that Kit was not constrained. But he stayed by Wesley. Every day I increased Kit’s ‘out time’ by 20 minutes. By the end of the third week home, he was out the better part of the day, still constrained, but out.

As they both had shown a willingness to be quiet, one night I finally decided to allow them both to be out of the round pen at the same time. At first all went well. Then Wesley decided to jump a stone wall between two pastures to see if the grass was "greener on the other side." I held my breath as Kit ran up to the fence but let it out when he opted not to jump it, I relaxed too early!

Wesley, realizing that Kit had not followed him into the adjacent pasture, wheeled about and jumped back into the pasture with Kit, bit him, and then jumped back into the other pasture. This time Kit followed him.

I cringed, thinking all the while I had just blown ten months of hard work on the part of all the vets, but thankfully Kit trotted away from the fence as sound as a dollar.

The next day, I repeated the experiment, but this time Wesley, who by this time was sick and tired of being cooped up in a small pasture, opted to jump the three-board fence into our eight-acre turnout field. Kit followed him without a second thought.

"Well damn," I thought. If Kit was sound enough to jump four-foot fences, then he was sound enough for me to start riding him again. And the next day, I did just that, and I’ve been doing so every day since then.

Truth be told, had one asked me ten months earlier if I was willing to spend what I eventually had to spend on his recovery, I’m not sure my answer would be yes. But today, as I sit on Kit and look at the horizon through his happy upright ears, I’m glad I did.