Because of space limitations, not all the stories I followed and wrote about in the forthcoming book Equine ER, made it into the book, such as this one below about an older Quarter Horse named Trouble. Also, some early buzz: Susan Richards, author of the New York Times best-seller “Chosen by a Horse,” calls Equine ER as “thrilling and drama-filled as any of the popular hospital shows on television today. As (author Leslie) Guttman takes us along on rounds with the vets from the prestigious Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital, we enter the life-and-death world of some of the most famous racing barns in America. Over and over, Guttman shows us that even in the high stakes world of racing, compassion and an enduring love of equines is the guiding force behind the decisions of this extraordinary group of veterinarians ...” 

The book is coming out very soon. Special deal for early birds who want to pre-order (free shipping, more than 20 percent off, click here. Thank you for visiting this blog. 

 Top: Trouble, a 22-year-old Quarter Horse; above: Trouble in his younger days (photo by Don Shugart, reprinted with permission).

With a No. 10 blade on his scalpel, Dr. Brett Woodie made a nine-inch incision from Trouble’s mid-section up toward his xyphoid, or breastbone. The horse had first been intubated — sedated, anesthetized, and a tube put down his mouth and into his trachea to deliver anesthetic gas and maintain his airway. His pasterns were shackled; an electric hoist had gotten him on the table. The vet’s first cut went through Trouble’s skin, the subcutaneous tissue, and then the body wall. Then Woodie used his fingers to open the peritoneum, the thin, opaque tissue that lines the abdominal cavity.

Inside, the doctor had to search by feel for the suspected lipoma, an accumulation of noncancerous fatty tissue he believed was wrapped around the small intestine, cutting off blood supply for the 22-year-old Quarter Horse. A rectal exam earlier had pointed to the possibility of a lipoma; during it, the small intestine, which always felt like a bunch of bike tire inner tubes to the doctor, had been distended, and on the grainy screen of the ultrasound the loops of the intestine were blown up twice their size.

On the operating table, Woodie started his search at the cecum, the four-foot-long pouch that lies at the junction of the small and large intestine; inside it microbes break down undigested feed. He worked his way from the terminal, or ending, point, of the small intestine backward to where it originated. The trick was not to mistake any part of the intestine or a blood vessel for the lipoma. Woodie couldn’t explain how he could tell a lipoma from everything else; it was just something that came with time, the way blind people learn to distinguish people’s footsteps. But it was still nerve-wracking, and even the best surgeons make mistakes.

Woodie is in his late 30s, 5 foot 11, with bristly reddish-brown hair and a matching mustache. He is confident, level-headed, pragmatic, an oldest child who turned down a college baseball scholarship to instead focus on getting into vet school. He made that decision like he makes his surgical ones: He weighed the odds and went with the best shot. He didn’t want to gamble and end up with a life spent rattling around in the minor leagues, taking crummy buses to half-filled stands. One of his mottoes is: If you don’t try, you’ll never win. But then he adds: But you have to know when to try and when to stop.

In some ways, though, surgery isn’t that different from baseball. Woodie loves the mystery of it, figuring out how to correct problems on the fly, the responsibility he holds in his hands. Any cases that don’t go smoothly on the table are analyzed and the lessons methodically applied to the next. It is a new play every time.

Nobody who buys their first horse thinks about what it will truly cost them – financially and emotionally, and Trouble’s owners, Tom and Diane Lumadue, were no exception. Trouble was their first, followed by Cupcake, a miniature pinto, and Cocoa, a brown pony Diane admits with embarrassment was an impulse purchase … but she was determined to find a horse for her 8-year-old twins who were outgrowing Cupcake. The horses needed their feet trimmed regularly … worming every six to eight weeks  … hay and grain and bedding … and of course, if you wanted to take them places, you needed a way to do it. The Lumadues are like so many regular, middle-class people who come down with horse fever. They wake up with a truck and a Featherlite trailer in the driveway and wonder: How did we get here?

But it wasn’t a complete accident. They wanted the twins to grow up in the country. So they bought 11 acres with a red barn and a pond and oak trees that the twins climb instead of watching tiny TV after school on their iPods. They have chickens that are chased on a regular basis; manure is thrown in combat.  It is a “Charlotte’s Web” kind of place. That book’s author, E.B. White, himself left the city with his family to live on a farm for much the same reason the Lumadues did: He wanted his family to have “adventures in contentment."*

It was 1 a.m. on a cold March morning when Diane heard a thumping sound. The noise sounded like it was coming from the barn, even though the barn is at least 500 feet away the house. She prodded her husband. He was zonked. Finally, she got him up. Tom thought the sound was coming from the subdivision up the road, but his wife was sure it was the barn. When they got there, they found Trouble covered with mud and rolling in pain. He had kicked the water bucket off the wall, and was kicking the wooden stall walls. The bedding was torn up. Trouble had colic. It all happened so fast, as emergencies do — the local vet couldn’t take the horse’s pain away and thought he might need surgery; by afternoon they were on the road with him for the three and a half hour drive from West Virginia to Lexington.

Tom Lumadue has thick brown hair, blue eyes, and a boyish face. His great-grandparents came to West Virginia from France and were coal miners. Diane Lumadue is about 5 foot 6, with dark blonde hair she often wears back in a ponytail. She’s lived in the state all her life. Tom’s an engineer with Columbia Gas; she’s a stay-at-home mom and former cosmetics sales rep. Trouble had lived on some property next door to their old place. A Texas businessman owned him and was rarely home. When Diane asked if she could ride him, he said sure. The woman-horse thing took over, something her husband freely admits is beyond his understanding. As she put it, “For a horse and a woman, we can be two together,” but for many men (though certainly not all), the connection just isn’t there. She bought the horse. She loved what she called Trouble’s giantness,  the innocence of his nature, the smell of his coat. He was from Texas, stocky, solid, muscular. He had been a show horse, a cutting horse who excelled in the Western event where a horse separates a cow from a herd and keeps it from returning. At 22, he was not a paddock potato; he still won at local shows; his grandfather was the sire of Shining Spark, the famous palomino stallion and leading sire for the National Reining Horse Association, among others. Trouble was taciturn, typical of many Quarter Horses; he let Diane love on him, but only to a point.

When they got Trouble down to the equine hospital, Tom was blown away by the size of it. It reminded him of a regular hospital — his dad had died almost exactly a year ago, and they had spent quite a bit of time in hospital waiting rooms during his illness. The family was still grieving. Diane didn’t think she could handle it if Trouble died on top of losing her father-in-law.

When Woodie first saw Trouble, he was pawing the ground, still trying to go down to relieve the pain and pressure in his gut. Now back on the operating table, the doctor kept feeling his way through the small intestine section by section, and in about the middle of it — jackpot: the lipoma. Then he looked over the large intestine and the rest of the abdomen for any other problems. As long as you’re in there, you better look around. Everything else looked okay.

Colic has been said to kill more horses than any other condition. With colic, the intestinal tract is irritated, blocked, or bloated for any number of reasons. A horse’s stomach is tiny compared to its size, making up about 10 percent of its digestive system. Horses are meant to roam around and eat small amounts of roughage throughout the day. However, domestication has changed that, with most horses eating concentrated food at one or two mealtimes in large amounts. Many are not turned out enough. All this means more digestive problems for today’s horses than there were for their evolutionary parents (or currently are for their wild cousins). It has been estimated that there are 12,000 to 14,000 equine colic surgeries each year — close to three an hour. However, in general, the design of a horse’s intestinal tract is such that it’s easy for intestine to move into places it shouldn’t, get distended, and not return to where it belongs.

The Lumadues had been watching the surgery from an observation window outside the operating room. Woodie left the table and met them at the door. With Trouble, there were only two choices: continue the surgery or euthanize now, he told them. Sewing him back up without doing anything wasn’t a choice. With dead intestine in there (caused by the strangulation of the intestine by the lipoma), bacteria would leak out of the G.I. tract, enter the abdominal cavity and the bloodstream, and cause the horse to die a terrible death. The doctor thought Trouble would likely recover, although he would probably be sick for up to a week, or possibly more, and would have to stay at Rood and Riddle. Of course, there was always the possibility that because of his age or complications, he wouldn’t make it, and then there was the matter of cost.

Woodie has seen people who could afford to keep their horses alive choose to put them down, and people who couldn’t afford to keep them alive try anyway. He doesn’t think either way is wrong. But you shouldn’t keep a suffering animal alive for your sake, or risk your family’s financial future for theirs, he believes. With a sick horse, owners often find themselves reluctantly playing God, or at times, going broke — that goes even for healthy horses. In 2008, a hay shortage had hit Kentucky, and prices had doubled — from $4 a bale the year before to $8 to $10. Authorities were finding horses starving because owners could no longer take care of them. But many were being kept by people who couldn’t afford them any longer, who found themselves behind in rent, canceling cable TV, cell phone plans, whatever. One of the receptionists at Rood and Riddle had rescued a starving pony and a colt from nearby Harrison County. Their personalities weren’t so sanguine, and a part of her regretted it even though she felt compelled to keep them. West Virginia was also feeling the hay shortage, and so were the Lumadues. Still, outside the operating room, they told Woodie to go ahead.

Woodie worked his finger in between the lipoma and the small intestine. It was tight, and he’d have to be careful when he cut it off not to nick the intestine. He cut it with a pair of scissors, like you’d cut a ring off a swollen finger. He removed the dead intestine and joined the healthy ends together, aligning the tissue and suturing first the inner layer, called the mucosa, and then the outer, the seromuscular layer. The plumbing was changed. A horse can lose over half its small intestine and still be able to digest food. It’s not clear what causes lipomas; some are incidental and don’t harm anything, but this one wasn’t.

Trouble, as expected, was ill for much of the nine days he stayed at the hospital. Horses can’t throw up; their stomachs would likely rupture instead, so they have to reflux — a tube is placed down the nasal passage, into the esophagus, and then into the stomach. Water is pumped in to create a siphon. While he was at the hospital, the Quarter Horse gained a small fan club of techs who were taken with his age and dignity. Many horse people respect their equine elders, unlike many humans. In the month Trouble was ill, fans of John Henry, the famous racehorse who had died earlier in the year, threw him a posthumous thirty-third birthday party with chocolate cake and donuts at the Kentucky Horse Park, located near Rood and Riddle.  In people years, Trouble would have been in his 80s. He was a $4,500 horse mending in a stall that had held million-dollar broodmares and stallions that had launched front-page bidding wars at Keeneland sales. I visited him late one night a couple of days before he left. He stood motionless in the dim light of the stall. His eyes were tired but determined and patient; his demeanor reminded me of those of the grandparents I see at the grocery stoically pushing around their grandkids. His coat was the color of a robin’s breast.

On the day Trouble left the hospital to go home, the cost of his medical bill meant that the Lumadues’ kitchen would not be remodeled this year. A vacation was questionable. The dog would have to do without his big milk bones. Trouble walked slowly and determinedly toward the trailer and boarded it without hesitation. The Lumadues were exhausted. In a few days, it would be the anniversary of the death of Tom’s dad. They had lived too close this year to the unfortunate truth that most of what we love torpedoes our hearts. The late horse trainer, poet, and writer Vicki Hearne once said: “In over 25 years of training, I have never seen an animal who was replaceable.” But loss wouldn’t come again this year for the family. Trouble would mend. He remains healthy today.

 Trouble leaves the hospital.

*When Cornell University professor and writer Morris Bishop discovered E.B. White was moving to the country, he told him “I trust you will spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.” Thankfully, he did not.

Dr. Claire Latimer, Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital's specialist in veterinary ophthalmology, performs eye surgery to remove a mass from a pony's eye. The eye was sewn up afterward to facilitate the healing. 

Hello there. Busy day? Take a breath and wander away to the Bluegrass for a minute or so with the latest Equine ER video (click here.) I will also have another post tomorrow. You get a double dose this week.

 Meanwhile, for those of you in Kentucky,  I am going to be at the John Henry Memorial Equine Adoption fair Saturday June 27 at Lexington’s Kentucky Horse Park. It starts at 4:30 p.m. I’ll be pre-selling the book and showing the Equine ER video series. I want to plug the fair for a moment because it’s so important. The event is the park’s response to the widespread “plight of abused and neglected horses” and features adoptable horses from several equine rescue organizations. John Henry was one of the horse park’s most famous residents. He was a blue-collar gelding who succeeded in a world that values bluebloods, becoming the first Thoroughbred to win over $6 million. He died in 2007. I went to his funeral at the horse park, where dignitaries spoke and a chocolate donut graced the mercurial horse’s grave. (He was a chocolate freak.)

        The fair will also include a live and silent auction, and all proceeds will benefit the Kentucky Horse Council’s Save Our Horses (SOHO) fund. For more info: 859.259.4209. Thank you for visiting this blog.

Above: Tom Riddle (left) and Bill Rood in the Bluegrass equine hospital's beginnings. Below: In 2008, close to 6,500 surgeries were performed at Rood & Riddle.

Hospitals are places where life turns on a dime, and Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital is no different: During the year I spent writing the book Equine ER, which comes out in August, I saw lives saved, lost, and remade. I also saw that alongside the advanced veterinary medicine being performed exists something timeless about the job of an equine veterinarian …. found in experiences such as the small miracle of watching a foal, slick from the birth canal, get up and walk for the first time, wobbly but persevering. Or in the ritual of an equine vet making a farm call in spring, his or her truck rattling up to an old black barn, past paddocks colored kelly green from the rain and dotted with mares and foals.

Much like Hewlett Packard and Apple Computer, also started in their garages by their founders, Rood & Riddle has come a long way from Dr. Bill Rood’s one-man show in his garage, the hospital’s origins in 1980. The staff then consisted of one retired neighbor stocking the pharmacy and a former waitress Rood had hired away from a Mexican restaurant to be its only tech. Rood first met Dr. Tom Riddle in 1981; both men were looking for another equine veterinarian with whom to form a partnership. They teamed up the following year and opened the hospital in its current location in 1986. It was about a quarter of the size it is now.

At that time, there was already a big, established equine veterinary practice in town, Hagyard-Davidson-McGee Associates (now called Hagyard Equine Medical Institute). Founded in 1876, it was, and is, famous for taking care of greats like Man o’ War and Secretariat, as well as horses Queen Elizabeth II once boarded in Lexington at Darby Dan Farm. But Rood and Riddle were relatively young and ambitious, thirty-eight and thirty-four, and already used to working endless hours; neither wanted to work those kinds of hours for anybody else. Because of their youth, they were also too foolish and untested by life, as Riddle says, to worry about failing. Today, meeting Rood, the personable mellow-voiced hospital director in his sixties, a heartbreaker in his day, it’s not hard imagining him as a young, brash entrepreneur going up against Hagyard’s, as everyone calls it. It’s harder to imagine the quieter Riddle as a risk-taker, a man who almost talked himself out of seeing his own filly run (and win) in a race at Churchill Downs on Derby Day because he thought he shouldn’t take a day off work during foaling season. But underneath their seemingly different exteriors – Rood, the laid-back easy-come, easy-goer, and Riddle, the self-described reader of the fine print – they are alike in that both want a big say in their own fates, and are willing to take the chances to have it.

The two went $1.8 million in debt to start the hospital (they had $1,000 between them in cash). The bank chief father of a college friend of Rood’s paved the way for the loans. When they sent out invitations to the hospital’s open house, a prominent equine veterinarian in town was heard to say, “I won’t be there for the open house, but I’ll come to the bankruptcy auction.” That veterinarian underestimated the impact of his statement on the two men, and the fuel that has driven so many entrepreneurs to succeed: pride. Rood and Riddle wanted to stay in Lexington; the horse world is insular; and they were determined not to implode inside it with everyone looking on.

That determination paid off. Since then, some of the most famous Thoroughbreds in the world have been through the hospital, such as the last two to win the Triple Crown, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed. But along with the Thoroughbred athletes, many other kinds of horses are treated, from miniature ponies kept as pasture pets to Clydesdales that pull wedding carriages, and the occasional llama. Today, the practice is a multi-million dollar partnership. One of the partners has his own string of polo ponies. But these veterinarians work hard, crazy-hard, for their money, and sacrifice many hours of personal and family time. I’m still trying to figure out when they sleep. Or eat. Rood told me that at the first partners retreat about twelve years ago, in a rare private conversation among the veterinarians (all men at the time) about the costs of their profession, some wept when talking about the time they had missed with their kids, and the pressure on their intimate relationships from the weight of the work.

The demands of their work ultimately stem from the sheer number of cases they treat. Approximately 11,000 horses come into the clinic each year, and ambulatory vets attend to roughly another 5,000. In 2008, close to 6,500 surgeries were performed.

With all the cases come some knotty situations. Riddle is an admirer of the late veterinarian-writer James Herriot, whose stories have inspired numerous young people to go to veterinary school, including interns I met at the clinic. Herriot once said, “If only vetting just consisted of treating sick animals. But it didn’t. There were so many other things.”

At Rood & Riddle, some of those other things are client-related dilemmas in emergencies. Owners can be difficult to reach, living or traveling in different time zones, even different hemispheres. Sometimes a farm manager or barn crew member will bring a horse in, and then give the go-ahead if the animal needs immediate surgery. Later, the owner might object to the cost and the fact he or she wasn’t consulted first. Vets at times have to watch animals suffer while owners are making the difficult decisions about whether to do surgery or euthanize, or while insurance agents have their own vets do required examinations. Just as with regular doctors, the paperwork is voluminous.

The hospital sits on twenty-four acres of what used to be part of the old Nursery Stud farm, where Man o’ War was born on a spring day in 1917. The grounds are lush, with plantings such as lilac and forsythia bushes, azaleas and Russian sage, and white pines, red oaks, magnolias, and spruce trees. The practice has more than fifty vets and a staff of over 200 people: nursing techs, farriers, barn crew, business staff, administrative assistants, and more. Nineteen of the veterinarians are ambulatory, meaning they are out in the field visiting farms all day, in trucks packed tight with all the medications and supplies they’ll need, including snacks like salted almonds and Girl Scout cookies since they rarely have time to stop to eat. On the property are nine barns with 140 stalls. Two of them are isolation barns for infectious diseases such as Potomac horse fever and salmonella. The hospital’s buildings include a surgery unit, a podiatry center, a reproductive center, its own pharmacy, and lab. The grounds are noticeable for what you don’t see: horse droppings. Whatever is pooped is immediately scooped by the first person to witness the event, it is almost like it never happens.

Horse people know that equines are stupendously accident-prone. But most non-horse people do not. They don't know that the elegant, graceful creatures that Bill Rood calls "man's noblest animal"  get hurt running into fences, running into each other, running into trees, getting stuck under fences and panicking, trying to jump fences and not quite making it, getting struck by lightning, getting their legs stuck in groundhog holes, wrenching their necks, kicking each other, stepping on each other … and so on. Numerous patients come in to Rood & Riddle without their owners knowing what led to their problems. A horse cannot tell its doctor what happened or where it hurts or feels numb. Their illnesses are very often mysteries.

Here is the second part of an (edited) excerpt that began last week from a chapter entitled “Lucky” from the nonfiction book Equine ER: Stories From a Year in the Life of an Equine Veterinary Hospital by Leslie Guttman, coming out in August 2009 from Eclipse Press. (See earlier post below for Part One.) Last week, Lucky, a six-week-old Tennessee Walker foal from Louisa, Kentucky, was mauled by a stallion named Willie, after the stallion broke the latch to Lucky’s barn door, and the foal wandered into Willie’s paddock. Lucky was taken to Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, the “Mayo Clinic” of horse hospitals and the setting for Equine ER. The open wounds on both sides of the foal’s neck, but particularly the left, were both severe and horrifying to view.

After looking at Lucky for a while, you got used to the grotesqueness of his wound. Rood & Riddle surgeons couldn’t close it because there wasn’t enough skin. What was there would be like suturing tissue paper. If all went well granulation tissue would form a bed of tissue that would fill the wound level with the surrounding skin. The wound’s edges would contract to cover the granulation tissue with skin.

However, with an open wound like his, an infection could easily start and become deep-seated in the muscle. It was summer, flies were in the air, and the wound was itchy. Lucky had to be watched constantly to keep him from rubbing the area too hard against the side of the stall, the feed bucket, and the water pail, creating more tissue trauma. If his blood supply didn’t stay strong, the edges of the wounds on both sides of his neck could die off further, making it expand instead contract. Dr. Brett Woodie was worried about the jugular vein and associated nerves that were exposed. If any of those were damaged, the foal could have a loss of nerve function to the left side of his larynx. In addition, it was important to keep the foal’s pain under control so he’d keep eating and stay healthy.

Vets knew if the foal took a downward turn, it would be hard to turn him back around. A few days after Lucky arrived, another foal came into Rood & Riddle that had apparently been kicked in the head by another horse. Despite surgery, that foal died three days later after lapsing into a coma. In a couple of months, yet another foal would come in that had been attacked by dogs, family pets, no less. He would die as well.

It was July when Lucky came to the hospital, humid and hot. Across the city, even the grass was getting sunburned. The heat didn’t help in the colt’s second week at Rood & Riddle, where one of the biggest challenges was keeping his fever down. It was running around 103; the anti-inflammatories would keep it down to a safer 101, but when they started to wear off, it would rise again. (The normal temperatures for foals range from 100.5 to 101.5.) The meds could be given only twice a day due to potentially harmful side effects such as kidney problems. Lucky’s IV fluids were refrigerated until they were given, which did help reduce his core temperature. However, his red blood cell count had to be watched; an excess of fluids would make it drop; they needed to be strictly regulated. The foal got alcohol baths regularly, and two fans remained on all the time in the stall. However, it was difficult to keep the fans positioned correctly 24/7; when he was down sleeping, the air wasn’t hitting him. When his fever went to the high end, he lost interest in nursing and went down to sleep. Yet doctors also didn’t want to kill the fever entirely because it was part of his immune system working to fight infection. It was a balancing act. By the end of the second week he had stabilized. The wounds on his neck were also mending. Lucky was ready to be transferred to a hospital barn, Three Sisters Farm in Midway, Kentucky. 

The drama of the stallion attack and the scrappiness of Lucky’s personality despite his circumstances made him one of the in-house celebrities at Rood & Riddle that summer. On the day Lucky left to go to Three Sisters, staff members were sorry to see him leave. It was hard to gripe or be crabby once you had been around him. The foal saw the glass half-full.

A week passed, and Dr. Stephen Reed, the lead vet on Lucky’s case, was alarmed to see on a farm call to Three Sisters that despite Lucky making great progress, the foal was now over at the knees. The danger with the condition was that his tendons could permanently contract. If that happened, his front legs would be crooked and he could have difficulty getting around. After consulting with Dr. Scott Morrison, Rood & Riddle’s head of podiatry, Lucky’s limbs were bandaged from fetlock to elbow, to relax the contracted tendons and ligaments.

Another week passed, and Lucky didn’t look right. His energy was low, and he was depressed and lethargic. Both the conjunctiva (the pink membrane) rimming his eyes and his (oral) mucous membranes were pale. It turned out he was anemic. An ultrasound of his lungs also showed the beginnings of pneumonia. Reed was worried the foal would seriously deteriorate. The vet put him on antibiotics and high-protein feed to boost his energy level and build muscle mass. Lucky’s anemia was being caused in large part by inflammation from the pneumonia. Resolving the pneumonia would also eventually take care of the anemia. As far as his knees, they still weren’t better. Morrison came out to assess the situation and trim the foal’s hooves. The vet thought that once the foal could be turned out, the problem would clear up. The growth process of the long bones in his limbs had been stalled because he had been confined for so long. Morrison believed that once Lucky got exercise, the ligaments and tendons would stretch, and the knees would straighten out. As Lucky progressed that’s what happened. Eventually, Lucky and his dam, Rose, could be turned out all day. Being outside was the best medicine. His anemia and pneumonia receded and then disappeared. On the quiet farm, summer turned to fall, and the cicadas’ drone grew fainter. Lucky played and grew and returned to health.

Lucky came back to Rood & Riddle the last Sunday in September. He’d have his final check-up on Monday and leave for his real home the following day. The wound had contracted to an opening about one to two inches wide and four inches long; it looked like just a small laceration. He had no nerve damage to his neck, and plenty of muscle remained for him to have normal movement. He might never have a normal contour to his neck, and it would probably always feel bumpy to touch. But he was alive. He was bigger, his coat darker, his face more mature. His mane had turned flaxen, his coat sorrel. He looked much like his famous grandfather. He wasn’t a baby anymore.
 
That Sunday, as he and Rose waited in the stall to go home, and the Wilsons, his owners, made arrangements in Louisa to pick him up, another sort of homecoming was taking place in Louisville: the memorial service for Eight Belles at Churchill Downs. The racetrack’s bugler played “Call to the Post” to open the service, and the speakers came to the podium in the garden where the filly’s remains were interred in a handmade walnut box. A magnolia tree sent from a South Carolina fan shaded her grave. After two people spoke, Larry Jones, Eight Belles’ trainer, took the podium. He wore his trademark white Stetson and a sport jacket. He spoke of watching a “long-legged, gangly two-year-old filly that took a while to learn her lessons … ” turn into a “lovely, gallant, and courageous racehorse.”

Of Eight Belles’ breakdown, Jones said, “It was something we never, ever dreamed, and we’ll never understand.” He spoke of trying to find some peace about it, and how he was “arguing with the One that’s in charge of all, and I couldn’t understand why He took my filly, and Mr. (Rick) Porter’s filly, and had this end this way.

“But it was revealed to me, thank goodness,” Jones said, “this was not our filly, this was His filly a long time before we knew her, and He had a plan for her, and we don’t understand it all, but we are seeing it unfold today. We’re going to see it unfold in the future … Changes are going to be made because of her … She proved through all the conflict and all the accusations that she competed at the very greatest horse race in the world without the help of performance-enhancing drugs. And therefore, if she didn’t need it, no racehorse needs it.” The day before, the governor of Kentucky banned the use of anabolic steroids for Thoroughbred and Standardbred racehorses.

“ … She stole a piece of my heart,” Jones said. His voice broke. He stopped for a moment, put his hand to his mouth, and started to cry. “When she fell that day, she ripped a big part of my heart right out with her.” He told Eight Belles to rest in peace and left the microphone. Two and a half weeks later, Jones announced he planned to retire from training at the end of 2009. He said the tragedy of Eight Belles combined with overly demanding racehorse owners had taken too much out of him.

The day after the memorial service, Drs. Stephen Reed and Brett Woodie gave Lucky the okay to go home. In the end, Gene Wilson didn’t have the heart to put down Willie, the stallion who mauled the foal and whose sire had been handed down to Gene from his great-uncle. Instead, Gene spent $8,000 on new fencing to keep the black stallion safely separated. Lucky’s combined medical bills were between $25,000 to $30,000. When the Wilsons picked him up, it was one of the first brisk days of fall. It was also the second day of the September yearling sale in Lexington at Keeneland, when some of the most desirable Thoroughbred youngsters in the world are sold. Right as the Wilsons and Lucky hit the road for home, a filly at Keeneland was sold for $800,000, followed by a colt for $285,000. On the sale’s first day, a filly sired by the great A.P. Indy was purchased for $3.1 million by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. Although Lucky is a pet, he had received medical care fit for any of those Thoroughbreds, and he is surely loved as much as Jones loved his dark gray filly. Lucky wasn’t only lucky; he was blessed.