This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled “Lucky” from the book Equine ER, coming out in August by Eclipse Press.

The trailer pulled up to Barn 9 after a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Louisa, a town in eastern Kentucky. The referring vet had called ahead: A foal, a family pet roughly six weeks old, had been mauled by a stallion. It was touch and go. His owners were desperate to save him. Dr. Alexandra Tracey, a new intern at Rood & Riddle, was waiting at the barn for the trailer. She assumed the colt would be on the floor when they opened up the door.

The door opened and a snack-size chestnut Tennessee Walker was standing without a problem, docilely nursing from his mother, Rose. It was Lucky … again.

The foal, originally christened Red, had been at Rood & Riddle three and a half weeks earlier. At that time, he’d had Salmonella, and the infection had gone into his hip. He was lame in his right front foot, and X-rays showed he had an infection in the coffin bone. At that age, with those medical problems, he easily could have died. He went home after a week on the mend. But trouble preceded the Salmonella: When the foal was a week and a half old, he had gotten his head firmly wedged under a fence, but had the sense to lie there without moving until morning when Gene Wilson, the husband and father of the family that owned him, could extricate him. His life was actually problematic from birth: Rose wouldn’t let him nurse at first. Her first foal had died; no one saw what happened, but it was thought she had stepped on it, accidentally or intentionally. When Rose finally started nursing with Lucky, it had to be supervised to make sure he wasn’t harmed. Now, the inquisitive colt, whose father had died after getting tangled up in barbed wire a month before he was born, was back at Rood & Riddle. The stallion on the Wilsons’ farm, Willie, had a habit of figuring out how to open doors. He had broken the latch to the door of the barn where the colt and his mother were stabled, and then slid the door open slightly with his head. The foal darted through the cracked door to the open pasture to say hello to the stallion. Not a good idea.

Willie is small and black and known to be nasty. Although many stallions are bad-tempered and aggressive, especially toward other stallions, Pauletta Wilson, Gene’s wife, believes Willie has insecurities about his size. In addition, he had never liked the foal’s father, who had often put the smaller stallion in his place. When the foal trotted into Willie’s pasture, a neighbor driving by saw the black stallion go after him as if he meant to kill him. Willie split the foal’s head with his hoof, and bit him multiple times on the neck, trapping the colt between his two front hooves. It looked as if Willie was trying to stomp the foal into the ground. Blood stained the grass. Then Willie left him for dead within ten feet from where the foal’s father is buried and went off grazing at the far end of the pasture. Meanwhile, the neighbor had found Gene on the property and told him what happened.

From a distance, Gene and Pauletta thought the foal was dead. By the time they got to the colt, he was still lying where Willie left him, moaning. The foal’s head was a mess. Gene pulled him to the barn on a canvas tarp and then called his vet. He told her he’d pay her fine if she got a speeding ticket getting there. When Dr. Liza McVicker arrived from Equine Medical Center in Chesapeake, Ohio, about 45 minutes away, the colt was a sight. The vet could see his frontal bone through the open wound in his head. Yet she was surprised to find it wasn’t fractured. But McVicker was worried about internal injuries and knew the foal had to get to a hospital quickly. She sewed the foal’s head up, started him on pain meds, and inserted a catheter in his neck to administer fluids to stabilize him. She worked as fast as she could, her adrenalin flowing. The Wilsons and their adult daughter, Lara, watched McVicker and her assistant work, as did a family friend, Larry West, who had been helping Gene clear brush when the attack happened. Larry looked at the prone foal. “If the little guy makes it,” he told them, “you need to call him Lucky.”

Ten miles down the road on the drive to Lexington, the foal got to his feet and tried to get under the partition separating him from his mother in order to nurse. Gene stopped the truck so they could move the foal over next to Rose. The colt stood the rest of the way.

When the trailer arrived at Rood & Riddle and Tracey saw Lucky was alive, she assumed he’d need an immediate blood transfusion. But surprisingly, his blood counts, plus clinical signs such as him walking off the trailer without a problem, demonstrated Lucky didn’t need it. She replaced his catheter and started him on various medications. Considering what he’d been through, Lucky didn’t look bad from the outside, even with a stitched-up head. The vets thought, however, he likely had a concussion. He also had abrasions and contusions (bruises) on his neck, chest, thorax, and abdomen. When Tracey felt the open wound (about two inches in diameter) on the foal’s neck where it met the chest over his left pectoral muscle, she could feel severe damage.

Dr. Stephen Reed, the lead vet on the case, thought it was a miracle the stallion hadn’t torn a hole in the foal’s esophagus. If the stallion had hit the jugular or the carotid artery,  Lucky could died. The foal had cheated death again. Still, the damage was great, and the foal was in shock. His prognosis was guarded.

A week later, Tracey and Andrea Whittle, one of Rood & Riddle’s night supervisors, were giving Lucky a back scratch. He was standing still, enjoying it. But the left side of his neck was a shocking sight. Roughly three quarters of the skin was now gone. The area of exposed, ruptured muscle looked like blood-soaked raw meat. For anyone not used to medical sights, it was horrifying, a stomach-turner. Here’s what happened: In the past week, bacteria, gaining access through the open wound on his neck, resulted in abscesses on both sides of his neck between the skin and the muscle. The warm, moist environment was a breeding ground for infection. Dr. Brett Woodie performed surgery to open the abscesses and put a drain on each side of Lucky’s neck to create exit routes for fluid. Additional skin and muscle then died, causing the wound on the left side to enlarge. In a second surgery the left side was debrided (dead tissue removed), and more dead skin peeled off the already-gaping area ... all of this resulting in the sight that was now wince-inducing. Tracey had never seen a wound that severe. Whittle had only once before, when two foals accidentally got switched at a barn, and one of the mares kicked the unfamiliar baby that had been put back with her.

When the Wilsons’ daughter told Reed she wanted to drive from Louisa to see Lucky, Reed told her, “It’s really bad. It’s not what you expect.” When Lara arrived, approached the stall, and saw the exposed wound, she did a double take. She kept asking Reed: “Is he going to make it? Is the skin going to grow back? Is he going to look like a regular horse?” He assured her all that was possible. Lara thought the vet was crazy, but didn’t say it out loud. She took pictures with her camera phone and repeated the doctor’s assurances to her incredulous parents when they saw the shots.

Next week: What happened to Lucky? And did Gene Wilson put Willie the stallion down?