On Monday in Part 4 of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER, we took a deeper look at the prison farm program where an inmate met Marching Orders, the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart. Today, we go back into the operating room and find out what the surgeon discovered with Marching Orders on the table.

In the operating room, what surgeon Scott Hopper found was a diaphragmatic hernia – a hole in the diaphragm between the chest and the abdominal cavity – and a section of the small colon had gotten trapped inside the opening. The ultrasound hadn’t picked it up because of the amount of gas distention and the hernia’s location, higher on the diaphragm, more toward the horse’s back. It wasn’t your everyday colic.



Dr. Scott Hopper operates on Thoroughbred Marching Orders.

Horses can live with diaphragmatic hernias for years (some are born with them). One original cause of a hernia is trauma – getting kicked, for example.  Often, diaphragmatic hernias are small, and because the lung capacity of a horse is one of the largest of all species, horses don’t necessarily need all that capacity to function, especially a horse like Marching Orders who was retired and not running on the track.

A vet student visiting from New Zealand who was observing the surgery asked Hopper how big the hernia it was.

“Not very big,” he replied, “it’s fibrous,” meaning it had a ring of thick scar tissue around the edges, signifying it had likely been there a while.

The gastrointestinal tract of a horse is not only much larger than a person’s, it moves around more. The small intestine is more mobile than the small colon, so Hopper was surprised it was the latter not the former that had, for some reason, found its way up to the hernia that day and gotten trapped inside.

The surprise factor is one of the things that Hopper actually enjoys about his work. He isn’t burned out even though he’s been a surgeon for more than a decade. He likes that you never truly know what is going on inside a horse until you open the animal up (kind of like a Christmas package, he told me once), and that he can take something broken and fix it.

To fix Marching Orders, the vet couldn’t just pull the small colon out. The section that had gotten stuck was now bigger than the hole; that’s why it had gotten stuck to begin with. Nor could he manipulate the colon from the other side and try and milk the gas back out – the location made that impossible. He first attempted to reach deep inside the horse and expand the hernia with his finger so he could remove the colon.

Monday: Was surgeon Hopper able to extricate the small colon?

Equine ER was recently the cover story of Ace Weekly in Lexington, Ky. Writer Kim Thomas calls the book a "must-read" for horse lovers. To order Equine ER, click here. Thanks for visiting this blog. 

On Thursday in Part 3 of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER, Marching Orders, the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart, ran into trouble in the operating room. Today, we look further at the prison farm program where an inmate's life was transformed by Marching Orders.

From the outside, Blackburn Correctional Complex looks like a former boy’s school – old-fashioned brick buildings with tall windows curved at the top – but it has always been a prison. The prison farm program is on 100 acres at the back end of the property. Headquarters is a converted dairy barn. It is white with green shutters, an octagonal window in the middle, and old-fashioned lanterns on either side. It looks like Anne of Green Gables mucks out the stalls inside, not men who have been convicted for dealing and selling drugs, DUIs with manslaughter, burglary, or writing illegal OxyContin prescriptions.

Horses graze in paddocks of the Blackburn prison farm program. 

The need is great for racehorse retirement homes such as Blackburn’s. In 2008, approximately 35,000 live Thoroughbred foals were reported born in North America, according to The Jockey Club. When I looked at the yearly foal report published by The Blood-Horse, its blue ledgers listing name after name, it was mind-boggling to think about the competition they would face at the track. A study done by the Thoroughbred Times analyzing data from 1990-99 found that out of the 360,741 foals born during that nine-year period, 48.1 percent would win a race but only 3.7 percent would be stakes winners, 0.8 percent graded stakes winners. As one inmate in the Blackburn farm program told North American Trainer magazine in 2008, “If they were humans, they’d have their players union and they’d have their retirement package. They don’t have a voice.”

Linda Dyer, who runs the Blackburn program, is a Lexington native and veteran manager of various farms in the area. She teaches the inmates everything she knows: from worming and giving vaccines … to how to wrap a horse’s legs and feet … to recognizing lameness, colic, and other problems. Since Rood & Riddle vets treat the horses, with access to technology you might not have outside the Bluegrass, inmates have gotten to see things they wouldn’t elsewhere – on-site digital X-rays and sinus scoping, for example.

Inmate Chris Huckleby was one of the best horsemen Dyer had ever had. She hoped he would get a job at one of the Lexington horse farms when he got out. One of the bigger operations had hired Blackburn inmates before, with good salaries and benefits. But the law is that a prisoner has to get a job fourteen days after he gets out, and inmates receive bus tokens but no money for other transportation. Farms want to see you in person and looking sharp. The buses don’t go out to many of the farms, numerous inmates don’t have family to take them, and the clothes they are given come from Goodwill.

Huckleby was transferred from Blackburn to another prison in 2006 and got out in 2008. He relocated to Lexington so he could adopt Marching Orders once he saved up enough money. He had already lined up a barn where he could board him. He soon got a job with a plumbing company making a decent salary. He thought about the horse all the time. The horse’s previous owners, a Bluegrass couple, had acquired the Thoroughbred in a claiming race. After donating him to Blackburn, they visited the horse regularly. Huckleby had become friendly with them during their visits, and now wrote and called the two constantly to find out how Marching Orders was doing. When the place Huckleby had lined up to board the horse fell through, Huckleby knew he’d find someplace else. He had to. It was as if he were separated from one of his kids. But it had to be the right place, one where it felt safe to leave the horse.

Thursday: What Marching Orders’ surgeon found in the operating room.

Equine ER is currently the cover story of Ace Weekly in Lexington, Ky. Writer Kim Thomas calls the book a "must-read" for horse lovers. To order Equine ER, click here. Thanks for visiting this blog. 

Equine ER author Leslie Guttman will be signing books at Keeneland Racecourse this Sunday 10/25 at the gift shop from 11 a.m.-1 p.m.  Also: big story in this week's Ace Weekly.

On Monday in Part 2 of the excerpt from the chapter entitled "Marching Orders" from the new book Equine ER we met the inmate whose life was transformed by the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart. Today, we head back into the operating room where Marching Orders is on the table for surgery. 

With Marching Orders now on the operating table, Dr. Scott Hopper stood over the horse’s open abdomen. A horse’s intestinal tract is seventy to ninety feet from end to end, but packed tight inside its abdomen, it winds back and forth, with changes in diameter. Colic is a broad term to describe pain caused by the intestinal tract being irritated, blocked or bloated for any number of reasons, and it is believed to be responsible for more deaths in horses than any other condition. That said, 80 to 85 percent of colics are considered “simple,” and can be treated without surgery or resolve on their own. Many mild cases are what’s called gas/spasmodic colic, believed to be caused by gas build-up in the colon, resulting in distension and pain. Food can also back up (from dehydration, for example) causing an impaction, which may or may not lead to surgery.

Dr. Scott Hopper operates on Marching Orders. 

More serious cases occur when part of the large colon becomes displaced (moving out of its regular position). By doing so, a portion is subsequently shut off, like a kink in a hose, which doesn't allow the passage of food or the gas created as a normal byproduct of digestion. The large colon can also twist, cutting off blood flow. Hopper found no obvious reasons for the horse's condition in the large colon and moved on to the small colon, looking for blockage or other problems.

At Blackburn, farm program workers had found Marching Orders a few hours earlier out in the paddock trying to lie down and attempting to bite his left side, classic signs of colic. They called Linda Dyer, the farm manager, who was out of town. She was baffled when they told her the horse was colicking. Marching Orders had already been out on new spring grass for a while, and usually horses don’t colic when they’re used to it.

Dyer called Dr. Nick Smith, the Rood & Riddle ambulatory vet who treats the Blackburn horses. When the vet got there, the horse was down and still biting at his side, and he was in a cold sweat. His temperature was low. Smith gave him anti-inflammatories, painkillers, and other drugs hoping that would help him ride it out. But after about forty-five minutes, the horse was still in pain. Smith was worried about a rupture. He called Dyer back. “I tried to smooth him out, but he didn’t smooth out,” he said, recommending the hospital. I visited Marching Orders in his stall shortly after he had arrived at Rood & Riddle. He was covered with sweat, with pieces of hay stuck to his coat. He was heavy on his feet and lethargic. But even though he was doped up, he gave me a deep look.

Back on the operating table, Hopper plunged his arm back in the horse’s abdomen and started feeling around. After a while he said, “Oh crap,” And then, “… that ultrasound doesn’t tell me shit, ever.”

Hopper felt around some more and then stopped. He said a phrase he often did when something wasn’t right. It was from Sesame Street: “One of these things is not like the other.”

Monday: What did the surgeon find?

Equine ER was recently made a "Staff Pick" by Bill Gordon, a longtime bookseller at Joseph-Beth Books in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the largest bookstores in the South. Gordon calls Equine ER "fascinating." To order the book, click here.   

News flash! Equine ER author Leslie Guttman will be signing books at Keeneland Racecourse this Sunday 10/25 at the gift shop from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. 

Last week in Part 1 of the excerpt from the chapter entitled Marching Orders from the new book Equine ER we met Marching Orders, a former racehorse, as he headed into surgery. In Part 2 today we meet the inmate whose life was transformed by the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart.

Marching Orders had a noble way about him. He was big and resolute; he had a paddock to himself because he played too rough. He didn’t get lonely like other horses do. He talked to the occasional cow and horses across the fence, but he preferred solitude. At the Blackburn Correctional Complex’s prison farm program in Lexington, the inmates called him The Viking because he would stand outside by himself through the wind and rain and cold. The only time they ever saw him go in his shed was once during a bad snowstorm.

 The barn at the Blackburn prison farm program.

The farm program started at Blackburn in 1999, in conjunction with the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, a national nonprofit that saves racehorses that can no longer earn their keep, preventing them from ending up abused, abandoned, or in foreign slaughterhouses. The Blackburn program’s intention is to teach inmates skills to get a job at a horse farm when they leave, as well as instill responsibility, structure, and provide a therapeutic connection to the animals. In the summer of 2008, the program had about seventy horses, ranging in age from four to twenty-six.

In March 2005, Chris Huckleby arrived at Blackburn and started working in the program, where each inmate is assigned an ex-racehorse to care for. He is in his mid-30s, from Western Kentucky, with blond hair, light blue eyes, and an inmate’s complexion: stark-white. He has been in and out of prison for a decade or so. He has a flatness about him, as if prison – and life – has compressed his life force. Huckleby was incarcerated at Blackburn on drug-related charges.

Some inmates at the minimum-security prison sign up for the farm program just for the freedom they get working in the barn, and while this was one of the Huckleby’s reasons, he also grew up with horses. He understood and respected them. When he saw Marching Orders walk off the trailer, the horse fixed what Huckleby called a “spooky eye” – his right eye had white in the pupil – on him. It felt like the horse was following his every move. Huckleby begged: “Assign me that horse; I want that horse.” The two became inseparable. Every time Huckleby would walk out the barn door, Marching Orders, or Mo as he was called, would run up to him. The horse would lean on Huckleby, lick him like a dog, twirl his hair with his lips.

“I don’t want to sound crazy or anything, but I think this horse is trying to tell me he loves me,” Huckleby told the farm manager. Horses do things like that, she replied.

Huckleby started reading books on natural horsemanship to try and decipher equine communication. He was going through a divorce and had three kids he missed. He felt like the horse knew he was having a difficult time, especially during occasions such as his children’s birthdays, when Huckleby got particularly depressed. The horse would bump him with his muzzle, pull on his shirt, or play hide and seek, running behind the barn. When Huckleby came down to the barn at dusk, Marching Orders ran to meet him across the paddock. He became known as “Huck’s horse.” The inmate told himself and everybody else that when he was done serving time, he was going to adopt him.

Thursday: Trouble for Marching Orders in the operating room. 

Equine ER was recently made a "Staff Pick" by Bill Gordon, a longtime bookseller at Joseph-Beth Books in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the largest bookstores in the South. Gordon calls Equine ER "fascinating." To order the book, click here.  

Today begins Part 1 of the story of how a former racehorse transformed the life of an inmate in this excerpt from the new book Equine ER by Leslie Guttman (Eclipse Press, 2009). 

On Sunday, April 6, 2008, a large dark bay gelding was on his back, anesthetized for colic surgery. Ten years earlier to the day, Marching Orders had slipped into this world, son of Captain Bodgit and Miss Stamper. Almost exactly six years earlier, he had been hurtling across the wire at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, six furlongs in 1:10:1, nabbing the winning purse of $28,500. Now, outside the operating room, nurses sheared the big country that was his stomach with electric clippers, and then shaved a strip down the middle for the coming incision with a disposable razor. Plastic gloves were placed on his hooves to keep the operating room sterile. Dr. Scott Hopper tucked the horse’s penis inside its sheath and began suturing the sheath closed to keep urine from contaminating the surgical site. (The sutures would be removed after surgery.)

 Racehorse Marching Orders in his prime.

The staff was exhausted and cranky; it was late afternoon, and they had spent the day attending to nonstop emergencies, after being up all night with successive emergencies. The backup team had been called, which was unusual because the hospital was well-staffed.

Jennie Rhoads, the 4 p.m. to midnight nursing supervisor, popped her head in the door. “That second colic got called off,” she said to the surgery team.

Dr. Travis Tull, the hospital’s surgical resident, looked up. “Great, so they’ll be here at 2 this morning?”

“Tell them if they call back a second time it’ll cost twice as much,” Hopper said, finishing his suturing. He didn’t mean it; he was just tired. The nurses gave the Thoroughbred’s abdomen what they called a rough scrub – a first cleaning with antiseptic – followed by a sterile prep. They wheeled the horse in for surgery.

Monday: Meet the inmate whose life was transformed by Marching Orders. And what happened to the horse in the operating room?

Equine ER was recently made a "Staff Pick" by Bill Gordon, a longtime bookseller at Joseph-Beth Books in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the largest bookstores in the South. Gordon calls Equine ER "fascinating." To order the book, click here.