The worst day of my entire life.

Champ is dead.

Yesterday he was off his feed - hadn't finished his hay, which is really unusual. But the weather was wonky so we decided to just watch him. I left right about the time they fed for the night. This morning I got a call that he hadn't eaten his grain or touched his hay overnight, just drank some water. Actually I got several calls, because I am a dumbass and left my phone in the living room overnight. Anyway. The barn owners called the vet and I dashed out about 9 to find a very sick looking horse.

They gave him some banamine, because it looked like a colic. And they put him in the arena to walk around if he wanted, and he'd pooped a little before I got there, so we were hoping it wasn't serious. He looked miserable, kind of shaky. His gums were very pale. He had gut sounds when I first there, but by noon they'd stopped. The vet was at the human doctor and promised to come out as soon as he done, but he didn't get out there til noon.

The vet was my first clue that things were going really horribly. He came out, did a fairly brief examination, tried to palpate, and told me to take him to OSU vet school immediately. He said Champ was somewhat impacted but I think he knew there was something Very Bad happening.

I didn't have the right trailer brake hookup thing on my truck, and the barn owner was in Indiana with her truck, so I called Graham and he came out with the F-150. We hooked up the BO's 2 horse slant, loaded Champ, and headed off. I guess we got to the hospital about 3? It took a while, between the vet exam, calling OSU, calling Graham, etc.

When we walked in the door with Champ a huge swarm of incredibly capable vets and students descended on us. The surgery team started with us, assuming it was colic, but they passed us on to the medical team pretty quickly. I stood at his head petting him and telling him he could bite people as soon as he felt better.

They did blood work, several times. Gave him NG and IV fluids, which perked him up a tiny bit. Shaved all over and did three separate ultrasounds, which is when I started to realize it was Really Very Seriously Bad. He had a lot of internal bleeding, and he had something terribly wrong with his liver. The RBC and WBC counts were extremely low, and his liver enzymes were wrong too - I can't remember if they were high or low. And his liver was not right. The ultrasound of it didn't look to them at all like a liver, so either there was a huge clot obscuring it, there was a huge tumor in its place and it was pushed behind his lungs, or it was really diseased.

We moved him to a stall in ICU while they waited for some tests to come back and thought about what to tell me. He ate three straws of his bedding and one small bite of some gorgeous green alfalfa and just stood there, wobbling.

Finally two of the medical vets came and talked to me. Whatever happened is pretty rare. They'd found a journal article about, umm, 80 or so horses that had presented with similar internal bleeding in about a decade (late 90s to 2004). Only 50% of them had survived to discharge, and there wasn't a great breakdown of the statistics - more than half of the horses in the article had obvious causes for their bleeding, either being kicked, colicking, or uterine artery rupture. The vet said they could try a few things to stabilize him overnight, see if they could stop the bleeding, but they had no idea what was wrong with his liver or really what kind of quality of life he'd have.

They left us alone for a while to decide, and I cried and cried and thought it all through. It wasn't trauma; he hadn't been out with Dixie (or at all) for four or five days, just some light riding. It wasn't poisoning; no other horse had any symptoms from possible bad hay and there's no trees or weeds in his paddock. There was something terribly wrong with him, and from the very quiet murmurs during the repeated ultrasounds and liver biopsies they didn't think it was minor. HIs quality of life is the most important thing, and none of us thought there was a good chance of it improving.

Telling them to put him to sleep was the hardest thing I've ever said in my entire life.

They are going to necropsy him tomorrow; they'll call and tell me what they see. If they don't see anything obvious, they'll do lab work that will take up to a month. They're going to mail me some mane and tail hair and a cast of a hoof. And a bill; I have no clue how much this cost. I don't really care.

Then we had to return the empty trailer. I was going to hide in the truck and cry, but I made myself go in and tell the BO and family what all happened. The BO, like the vets, agreed that I'd done the right thing. And the BO told me that I must come ride tomorrow... and I agree. It would be so easy to walk away, let somebody sell Dixie, not even think about horses again. I'm just fucking flattened. But I felt the same way when I put my old Lab to sleep, and then I ended up with Cersei who is the World's Best Dog Ever. I won't give up on falling in love with creatures I outlive.