Goodbye Sage

On Tuesday, April 28, 2009 we said our goodbyes to our lovely mare "Black Sage"....Tuesday started out to be a perfectly normal day...I had the Vet coming in the afternoon, to do preg checks, the farrier was coming in the morning to trim a couple of our mares.....

I fed the horses that were here at the house, Sage and her new baby "*C-C Handsome Dark Knight were in the pasture here by the house, I threw a small flake of hay to them, and continued my chores.....I was pleased to see the horses out on pasture had decided to come to the barn. Our mare/foal pasture is a bit large, and spans 1.2 miles from the barn to the back of our property. The mares rarely come to the barn in the spring, usually we end up treking up the hill and leading our choice of the bunch down to the barn. I quickly nabbed Ally and Spark, and put them in the stall in the barn. As soon as the hoof trims and preg checks were done, Ally and Spark could go back out on the big pasture. I finished feeding, HeartBreaker get a morning snack, and returned to the house to wait for my farrier to call and say he would be a bit late.....that happens alot ;-) My farrier Virgil is a true cowboy, he has no concept of time...
Sure enough, at 10am sharp, he called to say he would be a bit late....

I was enjoying some caffine when I heard a noise, a rattle....I looked out the window and saw that Sage was down and she had slipped a leg under a corral panel.....I hurried out the door, and got to her, she seemed fairly OK, and I hurriedly unhooked the corral panels to try and free her...as I worked a pickup loaded with hay was coming by, so I stopped him and asked for help...I got the panel unhooked, and Sage hopped up on her own...she headed towards the corral full of mares, on the other side of our big barn, instead of back towards her foal..at this point, I knew something was dreadfully wrong.

My helper took a halter and lead to catch Sage, while I put the panels back together to keep her foal "Dark Knight" from escaping....seemed easy enough, catch the mare, return her to her pen and all will be well....wrong....

I was finishing the panels when my helper called out..."she is down"......sure enough, Sage had managed to get inside our hay barn, and she was indeed down again.....could she be hurt from the panels? I had no idea .....we haltered her, and got her up again, a couple times she got very weak and almost went down again....we got her back in her pen, down again she went...I ran and called my vet, she said she would drop everything and be on her way....I returned and struggled to keep Sage on her feet, I administered Banamine, and prayed....Virgil finally showed up, and between the two of us, we kept Sage from rolling down the hill in our pasture , but we both knew it was very grim....Sage was in a horrific amount of pain.

Dr. Shelly arrived soon after Virgil, she administered pain meds, and we managed to get Sage up and Sage and the foal into our arena...at least we were in the dry and could proceed from there...
In only a few minutes the decision was made to try and get Sage and the foal to the vet clinic...Dr. Shelly could then administer more meds, and keep a constant watch on her. Dr. Shelly gave more pain meds, and we got Sage loaded in our trailer, we put the baby in the tack room of our trailer, if Sage laid down while on the trip, she would literally crush the foal. It was a very long 20 miles, Virgil drove, my pickup was not home, so we hooked up our trailer to Virgil's truck....

At the clinic we started treating Sage....more pain meds, mineral oil, IV fuilds....it was not long though and it was apparent that this was not a common case of colic...it was way more serious, we were losing her. Even with surgery there was no saving the mare... Late that evening, Dr. Shelly , and the rest of us said goodbye to Sage and she was humanely put down....In an autopsy ( sorry, don't know how to spell the equine version of this ) it was found that Sage had a small intenstive twist....an irreparable situation...simply nothing a human could do. The twist hit her fast and hit her hard...literally at home, one moment she was fine, the next moment...she was dying.

In our pain and numbness of losing Sage, we had no time to grieve, we had a foal that was a week old to try and save. The tears will come later, but right now, we have a hungry baby who will be missing his Momma....