My heart sank about a foot. I knew what that meant. Horses rarely have twins. It’s even more rare for either of twins to survive. I ran down to the barn, going as fast as my legs would take me. I slowed to a walk as I got closer to the stall. Mares get fiercely protective when they give birth and it was possible this mare would not be impressed when we tried to intervene.
I looked immediately to the north wall where the small corpse of a grulla colt lay curled up. He was stillborn. The mare hadn’t even finished licking the birth sac off him or drying his coat. She knew. God created animals to understand things like that, and I think it’s amazing. I could see where the mare had laid down again to birth the second baby. This one was a filly, and she lay in the far south corner, directly opposite her brother. A red dun. This crossing sure produced some color. In any other circumstance I would have rejoiced in that fact for a while longer. Not now; we had a shivering baby to attend to.
I entered the stall and knelt next to the filly. Her lips were cold and her tongue blue. She was shivering and needed some groceries, stat. We had no idea how many hours old she was. I had last checked the mare at 12:30am. It was now 6:15am. A normal foaling should follow the “1, 2, 3” pattern. 1. Baby should stand within an hour. 2. Pass their first manure in two hours. 3. The mare births the placenta within three hours. Just like humans, a foal’s first nursing is very important. Through the mare’s special milk, called colostrum, the baby gets all the antibodies they need to fight disease, infection, and illness. There’s a time window to getting the colostrum into them. A foal’s gut will only accept the colostrum and antibodies for the first twelve hours of their life. This filly could be as old as five hours and had not yet stood to nurse. Suddenly the anxious and happy expectation of one healthy baby turned into a critical situation.
We needed to call the vet asap. Mom ran to get them on the phone, while Dad and I remained in the stall trying to warm up the filly. I took towels from the foaling kit and laid them on her, and then removed my heavy barn jacket and laid that over her too. She continued to shiver. Mom came back with the vet on the phone. I described the situation to her. She said she was coming but needed to drop her kids off at daycare first. We were on our own for a while longer.
She needed to get milk in her, like yesterday. Again, Mom ran to the house in search of a baby bottle. No luck, so she jumped in the car and drove over to our neighbor’s house to borrow one. They have young grandkids. While she was gone, Dad had the inspired idea to get our little ceramic electric camping heater and put it under her blankets to blow on her belly, head, and neck. Soon warm air was blasting under her covering of towels and winter jackets.
Mom returned with the bottle, and I tackled my next quest - milking out the mare. I’ve milked cows many times. I said to myself, “Milking a horse is not all that different, right?” I sidled up next to the mare, unscrewed the bottle’s lid, and squatted down next to her udder. Soon warm colostrum was swish, swish, swishing into the bottle. We all breathed a sigh of relief as the mare stood patiently and I filled the bottle. I swear she was relieved to have some of the pressure taken off. I can now add “Horse Milker” to my list of marketable skills.
Walking back over the blanket swathed baby, I knelt and concentrated on getting a few drops of warm milk into her. She was not having any of it. Milk dribbled in one side and out the other. Trying for ten, then twenty minutes, she simply wouldn’t swallow. She was too cold and too loopy to exercise her natural suckle reflex. Her breathing began to labor, and I could feel desperation begin to rise in my throat. “She has to drink!” I thought to myself. The three of us continued to kneel around her. Dad was on heater watch, Mom kept an eye out for the vet, and I continued to peel her lips back and drip milk on her tongue.
She was beginning to warm up. Her tongue was a less intense shade of blue-gray and her eyes looked more alert. My heart skipped a beat as she tongued the nipple of bottle and tried to suck. It was the first time she had made any kind of effort to eat. “There’s a chance!” I thought. Then, magic happened as she gripped the bottle and sucked down two swallows. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Another ten minutes passed. We heard a truck crunching down the gravel driveway and soon a red Chevy pulled up to the barn. The vet and vet tech strode in, and we gave them the report. “No we don’t know how many hours old she is.” Has she gotten any colostrum? “She hasn’t stood to nurse that we know of, but she’s swallowed about half a bottle of milk.” Were the babies born prematurely? “No, the mare carried them to full term.”
We moved aside as the vet and tech came to assess her health. The vet pulled out a thermometer and inserted it where the sun don’t shine. A few seconds later we heard it beep with its final report. 95.8 degrees. The normal temperature of a newborn foal is 100.3 degrees. “Okay, our number one priority is getting her warm. Her gut will not absorb any kind of nutrition until she is over 99 degrees,” said the vet.
Now we knew our mission. The vet looked at the placentas and evaluated them to see if any afterbirth had remained in the mare. If pieces of the placenta are not passed, it can mean serious things for the mare; a high temperature, founder, and in serious circumstances, death. Unfortunately it looked like parts of one placenta were missing. We had a second thing to monitor. The vet gave us our marching orders before she left - “Get her warm. Feed her as much as she will eat, especially after she is 99 degrees or higher. She needs to eat and rest every hour. Give her these antibiotics once a day and give the mare these two medications morning and night. If her (the mare’s) temperature rises above 101 degrees let us know. Call us this afternoon and give us an update. We’ll be back tomorrow to check her out. Good luck.”
For the next six hours, I and one parent or the other sat in the stall and bottle fed the tiny filly. She attempted to stand on her own a couple times. I lifted her up on her feet when she got really close. Those longs legs were a lot to navigate. Most foals stand within an hour of birth. In the wild, this is a necessity to flee from predators eager to get an easy meal of newborn baby. But this filly was acting like a “dummy foal.” Her ears were floppy, she couldn’t stand or walk very well, her eyes didn’t focus on anything, and nursing from the mare was too much for her to tackle. According to the vet, she would come out of it in a day or so. “The first twenty-four hours will be the hardest,” she said. I was hopeful but also acutely aware of how abnormal this behavior was.
Right before she got in her truck, the vet said, “If you can, only bottle feed her when she is near the mare. She needs to associate mama with milk. If she only learns to drink from the bottle, you could get stuck bottle feeding her for the next six months.” Heck no, that was not going to happen. I followed their advice religiously and only fed her when the mare was near.
I took her temperature every two hours or so, smiling huge when the digital readout said, “97.5 degrees” and later “98.6 degrees.” She continued to drink about 5 ounces each feeding. I monitored the mare’s temp, but she held steady between 99 and 100 degrees.
When I looked at the clock on my phone it read 5pm. How had eleven hours gone by so fast? The filly was improving. She had hit 99 degrees around 3pm, and her shivers had gone away a few hours before that. Now that she seemed stable, I needed to make a plan for the night. Baby needed to eat every forty-five minutes. Dad valiantly volunteered his Dodge Sprinter to be my hotel for the night. He backed the white, milk carton shaped van into the barn and set up a heater and cot for me.
Around 10:30pm I crawled into bed, set my alarm for 11:15pm, and closed my eyes. The blaring “beep, beep, beep” came much too soon, but I grabbed the bottle that was warming in front of the heater and knelt down beside the filly. By this time, she was knew what the bottle was all about and was feeding quite vigorously every time. This routine was on repeat the whole night. Mom was awesome and volunteered for the 1am and 4am feeding shifts, but I was still intensely bitter towards my alarm by the time the sun rose.
The vet called around 8:30am and said, “Hey we had some time open up in our schedule so we’re on the way out now.” This was great news. We needed to test the filly’s IgG, which means drawing blood and testing the levels of antibodies she absorbed from the colostrum. If foals do not have high enough levels of antibodies, they can quickly become septic, meaning their bloodstream is infected. Septic foals have a very low survival rate. Since her first eight hours of life were pretty dramatic, there was a chance the filly, now known as Ruby, had not absorbed enough colostrum to warrant high levels of antibodies. If her levels were not high enough, she would need a plasma transfusion.
By the time the vet and her sidekick pulled in, the stalls were cleaned and the horses fed. This morning it was a different vet and tech who came to evaluate Ruby, so after the introductions were made and report on the night’s improvements given, they entered the stall and looked her over. They needed to draw blood for the IgG test so one held Ruby still while the other did the poking.
She kicked and hopped and bucked the whole time, but I was happy to see her feeling so feisty. They finally got enough blood to run the test. It took ten minutes for the test to process, so I asked questions while we waited. “How often do foals need transfusions? Do they usually work the first time? What were the most difficult foals you’ve worked with? Where did you go to school? How long have you been in Minnesota?” I’d been in the barn for two days, so I was eager for some human interaction.
The test results were not good. Her IgG level was 496. The absolute minimum we needed was 750. It was transfusion time. Getting the catheter in Ruby’s neck took about twenty minutes. She really does not enjoy getting poked, so she squirmed, jumped, and thrashed the whole time. The vet was just about ready to pack up and try again tomorrow, but seconds after she said those words she got the catheter into Ruby’s neck.
She took the thawed plasma and hooked it up to the catheter. The vet, the tech, and I chatted for forty-five minutes as we watched the yellow-orange plasma drip through the IV. There was a fifty percent chance we’d be doing this again tomorrow, as many foals reject the foreign antibodies and require a second transfusion. For Ruby’s sake and that of my bank account, I prayed this first one would be successful.
We left the catheter in her neck for the next day’s test and swathed it in blue VetWrap so she wouldn’t pull it out overnight. The vet’s packed up their things and took off. By this time they felt like old friends. I could tell they were just as invested in Ruby as I was, and that made me feel like a million bucks.
The rest of the day was spent trying the teach Ruby to nurse from the mare. She still displayed some signs of being a “dummy foal” but overall her ability to stand, walk, and focus her eyes on objects was much better. This was a HUGE relief since the night before I had mistaken her clumsiness and lack of response to my hand going past her eyes as potential blindness. The vet had quickly righted my misguided theory, and I was incredibly happy to have been proven wrong.
In my quest to interest Ruby in nursing from the mare, I got creative. She was struggling to find the udder and would suck on everything but the teat. She needed some incentive to suckle so I rubbed the mare’s udder with maple syrup, hoping to convince her that nursing from Mama was more fun than from the bottle. It went like this: rub Mama with syrup, guide Ruby to Mama’s udder, stand behind Ruby to hold her in place, guide her nose to the syrup, and wait while she tried to nurse. Rinse. Repeat.
Finally, around 6pm she got it! Eureka! She latched on to the teat and sucked like her life depended on it. Her little tail switched with delight as she realized she could have as much milk as she wanted, whenever she wanted it. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. No more bottle feeding!
I still slept in the van that night but woke up every ninety minutes rather than every forty-five. The next morning the vet returned to retest her IgG levels. We all cheered when the results came back - 971! A second transfusion was not necessary. The vet removed the catheter, and deliver to me the rather staunch bill from the last three days of medications and vet visits. I was so relieved and happy that I didn’t focus too much on the amount, instead thanking them for all they had done to help her.
As the day moved along, Ruby continued to grow stronger. She began to act like a normal foal, even hitting what I would call the “frisky phase,” bucking and kicking and playing like a normal baby should.
As I write this on Friday, May 9th, I think back on all that’s happened since Tuesday morning. I am amazed at the gamut of emotions my family and I experienced in the past seventy-two hours. I’m deeply thankful for my parents who cared so much about this foal; showing so much concern and help when they didn’t have to be that invested. I’m touched by the friends who called or text, asking if there was anything they could do to help or just offering encouraging words. I’m grateful to the team at Minnesota Valley Vet who did so much to save Ruby’s life.
My friend Clint suggested this experience has given me the smallest glimpse into what a human mom feels like when her baby has complications. I believe that is true, and though I would never say that the things I’ve felt in the last three days are equal to the emotions a mother feels for her child, I can now relate the tiniest bit more to these women. When happy anticipation of a birth and healthy baby turns into a medical emergency, and even the loss of one life, there is pain and sadness.
Through all of this, I’ve been reminded that God is good all the time. He cares for the sparrow who falls to the ground, so I know He watches over me and even my horses. Could Ruby have died? Yes. Would I still have said God is good? Yes. This experience taught me more than how to care for an at-risk foal. It reminded me that even in the poignantly emotional times, in the deepest moments of the night, and in the most frantic moments of desperation, He is there.
He is solid. He is secure. He is good. That never changes. His goodness is not circumstantial. It is true always. If we look to Him, we will see that joy comes in the morning. My family and I trouped down to the barn last night to check on Ruby before dinner. Sitting on the straw in the stall, I looked up and saw my mom smiling and taking video of Ruby with her iPad. I saw my dad with one foot up leaning on the gate, watching her run and buck and play. I saw my brother approach her and tenderly pet her neck, and I thought, “Wow, God. Thank you for this moment. Thank you for this experience. Yes, thank you for saving Ruby’s life, but thank you even more for all the things You have done through this time.” We got to stand together as a family, rejoicing in new life.
Next time, when life doesn't play out the way I expect, I will think back on the day Ruby was born and remember that God is good all the time. And all the time, God is good.
I entered the stall and knelt next to the filly. Her lips were cold and her tongue blue. She was shivering and needed some groceries, stat. We had no idea how many hours old she was. I had last checked the mare at 12:30am. It was now 6:15am. A normal foaling should follow the “1, 2, 3” pattern. 1. Baby should stand within an hour. 2. Pass their first manure in two hours. 3. The mare births the placenta within three hours. Just like humans, a foal’s first nursing is very important. Through the mare’s special milk, called colostrum, the baby gets all the antibodies they need to fight disease, infection, and illness. There’s a time window to getting the colostrum into them. A foal’s gut will only accept the colostrum and antibodies for the first twelve hours of their life. This filly could be as old as five hours and had not yet stood to nurse. Suddenly the anxious and happy expectation of one healthy baby turned into a critical situation.
We needed to call the vet asap. Mom ran to get them on the phone, while Dad and I remained in the stall trying to warm up the filly. I took towels from the foaling kit and laid them on her, and then removed my heavy barn jacket and laid that over her too. She continued to shiver. Mom came back with the vet on the phone. I described the situation to her. She said she was coming but needed to drop her kids off at daycare first. We were on our own for a while longer.
She needed to get milk in her, like yesterday. Again, Mom ran to the house in search of a baby bottle. No luck, so she jumped in the car and drove over to our neighbor’s house to borrow one. They have young grandkids. While she was gone, Dad had the inspired idea to get our little ceramic electric camping heater and put it under her blankets to blow on her belly, head, and neck. Soon warm air was blasting under her covering of towels and winter jackets.
Mom returned with the bottle, and I tackled my next quest - milking out the mare. I’ve milked cows many times. I said to myself, “Milking a horse is not all that different, right?” I sidled up next to the mare, unscrewed the bottle’s lid, and squatted down next to her udder. Soon warm colostrum was swish, swish, swishing into the bottle. We all breathed a sigh of relief as the mare stood patiently and I filled the bottle. I swear she was relieved to have some of the pressure taken off. I can now add “Horse Milker” to my list of marketable skills.
Walking back over the blanket swathed baby, I knelt and concentrated on getting a few drops of warm milk into her. She was not having any of it. Milk dribbled in one side and out the other. Trying for ten, then twenty minutes, she simply wouldn’t swallow. She was too cold and too loopy to exercise her natural suckle reflex. Her breathing began to labor, and I could feel desperation begin to rise in my throat. “She has to drink!” I thought to myself. The three of us continued to kneel around her. Dad was on heater watch, Mom kept an eye out for the vet, and I continued to peel her lips back and drip milk on her tongue.
She was beginning to warm up. Her tongue was a less intense shade of blue-gray and her eyes looked more alert. My heart skipped a beat as she tongued the nipple of bottle and tried to suck. It was the first time she had made any kind of effort to eat. “There’s a chance!” I thought. Then, magic happened as she gripped the bottle and sucked down two swallows. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Another ten minutes passed. We heard a truck crunching down the gravel driveway and soon a red Chevy pulled up to the barn. The vet and vet tech strode in, and we gave them the report. “No we don’t know how many hours old she is.” Has she gotten any colostrum? “She hasn’t stood to nurse that we know of, but she’s swallowed about half a bottle of milk.” Were the babies born prematurely? “No, the mare carried them to full term.”
We moved aside as the vet and tech came to assess her health. The vet pulled out a thermometer and inserted it where the sun don’t shine. A few seconds later we heard it beep with its final report. 95.8 degrees. The normal temperature of a newborn foal is 100.3 degrees. “Okay, our number one priority is getting her warm. Her gut will not absorb any kind of nutrition until she is over 99 degrees,” said the vet.
Now we knew our mission. The vet looked at the placentas and evaluated them to see if any afterbirth had remained in the mare. If pieces of the placenta are not passed, it can mean serious things for the mare; a high temperature, founder, and in serious circumstances, death. Unfortunately it looked like parts of one placenta were missing. We had a second thing to monitor. The vet gave us our marching orders before she left - “Get her warm. Feed her as much as she will eat, especially after she is 99 degrees or higher. She needs to eat and rest every hour. Give her these antibiotics once a day and give the mare these two medications morning and night. If her (the mare’s) temperature rises above 101 degrees let us know. Call us this afternoon and give us an update. We’ll be back tomorrow to check her out. Good luck.”
For the next six hours, I and one parent or the other sat in the stall and bottle fed the tiny filly. She attempted to stand on her own a couple times. I lifted her up on her feet when she got really close. Those longs legs were a lot to navigate. Most foals stand within an hour of birth. In the wild, this is a necessity to flee from predators eager to get an easy meal of newborn baby. But this filly was acting like a “dummy foal.” Her ears were floppy, she couldn’t stand or walk very well, her eyes didn’t focus on anything, and nursing from the mare was too much for her to tackle. According to the vet, she would come out of it in a day or so. “The first twenty-four hours will be the hardest,” she said. I was hopeful but also acutely aware of how abnormal this behavior was.
Right before she got in her truck, the vet said, “If you can, only bottle feed her when she is near the mare. She needs to associate mama with milk. If she only learns to drink from the bottle, you could get stuck bottle feeding her for the next six months.” Heck no, that was not going to happen. I followed their advice religiously and only fed her when the mare was near.
I took her temperature every two hours or so, smiling huge when the digital readout said, “97.5 degrees” and later “98.6 degrees.” She continued to drink about 5 ounces each feeding. I monitored the mare’s temp, but she held steady between 99 and 100 degrees.
When I looked at the clock on my phone it read 5pm. How had eleven hours gone by so fast? The filly was improving. She had hit 99 degrees around 3pm, and her shivers had gone away a few hours before that. Now that she seemed stable, I needed to make a plan for the night. Baby needed to eat every forty-five minutes. Dad valiantly volunteered his Dodge Sprinter to be my hotel for the night. He backed the white, milk carton shaped van into the barn and set up a heater and cot for me.
Around 10:30pm I crawled into bed, set my alarm for 11:15pm, and closed my eyes. The blaring “beep, beep, beep” came much too soon, but I grabbed the bottle that was warming in front of the heater and knelt down beside the filly. By this time, she was knew what the bottle was all about and was feeding quite vigorously every time. This routine was on repeat the whole night. Mom was awesome and volunteered for the 1am and 4am feeding shifts, but I was still intensely bitter towards my alarm by the time the sun rose.
The vet called around 8:30am and said, “Hey we had some time open up in our schedule so we’re on the way out now.” This was great news. We needed to test the filly’s IgG, which means drawing blood and testing the levels of antibodies she absorbed from the colostrum. If foals do not have high enough levels of antibodies, they can quickly become septic, meaning their bloodstream is infected. Septic foals have a very low survival rate. Since her first eight hours of life were pretty dramatic, there was a chance the filly, now known as Ruby, had not absorbed enough colostrum to warrant high levels of antibodies. If her levels were not high enough, she would need a plasma transfusion.
By the time the vet and her sidekick pulled in, the stalls were cleaned and the horses fed. This morning it was a different vet and tech who came to evaluate Ruby, so after the introductions were made and report on the night’s improvements given, they entered the stall and looked her over. They needed to draw blood for the IgG test so one held Ruby still while the other did the poking.
She kicked and hopped and bucked the whole time, but I was happy to see her feeling so feisty. They finally got enough blood to run the test. It took ten minutes for the test to process, so I asked questions while we waited. “How often do foals need transfusions? Do they usually work the first time? What were the most difficult foals you’ve worked with? Where did you go to school? How long have you been in Minnesota?” I’d been in the barn for two days, so I was eager for some human interaction.
The test results were not good. Her IgG level was 496. The absolute minimum we needed was 750. It was transfusion time. Getting the catheter in Ruby’s neck took about twenty minutes. She really does not enjoy getting poked, so she squirmed, jumped, and thrashed the whole time. The vet was just about ready to pack up and try again tomorrow, but seconds after she said those words she got the catheter into Ruby’s neck.
She took the thawed plasma and hooked it up to the catheter. The vet, the tech, and I chatted for forty-five minutes as we watched the yellow-orange plasma drip through the IV. There was a fifty percent chance we’d be doing this again tomorrow, as many foals reject the foreign antibodies and require a second transfusion. For Ruby’s sake and that of my bank account, I prayed this first one would be successful.
We left the catheter in her neck for the next day’s test and swathed it in blue VetWrap so she wouldn’t pull it out overnight. The vet’s packed up their things and took off. By this time they felt like old friends. I could tell they were just as invested in Ruby as I was, and that made me feel like a million bucks.
The rest of the day was spent trying the teach Ruby to nurse from the mare. She still displayed some signs of being a “dummy foal” but overall her ability to stand, walk, and focus her eyes on objects was much better. This was a HUGE relief since the night before I had mistaken her clumsiness and lack of response to my hand going past her eyes as potential blindness. The vet had quickly righted my misguided theory, and I was incredibly happy to have been proven wrong.
In my quest to interest Ruby in nursing from the mare, I got creative. She was struggling to find the udder and would suck on everything but the teat. She needed some incentive to suckle so I rubbed the mare’s udder with maple syrup, hoping to convince her that nursing from Mama was more fun than from the bottle. It went like this: rub Mama with syrup, guide Ruby to Mama’s udder, stand behind Ruby to hold her in place, guide her nose to the syrup, and wait while she tried to nurse. Rinse. Repeat.
Finally, around 6pm she got it! Eureka! She latched on to the teat and sucked like her life depended on it. Her little tail switched with delight as she realized she could have as much milk as she wanted, whenever she wanted it. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. No more bottle feeding!
I still slept in the van that night but woke up every ninety minutes rather than every forty-five. The next morning the vet returned to retest her IgG levels. We all cheered when the results came back - 971! A second transfusion was not necessary. The vet removed the catheter, and deliver to me the rather staunch bill from the last three days of medications and vet visits. I was so relieved and happy that I didn’t focus too much on the amount, instead thanking them for all they had done to help her.
As the day moved along, Ruby continued to grow stronger. She began to act like a normal foal, even hitting what I would call the “frisky phase,” bucking and kicking and playing like a normal baby should.
As I write this on Friday, May 9th, I think back on all that’s happened since Tuesday morning. I am amazed at the gamut of emotions my family and I experienced in the past seventy-two hours. I’m deeply thankful for my parents who cared so much about this foal; showing so much concern and help when they didn’t have to be that invested. I’m touched by the friends who called or text, asking if there was anything they could do to help or just offering encouraging words. I’m grateful to the team at Minnesota Valley Vet who did so much to save Ruby’s life.
My friend Clint suggested this experience has given me the smallest glimpse into what a human mom feels like when her baby has complications. I believe that is true, and though I would never say that the things I’ve felt in the last three days are equal to the emotions a mother feels for her child, I can now relate the tiniest bit more to these women. When happy anticipation of a birth and healthy baby turns into a medical emergency, and even the loss of one life, there is pain and sadness.
Through all of this, I’ve been reminded that God is good all the time. He cares for the sparrow who falls to the ground, so I know He watches over me and even my horses. Could Ruby have died? Yes. Would I still have said God is good? Yes. This experience taught me more than how to care for an at-risk foal. It reminded me that even in the poignantly emotional times, in the deepest moments of the night, and in the most frantic moments of desperation, He is there.
He is solid. He is secure. He is good. That never changes. His goodness is not circumstantial. It is true always. If we look to Him, we will see that joy comes in the morning. My family and I trouped down to the barn last night to check on Ruby before dinner. Sitting on the straw in the stall, I looked up and saw my mom smiling and taking video of Ruby with her iPad. I saw my dad with one foot up leaning on the gate, watching her run and buck and play. I saw my brother approach her and tenderly pet her neck, and I thought, “Wow, God. Thank you for this moment. Thank you for this experience. Yes, thank you for saving Ruby’s life, but thank you even more for all the things You have done through this time.” We got to stand together as a family, rejoicing in new life.
Next time, when life doesn't play out the way I expect, I will think back on the day Ruby was born and remember that God is good all the time. And all the time, God is good.
