[myhorsesonador]

Wow, two months late. That's a miracle he was okay.

My first ever foal experience was a bit of a nightmare. Everything seemed to go wrong except for the birth itself, which I missed. :-|

I first found my foal on one of my late night checks on my mare. It was about 1 am and here is this little wet foal just standing up! Since he was spraddle legged and still wet, I figured he had only been out of mom for maybe 1/2 hour or so (?)

So I check him over and find that one of his legs is deformed. Not the usual week tendons or crooked knees, but the cannon bone itself just didn't look normal. So I went and grabbed iodine to dip his navel and called two of my friends who were on standby for the foaling. I was so heart broken. I thought for sure the vet would tell me to put him down.

Much to my surprise, the vet didn't even want to put him down. The vet didn't even want to see him right away! It took 2-3 days for the vet to come out and look him over. In the meantime, I was scared the prognosis would be bad and was afraid to name or bond with my first-ever foal.

So the vet came out and proclaimed it an extensor tendon injury and that he would be fine. Relief at last! Until his navel broke open a few days later and exuded pus. It then became apparent that every time he peed, a few drops of urine would come out his navel. It was a patent urachus. That's why he became infected. So he was put on antibiotics and I was constantly treating the navel with iodine hoping it would form scar tissue and he wouldn't have to have surgery to fix it. Luckily it did.

Then one night not long after, I went out to check on him and he was terribly constipated. He had chewed up some of the bedding (straw) and wasn't able to chew or digest it, so he was all clogged up and trying to push it out. I didn't want to wake anyone up, so I gave him an enema in the middle of the night, by myself. Luckily he was small enough for me to wrangle by myself.

Then he got the foal heat scours a couple days after that and I was constantly cleaning up his little bum and putting diaper rash cream on it.

So, when he was about a 1 1/2 months old, and the leg STILL wasn't getting any better, and I finally talked the vet into x-raying it. As it turns out, his cannon bone IS deformed.

The good news is, he has always been sound on it. So I pray he always will be. That leg is about one inch shorter than the other due to the deformity.

So that is the story of my first and only foal, Zane. He is 8 months old and very healthy and sassy. I hope to keep him forever and that we can become life-long best friends. But boy, it has been A LOT of tears for me, and an uphill battle all the way. I had no idea raising a foal would be so hard! It's kind of a shame that I couldn't really truly enjoy him right after his birth because I was so afraid I would loose him. And then he had one health issue right after another. There was scarcely any breaks in-between!

And I forgot to mention that when he was gelded at 5 months he also came down with an infection! What are the odds of that? I exercised him exactly as I was supposed to. But he had some tissue hanging out of one of his incisions, so I think that was a factor.

So here is my unruly child. He is going to give me a head full of gray hair! :lol:

You should make your own post called so you really want to breed? and have it stickied!