A Tribute

    I’d known Burney Chapman roughly thirty minutes when, crouching under my horse, he glanced over and said: “Darlin’, this is going to hurt you a lot more than him.” Turning to the foot, Burney neatly plunged his hoof knife into the sole. A gasp emerged from the onlookers, the horse startled slightly as blood and puss poured onto the floor. I felt like throwing up. It wasn’t the gore, but the tension; like many of his clients, I met Burney Chapman in the middle of a crisis.
    October 1997, Bernie Chapman saved my stricken grand prix horse. The trouble had appeared that July. I was home, in Spokane for a few weeks, in the middle of doing the selection trials for the World Cup. My partner was an eleven year old Hannoverian gelding named Galoni.
    In 1990, after three years of training in Germany with Rudolf Zeilinger, my mother generously offered to help buy a horse worth training to Grand Prix. We could not afford a made horse; good ones are in the millions. Mom reasoned, correctly, that a long term project shouldn’t be based on a second rate horse. She offered to pay most of the purchase price and I would pay the balance and the training. This was a one-time deal, there would be no second chance; the horse had to work out.
    Rudolf Zeilinger found Galoni for me as a five year old, after searching for over a year. When Rudolf called saying he’d found my horse, I was, coincidentally, due in Germany the next week to train. I asked if the sale could wait for me to ride the horse. Rudolf told me we could wait, but the horse would probably be gone; he was that good. I talked with my mother and decided we would go ahead sight unseen. In the end it was the right choice. Galoni was high strung but teachable, mastering the grand prix as a seven year old, and consolidating the work for the next two years when it was to be my turn to show him.
    1996 was the year of the Atlanta Olympics and things were really starting to gel. Galoni and I were a well suited pair, and there are not that many good grand prix horses out there. Rudolf and I had talked about it, but I simply couldn’t afford a show season in Germany: Too far from my client base and source of income. Although it meant going without my trainer, (almost unheard of,) Rudolf okayed an Olympic bid in Florida.
    I came back to the US with Galoni, and we did respectably, but didn’t make the team. No surprise there the first season out. Galoni and I retreated to Germany for the summer, clarifying mistakes of the past year. Then, back in the US, and with the support of a wide variety of clients and family, I arranged another competition bid: this time the World Cup.
    I met Burney, when Galoni abruptly went lame after a normal work in Spokane. We were getting ready for the CDI in Parker Colorado, when Galoni took an off step in extended trot. I thought he’d lost his balance, but it was the end of the ride so I cooled him out, not thinking too much of it. That was a mistake.
    The next day was rest and I didn’t move him around much. The following day I brought him out and saw something was wrong. When jogging, he was dead lame. I felt his feet, and then up the leg. No swelling. The left front foot was warm with a very faint digital pulse. I called my vet and made an appointment for the next day. It didn’t seem like an emergency, but I wanted it looked at.
    The horse was worse when the vet arrived. Using the hoof testers and finding pain in the sole he suspected an abscess. He then removed the shoe, something my farrier just hates, and began to probe around near the toe. After finding a dry, mushy spot near the toe, he confidently pared it out, clearly expecting a gush of fluid as the pressure from an abscess was relieved. Nothing happened so he cut more.
    Closely examining the foot, we saw the connection of the sole to the white line, which had appeared solid before being cut away, had no connection between the laminae and the outer wall. My vet gingerly stuck a probe up into the area. Under the hoof wall it was completely vacant, almost to the coronet band. Instead of hard elastic connection there was pulpy white powder. My vet dug a bit deeper with the front of the hoof looking rapidly like a disaster area. Galoni was mildly uncomfortable, but mostly from the hoof testers, not the probing. I was the one in a sweat. We had what appeared to be an ongoing condition of advanced white line disease. The questions: why lame, and why now? The horse without his shoe was very lame.
    The vet took X-rays and left. I wrapped the foot, bedded the stall deeply, called my farrier, who (after a little colorful language about a vet touching his foot) said he would be right out. I should have called him in the first place and he scolded me as he carefully nailed the shoe back on. --- Galoni was relieved at not walking on his sole, but still very lame. The X-rays showed the P-3 had a shading down and across it, very slight, but discernable. The problem was, that without a complete hoof wall in front of it, as it had been paired away before the picture was taken, we couldn't tell if what we were seeing was an artifact left by the shadow of the existing wall, or a fracture in the coffin bone.
    The lateral view was equally worrisome. The P-3 appeared to be rotating relative to what was left of the front wall, but as the wall was both now missing in places, not to mention, not being attached to the laminae, how could we tell what the angle should have been? We settled on measuring the amount of sole and agreed grimly to call the insurance company. Galoni was insured, but for his purchase price only, not the six years of successful training. We knew the policy was not what he was worth, but paying for that much insurance would have prohibited showing him. A real catch 22. I would do it differently now, major medical and that’s it, but I didn’t know then what having that silent partner would mean. The insurance company was concerned. They asked my vet many questions: why they weren’t informed we were doing a resection? "Resection!" my vet replied, we had not done a resection, just probed for an abscess. Then, after questioning it, they inexplicably requested to involve their vet and consultants.
    A month later Galoni’s foot was blazing hot. He had a pounding pulse and was three-legged lame. If we had not had a foundering horse before, we had one now, and the fight was on as to what to do about it. The insurance company had flown in their expert from the east coast, a vet and farrier. My vet appeared relieved, my farrier did not. When I questioned the insurance vet about the plan he had in mind he shrieked at me over a long distance line: "You want to kill you horse? ---Just go ahead!" So they persisted, and I was horrified watching Galoni hobble around after they created a ball of rubber to stick in the heel of the shoe, pointing the toe downward, Their theory was, as I understood it, was it relaxes the tension on the ligaments that are pulling the P-3 out of alignment in a foundering horse.
    There were several things I didn’t like about this. In my heart I believed, and still do, that Galoni had fractured the P-3. White line disease, yes but, not an active infection. My nagging thought was that at that end of that workout he'd stepped on a rock. Uncommon, but not unknown in our arena. And, without the normal support on the top side of the P-3, we were dealing with a small fracture which, with all of our fussing, had been untreated and insulted. In the end inflammation of the foot is founder and it looked like we had one. The second thing I didn’t like about the ball scenario was that the research on its efficacy was based on survival rates, not working recovery rates. Many of the subjects had tendons cut which was simply not an option for me with a performance horse used to living in a stall.
    The third thing I didn’t like about is that my farrier was livid. I talked to my vet, begging him to come to a compromise with the insurance company. My feeling desperately that a good deal of the hand wringing had not to do with the horse, but the value of the horse as compared to the value of the insurance. It worried me that the insurance company’s interest was in the horse living out the premium time (six months) and they shared no interest in him working again.
    Finally, I called the company and talked with our consultant. I laid it on the line: they might pay my mother off if the horse died, but if they ruined him with their treatment they would have my lawsuit to contend with for the rest of the value of the horse, which was far more than their interest. As that information digested, they agreed that I could choose my expert as long as I chose someone with a good track record. I called my farrier. Within seconds he had the answer: Burney Chapman.
    Within a week, Burney was in Spokane with his hoof knife and under my horse, and by that time he had been three-legged lame for most of four desperate months. Burney, had looked at stacks of X-rays before he arrived. When finished evacuating the abscess that had formed under the sole, he performed a full resection, applied a descending pressure heart bar shoe with a treatment plate and showed me how to use it. The crowd stood back as I untied Galoni, ready to watch him hobble back to his stall. Burney smiled and said: “No Bute.” I replied, "okay." --- “Nitroglycerine patches on the coronet would be a good idea.” ---“Okay.” --- “Take him for a walk around the barn, he needs to get out." “Are you’re kidding?” ---“Nope.” I was incredulous; the horse had not been out of his double stall in four months, except to walk to the crossties. But Burney was the expert, and I did what he told me to do. Half-way through that walk I had to stop to put the chain over my grand prix horse’s nose. The walk had turned into a passage, which had turned into a jubilant buck, whirl and jump.
    I wished I’d had longer to look at the expression of the group, but my hands were very full.

                                                                                      Epilogue:
   It took over a year to grow the resected hoof down to the shoe. There were times when the corium showed throughthe gap under the P-3. Burnie sent us a copper sulfate solution for that. We also tensely watched for the dreaded appearance of the P-3 through the sole of the foot. We were on the verge of having a “sinker”.
    After the foot was solid and during the recovery, we did massage, acupuncture and stretching. Galoni’s body was crooked and sore from walking on three legs, while he was very lame, and that had to be dealt with.
    I am happy to report that three years later, I rode Galoni to his highest score ever in a Grand Prix, and he is, now twenty, is sound, and teaching tempi changes to the woman who was my groom in California the year he went lame.

We never made it to the Olympics. --- Sometimes you don’t know the meaning of the journey 'til the end.