It has been 7 days since Mahogany cut herself. She is still housed in the yard and is starting to get a little grumpy about it. But, she needs to not use that foot too much, so the yard it is. So far, there is no sign of infection. The wound is big and deep, and is draining as it heals. It is healing, but the word from those with experience with these types of wounds is that it will take months. We are changing the dressing daily. She tolerates this pretty well as long as we don’t have wash the wound out. I did more research tonight and the recommendation is to just wipe the discharge off with saline-moistened gauze. I’ll try that tomorrow. For now, she’s healing well and we will continue to do what we can.
Month: September 2013
Horse woes
Steve alluded to Mahogany’s injury in an earlier post, but I have avoided talking about it because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. We are a few days out from the injury now, and Mahogany is doing well, and I’m optimistic for a positive outcome, so I can describe what happened.
Monday morning, Steve and I went out to take pictures of something (neither one of us can remember what at the moment) and noticed my brother’s girlfriend’s horses were on the hill behind the creek, outside of their pasture are. We walked down to check out the fence Steve had just tightened earlier this spring that was supposed to keep the sheep out of the horse pasture and on the farm. Physics being what it is, if a horse can get through the fence, then so can a much smaller sheep. Before we headed out, we noticed blood on Mahogany’s back foot. The blood, however, was coming from her front foot. She had a very deep cut across the back of her front foot, just above the hoof. That’s bad, for the non-horse people among us. It was important, however, to confine the sheep, because they were headed for the hole, so I put the horses in the yard, registering that it was bad, and went to see what was up with the fence, it turned out the horses had just rubbed the gate open, so we closed it up and went back the house. On the way, I called Mom to get a hold of Matt to catch the wandering horses.
We got back to the house, and looked for the source of Mahogany’s injury. She had apparently been striking at the other horses, whom she has previously gotten along with just fine, and caught the second-from-the-top strand of wire and broken it. Yes, she snapped the wire with her foot. About that time, my brother showed up and helped me evaluate the severity of the injury. We determined that she had not cut the tendon, and he called someone he knew with more horse experience than both of us put together. We just honestly did not know whether there was any hope of a horse recovering from this type of injury. It turns out that if the tendon is not cut, and if you can keep the flies out and if an infection does not set in, the wound will probably heal. If you have ever tried to bandage a horses ankle, you will realize this is not necessarily an easy set of conditions to achieve.
Matt was willing to help, and I really do care for my horses, so we gathered supplies and proceeded to treat the wound with Vetricin, then cover it with gauze and vet wrap, followed by a fancy duct tape booty for her. The goal was to keep dirt and insects out of the wound so it could heal, while preventing her from re-opening the wound with every step. Mahogany was not impressed, but we (mostly Matt) prevailed, and she ended up with a pretty silver toe. We left that for two days, and yesterday, we reversed the process to see what we had. It didn’t look good at first. There was a strong odor coming from the wrappings, and there was evidence of fly penetration into the tape layer. I was getting a very bad feeling. But, we got everything off, and amazingly, the wound itself looked very good. Everything was the right color, and there was minimal swelling, and no evidence of infection. So, we applied more Vetricin, wrapped it all back up, and tonight Mahogany got a shot of antibiotic. Tomorrow we will change the dressing again. We’re on a two-day schedule for a while.
Right now it looks hopeful that she will recover. Only time will tell if she has long term lameness or weakness. Keep your fingers crossed for us. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, she’s confined to the yard. I bring her in some hay once a day, but she’s still eating the grass down very short, and Sarah has a new chore that involves a shovel and the removal of the applied horse “fertilizer” on a daily basis. Meeka comes and goes, but really, Mahogany is much calmer with her in the yard, so she spends about half her time in the yard too. It’s a good thing I hadn’t put a lot of time and effort into our landscaping, because its going to take a beating.
Cupola number one completed.
Today was the day we finished the first cupola! It was a dreary over cast day. A very good day to be on the barn roof. It was very tolerable. I snapped a picture while waiting for Jason to cut the next piece of wood and tie it to the blue rope so I could pull it up and attach it to the cupola. Since our progress is measured in inches this year I decided I had better go cover the other cupola holes with plastic and a couple of pieces of tin to get us through until next year. I had just crawled up the hole when a very large storm rolled in. Jason was out watching for lighting while I tried to finish screwing the tin in place over the plastic. I got the far side down before the rain started. Oh boy does a cedar shake roof get slick with a little bit of rain on it. I managed to get the second piece in place before the torrential downfall started. I have hopes of doing another couple of days on the roof but I want to get things cleaned up and ready for winter now so I have to take it into account also.
We ran to town and when we came back we did some more fencing down by the far end of the orchard. The bull and sheep will no longer be able to sneak through the creek crossing. We also used the tractor and shovels to clean out the front creek from the far end of the orchard to the creek pipe crossing. The concrete chute where the old irrigation pump used to pump is full of dirt and grass, we just dug a path and removed most of the weeds. I want the creek bed to dry up where the water is not running so it can be worked with the tractor. There was a six foot wide path of mud, now there is a one foot wide channel with all the water running down it. I am hoping that other five feet of mud dries out. Here is a picture of the finished cupola.
Always something different
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| Day 5, one piece left on each side then other 2 sides! |
It has been a long holiday weekend. Jason and I worked on the cupola both Saturday and Sunday. It was hot! A nice overcast day would be nice. On Sunday at lunch time Annmarie wanted us to start sprinklers. So I changed out broken sprinkler heads on two sprinklers and tried to pump from the front creek. With three sprinklers running we started to run out of water, so I shut one outlet valve, water level still dropping, so I shut another outlet valve, level still dropping so I throttled the last one down 50% and the creek level still dropped. We cannot pump out of the front creek at this time. There is only a small amount running. So after Jason cut the same board three times and I threw it off the roof three times we called it quits on the roof for the day. Instead we went to go look at the spring head up by the old chicken coop. It does indeed have a cavern and it was all clogged up with grass and weeds. We raked and shoveled the grass out till we got down to the area I could dredge with the tractor. I dredged it and scooped out a few yards of foul smelling mud and dead weeds. This is not pleasant work by any stretch of the imagination.
I went out before dinner to get eggs and noticed that it was very dark due to a sudden storm having moved in. My automatic chicken door had closed early locking several chickens outside the coop. I had to chase the chickens around the coop three times before they would go inside the human door into the coop. I have only been getting 3-4 eggs/day recently. It finally dawned on me that the chicken light is out! They are not getting enough light. I will fix that very soon. One of the horses got into the barb wire fence fighting with some other horses yesterday. She tore up her front foot dorsal side pretty bad down near the hoof. So I went and fixed the fence while Annmarie and her brother Mathew bandaged up Mahogony (horse). She is now living in the front yard for the duration to limit her movement and keep her foot clean. Annmarie is very worried that she will heal. Time will tell, but the waiting is hard.
Woe is me.
Jason came to the house bright and early so we could get on the barn roof before it got really hot. He started to cut the flashing while I geared up to go up on the roof. I got my little pouch of screws on, strapped myself into the safety harness and hung my impact driver from my pants pocket. I climbed up to the roof peak carrying two pieces of flashing while clipped into the safety rope. I crawled onto the peak and was sitting down reaching for my impact driver when it leaped off my waist and started careening down the roof top rapidly approaching terminal speed. Gravity works and the ground is harder than the plastic casing on my brand new impact driver! The handle broke on impact. I have no way to put screws into the roof. So I scooted back down the roof and discussed different approaches with Jason on how to tell Annmarie that I broke another impact driver on the barn project (#3). Jason pulled the flunky routine and said I had to do it. This would not be such a big deal if my other one was back from getting repaired but there seems to be a snag with that process. I sent it to the repair shop, they called asking me what was wrong with it (I forgot to put that on the note), then last week they called twice and left messages telling me it was done. I called on Thursday and the gentleman on the phone could not find my impact driver. He took my name and number and said he would call me back. It has been four days with no phone call. I am hoping next week he calls, if not I will call him.
I gave explicit descriptions of the offending item so that Annmarie could go buy me a new one at Home Depot off she went. Jason and I started by readying the barn for animals. We finished cleaning it out and then spread straw all over. This is a sure sign that the weather is changing because in spring and summer they never come int on their own. We then went on to the fence between the barn lot and the ram pasture. It needed to be redirected so that the creek crossing was at a 90 degree angle. There was too much fence hanging over the creek and everyone was using it like an open gate. We had to install a H-brace then custom cut some cow panels to go over the creek. We also had to retighten all the fencing and install wooden fence stays. This took us most of the day. We even redug the front creek through the barn lot. Jason even found some tiger salamander larvae (we had to look them up on the internet!)
Annmarie brought the new driver back but we were busy so it got left over by the fence. After our work was completed Jason went over and picked up the box and says “its 12 volts”. The one thing I forgot to tell Annmarie was it should be an 18 volt driver! I jumped in the car and went over and exchanged it while Jason cleaned up the fencing tools. Tomorrow we will hit the roof early and I will use a piece of parachute cord as a safety rope for the impact driver. On a potential plus note, I had saved body #1 of the first broken Makita driver and I may be able to change out the plastic bodies. Here’s hoping that works.
Stewart Creek Somethings 