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Chapter Five

Life or Death

It was fortunate on that otherwise normal afternoon in late January, eight weeks or so after Prince Of Penzance’s operation, that Laura Dixon was at home. The owner and manager of Dowling View Equine Centre was preparing to move a delivery of sand when she noticed that the bay looked a bit agitated.

But just a little, as though a fly or something minor was annoying him. Then he got down and rolled, kicking out a bit. Laura thought it might be his rug that was proving an irritation, so she removed it.

Some would’ve left it at that. Fortunately, Laura was both diligent and caring.

And so she kept watch and when Prince Of Penzance continued to roll, Laura called Darren Weir. Already she had erred on the side of caution by ringing the stable vet, but he was on the other side of Ballarat at the time.

During the next five minutes Laura witnessed what all lovers of horses dread. Prince Of Penzance was no longer just rolling, he was throwing himself on the ground. He was in pain.

Within ten minutes Dr Nicola Lynch was on the scene, but it proved difficult for her to inspect her patient — he was under too much stress to stand still. It took three lots of drugs before she could even get near him.

Getting him onto the float proved difficult, taking all of Laura’s and Dr Lynch’s patience and equine expertise. And once in he again wanted to go down.

Fortunately the equine clinic was close by, just a quick trip around the corner, at the back of Ballarat race course. Specialist surgeon Dr Brian Anderson and his team — a nurse, an anaesthetist and an assistant — had everything set up and ready to go.

All up it was just an hour from Prince Of Penzance’s first symptoms of colic to him being under the knife.

Dr Anderson well remembers Prince Of Penzance’s arrival at the clinic, and things looked bleak. ‘He was not in good shape,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He was in a lot of pain and had not responded to several pain-killing injections.’

The normal heart rate of the thoroughbred at rest sits at around 36–42 beats per minute. At this stage, Prince Of Penzance’s was soaring into the eighties and nineties.

The lack of response to pain relief, Dr Anderson says, is the first sign of danger, with ninety percent of colic (a generic term for a stomach upset) cases rectified by a single dose.

‘It is a bit like a person having an upset stomach after a curry — you take a panadol and lie down and usually you are fine within the hour.’

But in the other ten percent of cases, something more serious occurs. The digestive gases build up and the abdomen begins to distend. And this is what was happening to the now very uncomfortable and distressed Prince Of Penzance.

It was, said Dr Anderson ‘a life or death situation’.

After a couple of diagnostic tests, an ultrasound and a rectal exam to see what was going on, Prince Of Penzance was prepared for surgery. He was placed in a confined area next to a shifting partition.

Within five minutes, once the initial dose of anaesthetic had kicked in, he went down. The moving wall was gently lowered, the horse slid across to an awaiting water bed warmed to a comfortable thirty-seven degrees.

From there he was hooked up to a ventilator and an anaesthetic machine, turned upside down and transported to the adjoining surgery by a pulley system. And then Dr Anderson went to work, beginning with a forty-centimetre incision through the horse’s stomach. ‘A bit like opening your jacket,’ he said as he deftly unzipped his coat.

Sometimes what confronts the equine surgeon at this stage is distressing. The ‘large and long’ intestines (in the horse the small intestines measure at around eighteen metres in length, the large intestines about six) in reaction to the build up of gases start to twist, cutting off blood supply. It can take only a couple of hours for irreversible damage to occur. Tissues starved of oxygen begin to die.

Parts of the intestine can be removed, the remaining parts joined, as Dr Anderson put it, ‘a bit of plumbing’.

When this occurs the likelihood of complete recovery plummets, from a seventy to eighty percent chance, to fifty percent or less.

Fortunately, thanks to the speed in which Prince Of Penzance made it to the clinic, in this case there was not yet any major damage.

And so, over the course of a couple of hours, a twist of the large intestine was fixed. It is work of high concentration, with little margin for error. The skill and experience of the surgeon kicks in.

After being sewn back up, Prince Of Penzance was placed back on the pulley and moved to the nearby recovery room. This is another crucial stage.

Anaesthetic suppresses normal function, and horses are not made to lie down for prolonged periods. Neither are they made for deep sleep. They are creatures of flight and their first instinct when something concerns them is to run.

And of course waking up in a strange environment, feeling groggy and a bit sore, a horse will worry. Or worse still, panic. The recovery room is therefore heavily padded, just in case a horse begins to thrash out.

Such was the case with the legendary American filly Ruffian, who, having been successfully operated on after breaking down in her famous match race with Foolish Pleasure (her only defeat), awoke from her anaesthesia in a frenzy, injuring herself so severely that she had to be euthanised.

It is rare, said Dr Anderson, for a high-class horse to react in such a way. He has found that the better the horse, the more likely they are to stay calm; they have an internal strength, an intelligence that better prepares them for the unknown.

‘Champions,’ he explains, ‘are strong and tough. And they know they are special; they have that arrogance, a swagger, a confidence.’

Prince Of Penzance is one such horse. From him there was no panic, no kicking out. He rose slowly, gingerly, looking after himself. Just four hours after he felt those first worrying twinges of pain he was in recovery, being closely monitored.

It was not long afterwards that Prince Of Penzance gave hospital staff some cause for concern. He did not look happy; he was pawing at the ground.

And so they rushed to his side. But this tough, hardy thoroughbred was not in pain. He was hungry!

This is one of the very best signs that a horse has come through an operation well. With the intestines needing time to recover, the patient is not fed for at least twenty-four hours, and the first offering of a couple of handfuls of chaff is either rejected or gratefully received. When it is the latter, the horse is on his way to recovery. When he is ready for a snack, says Dr Anderson, you know he is going well.

He is, by no means, out of the woods. This particular type of surgery is demanding on the equine body. After an operation for bone chips a horse can lose around five, maybe ten kilograms. After a procedure to relieve colic they can shed up to fifty kilograms, around ten percent of their entire body weight.

Full recovery is a slow process, the horse regaining weight at the rate of around one kilogram a day. It takes three months for the horse to regain sufficient strength to be ridden, and once a horse suffers from a severe colic attack they are at risk of recurrence.

The threat is at its highest within the first three months, and decreases a little more after a year, all the more so after three years.

Darren Weir knows all about this, for in 2002, the year before she finished second in the first of Makybe Diva’s three historic Melbourne Cup victories, his gallant mare She’s Archie had twice been struck.

And it was the team at Ballarat who saved her life also, Dr Anderson performing both procedures. ‘We joke with Darren that we should operate on all his Melbourne Cup aspirants!’

Prince Of Penzance remained at the equine clinic for a week, followed by three weeks in a box, another three in a small yard and six in his paddock.

He recovered well, though it was not completely smooth sailing, with the incision site contracting an infection and a course of antibiotics required. And then, despite Laura Dixon’s and Darren Weir’s best efforts in choosing just the right companion for Prince Of Penzance, his paddock mate kicked him and he ended up with a massive haematoma … ‘a basketball on his hind leg’.

Fortunately, another week in the box saw Prince Of Penzance fully recovered from that setback, and the rest of his spell was bother-free. Nobody could have foreseen that just nine months later the horse would run the race of his life.