08/03/2026
Today was the day. As most of you know Gigi injured herself the day after arriving home with us. It looked bad….really bad, and at the advice of our vet we made her a small soft pen and waited to see what it would look like. Over the last 2 weeks we have done everything we can to get her to eat grain to feed through pain meds and anti-inflammation medication which she has had little to no interest in eating over her delicious hay. Also getting her as used to people in as low stress environment as we could to make working her less stressful. We all agreed if in 2 weeks time it wasn’t significantly better we would risk moving her into the chute and potentially making it worse to sedate her and get her x-rays to know exactly what we were dealing with. Walking into today the vet said less than 10% chance this is anything survivable given the way it looks. We set up an alley and calmly walked her into it slowly narrowing it as she backed away from us and into the chute….She never panicked and never kicked. Kody haltered her in the chute to help hold her head still and our vet administered intramuscular sedative to take the edge off so she could place the catheter to give IV sedative. After the intramuscular injection we had to wait around 20min for it to take full effect. We spent that 20min setting up the xray equipment pulling up drugs for euthanasia as that was going to be the most likely outcome. We talked over every possibility likely fractured pastern bone, possibly dislocated fetlock, catastrophic injury, made plans as once she was down and we took pictures we knew we’d only have minutes to make a decision….finally she was sleepy enough to safely insert the catheter and push enough sedation for her to lay down, our vet gave the drugs and we opened the chute into a small secure soft deep sandy pen where she could lay down safely. Didn’t take but a minute and she was out, our vet got all the X-rays they needed as quickly as possible. Watching her load and scroll through those images in silence took what felt like forever. And then she said it the thing honestly no one thought was gonna be a possibility….”I think she’s gonna be okay”. “No break, no dislocation, lots of soft tissue swelling.”….Gigi is tough as nails a true mature matriarch of a mustang mare she didn’t let us finish looking at the images before she got up and said “I’m not done fighting yet!” So we have a prognosis and a plan. Gigi should recover to at the very least pasture sound and could potentially recover completely but only time will tell, this isn’t days or even weeks, this is a months long process. But Gigi deserves every ounce of time she needs to recover and if she keeps fighting we will keep fighting for her.
