PrintThe role of rehabilitation facilities is growing rapidly as owners set new standards for healing injured sport horses.
Becky Holder was at her wit’s end. She looked over the stall door at her beloved gray frantically circling his stall and knew something had to change.
Holder’s Olympic and World Equestrian Games veteran, Courageous Comet, had been injured at the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, and his recovery wasn’t going smoothly. At the WEG, Comet threw a shoe on cross-country and strained the check ligament in the opposite front leg, which kept him from completing the event.
“The best vets in the world were there, and they all felt like it was a fairly insignificant, though momentarily painful, injury that should heal very quickly,” Holder said. “When they sent him home, everyone was all smiles, believing that with the correct anti-inflammatories and rest, we were looking at a couple of months recovery time.”
But once Holder got Comet home to her Chattahoochee Hills, Ga., farm, she ran into frustration. Comet, fit enough to run a four-star cross-country course, wasn’t happy on stall rest and took up stall walking.
“It was very difficult to keep him happy,” said Holder, who tried to get Comet out hand walking as much as possible.
Even more worrisome was the lack of progress in Comet’s leg healing, despite Holder’s best efforts with icing and therapy. “It just wasn’t looking the way I thought it should look,” she said.
And an ultrasound taken three weeks after the injury told a disheartening tale. “He had started to lay on so much scar tissue in the area that it was really alarming. They didn’t know why, but his leg was healing by binding scar tissue not within the structures, but outside of the structures.”
Intensive Attention
Holder knew she had to change Comet’s situation to get his healing back on track. She decided to send him to KESMARC Florida, an equine rehabilitation facility in Ocala. The staff there was up-to-date on a wide range of therapies and willing to work with Comet’s current veterinarians, Dr. Christiana Ober and Dr. Tom Daniel.
KESMARC Florida offers cutting-edge therapeutic equipment such as an AquaTred submerged treadmill, a swimming pool, a hyperbaric chamber, an Equigym exerciser and an indoor track. And the facility’s environment helped calm Comet.
“The routine was all about him,” Holder said. “They had him out of his stall seven or eight times a day, so he didn’t get bored. They hand-walked him five or six times a day in their big facility, where he didn’t have the stimuli of other horses being turned out next to him or riding by. They lasered his leg, and he went on the AquaTred, and they gave him all kinds of attention.”
Holder was especially thrilled with the constant updates that KESMARC Florida provided her. They frequently emailed her progress reports and video clips of Comet jogging. Comet’s recovery accelerated as the KESMARC Florida staff followed the program Ober and Daniel had set up.
“It felt like I was getting the total picture and there was a good continuity to everything,” said Holder, who took Comet home in March after 10 weeks at the facility. “When I got him back, he’d kept good weight, and he’d had all his Gastrogard and meds. They’d taken really good care of him.”
