Thanksgiving
Danny, my top horse, had emergency colic surgery at the end of October. To make a long story as short as possible, I learned that, because he’d had a brief hospital stay in August of 2016 for a non-surgical colic, I was ineligible for the colic surgery coverage I’d thought I’d had through my equine insurance; I’d thought coverage was reinstated a year after the incident, but it’s a year after the date of renewal.
If you think that’s a weird and arbitrary way of deciding when to reinstate coverage, join the club. But rules are rules, and my underwriters decided that insuring large numbers of my own horses, sending multiple clients their way, and also having my liability coverage with them for more than 20 years was an insufficient reason to bend the rules. So I was on my own.
This was not good news. To add insult to injury, Danny continued to drain from his incision upon his return from the hospital, and a culture showed an antibiotic resistant infection. In spite of having no other symptoms —no fever, no wonky vitals, no problems gastrointestinally —the consequences of an antibiotic-resistant infection getting away from you are severe. So he’s back in the hospital, looking at a two week stay to treat the infection with the only drug to which it does respond, naturally one that is incredibly expensive.
Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!
Hello, friends. In October of 2017, my top horse, the 9 year old Dutch gelding Danny Ocean, underwent lifesaving emergency colic surgery, and later developed a complication that is requiring a longer hospital stay and expensive treatment. Shortly after surgery, I learned that I didn’t have sufficient insurance coverage to pay for any of it. Never in a million years would I have let Danny go for want of surgery coverage, but this realization has made my life a lot harder. To help pay for this lifesaving surgery, I’m hosting an online auction, with items and services graciously donated by the equestrian community.
A million years ago when I was young and adorable I attended USDF’s Young Rider Graduate Program, a two-day conference on how to be an adult in the horse business. It was a very informative weekend, with speakers on a huge range of subjects from professional liability to marketing to sponsorship, and one of the speakers was Jane Forbes Clark, who is a major player in ownership of team horses across several disciplines.