Please send luck and healing

["Maryanne Stroud Gabbani" <gabbani@starnet.com.eg>]

Tomorrow my gelding Bunduq will have to have some nasty surgery on his right
forehoof. This is the same horse that slipped on cement walking out of his
stall to be trotted out for a vet for a minor problem and fractured his
cannon. He's been boxed for 3 months while we prayed that the bone wouldn't
move because there wasn't any equine surgeon closer than Austria who could
put a lag screw in the cannon. The cannon has healed fine. He stepped on a
10 cm nail in his shavings (the only horse in the stable with them because
he wasn't allowed out of the box) that has caused osteomyelitis in the
coffin bone. This happened a day or so after my husband died so I wasn't out
at the stables keeping an eye on things. My local vet hoped he had the
infection under control with aggressive treatment at first but Bunduq
couldn't shake it and xrays we did yesterday and emailed to our US vet
confirmed what Dr. Emad was afraid of.

Surgery like this is really tough here. He's going to have to have a general
in a big box stall that has been scrubbed top to bottom and painted with
antiseptic and fitted with screens. Major fly season right now. We don't
have an equine clinic or hospital here that is equipped to do this stuff,
and no way to get him to one three legged lame anyway...not safely...so it's
field surgery basically. Everyone go out and buy your local vet or equine
clinic some flowers, bless them for simply existing, and then think about an
amazingly patient, gentle horse who is really getting hit with the rotten
luck six ways from Sunday.

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
gabbani@starnet.com.eg