A road travelled

I found a video my friend of taken on her phone of Wolfie when I first got him.  I never took any photographs of him in the first month I had him.  In all honesty, in my heart I didn't know if he was going to make it and I didn't want to look back on photographs of him and remember him that way if the worst did happen.  This video must have been taken around 2 weeks after he arrived and 2 weeks before he was in a stable enough condition to go to the vet school and undergo surgery.  Despite his body being overrun with infection, he did start to put weight on and in the video he already looked much better than he did when he arrived.  He is still covered in rain scald, you can't really see from the video, but his coat was enormously thick, I'd managed to get rid of the lice that he was infested with and even though he had put on a little weight, under the coat was razor sharp bones sticking out.  I don't know if I've just blocked that time from my mind, I don't ever think about it.  I took all my annual leave from work and just spent practically every minute of every day during the course of that first month with him, slowly picking all the scabs, dead hair and mud from him.  He didn't know me, I didn't know him, but I think from pretty early on Wolfie realised that I was really all he had.  He was a baby, had no handling and yet he gave me his complete trust.  The vets all said that it was likely that I would never get near Wolfie's back legs properly after everything, but I can.  Even at his sorest when I was trying to clean and remove scabs, he would warn and warn me to move away.  He would never intentionally lash out at me.  It brings tears to my eyes watching this video as the survival rate of schirrous chord is poor at the best of times, Wolfie's abcesses had formed right at his gut wall, the prognosis for him was...well it wasn't good.  I'm uploading this video today, because I can look at this now, and although it upsets me, I only need to think about far we have come and remember where we started.

Wolfie had major abdominal surgery and spent a month recovering in the vet school.  It was a long haul and the wound sites were draining infection right up until 2 days prior to his discharge from the vet school.  Schirrous chord is resistant to antibiotics so it's a case of waiting and hoping.  This next short clip was taken about 3 weeks after he came home and well on the way to recovery.

Wolfie had vet visits at least 3 times a week for that first month.  My vet likes to tell all his students about Wolfie when he's visiting .  The last time he was up he was saying what a nice type of horse he was and that he was lovely looking and very striking.  Then he said '.........because he certainly wasn't much to look at when you got him'.  No he certainly wasn't, but he was still Wolfie and I'm sure it was his heart and spirit that got him through those first few months with me.