10/11/2026
TLDR: We had our second agricultural inspection yesterday (Friday). Coleen and I walked for miles as we visited every horse in every pasture, comparing them to their negative coggins test and checking for symptoms. Our horse who tested positive is almost completely closed up on her lanced lymph node and there is no residual swelling. We have one other horse with a swollen lymph node that we may decide with the vet to drain to speed up healing and to keep him comfortable. Everyone else is doing well. All of our humans are tired. Send coffee, donuts, and hand sanitizer! 😂
Detailed version:
Thursday the 8th, as I was packing my bag for my Colorado clinic, our vet called to let me know that the horse we swabbed on Tuesday was positive for Strangles (Streptococcus equi). He called our resident vet after he and I spoke. Then I spoke with our resident vet. I asked if I should cancel the trip and she told me to go, that she had it under control.
After what felt like 6,000 text messages on my way to the airport (I wasn't driving), I cruised through security and boarded my flight. I had to ride some horses for owners who were out of town and since I was too stubborn to pay a $75 bag fee to Frontier, I wore my riding boots on to the plane. As we came in to land, I realized, s**t!, I was wearing my riding boots. Not that they go anywhere but from one saddle to the next by way of the mounting block, I had a mild panic about getting in my friend's car and going home to her farm with my cootie boots. I texted to ask if she had any disinfectant wipes in her car as I made a pitstop at the restroom on the way to passenger pick up. Before I left the restroom I got a text back, "No." I walked out and almost bumped into the cleaning lady and her cart, saw her spray bottle of random blue liquid, and thought to myself, "If it is good enough for an AIRPORT BATHROOM, surely that will kill any possible thing on my boots." She let me take the bottle and douse my boots, then insisted I take a rag and wipe them down! ~Crisis averted!~
The clinic was wondeful, minus the fact that I went to bed on Colorado time and woke up on Florida time to field messages, calls, procedural questions and concerns, and weigh in and medical questions. I was able to take some of the administrative tasks on long distance. I wonder what type of crime scene our Sam's Club driver thought he was leaving for when the 21 items he picked consisted of nothing but multiple 4-packs of bleach and disinfectant wipes! 🤪 With my flight home delayed, I ended up with 2.5 hours of sleep Monday morning and off I went...into the land of bleach footbaths and hand sanitizer.
We spent the next couple of days realizing that replenishing footbaths at night means you have to add more bleach in the morning because of the torential rain we've been having, figuring out how to separate a couple of horses from their group due to one with a fever, one with a snotty nose, and one with a mildly enlarged lymph node, and just how to navigate keeping the healthy horses healthy while still tending to anyone who needed extra care.
We put any suspect boys in one paddock (the cootie crew, the boogie boys) and dropped a 1,000 pound alfalfa block in case we had to miss any grain meals. This was difficult because one is a pushy bastard at meals times and while his nose was full of snot, it did not affect his appetite. Another who had a fever was eating super super slowly. The other two just did their thing but we still had to hold each of them individually to eat. In and of itself, that wouldn't be so bad. But when you have 70 other horses to feed and care for and quarantine stuff to maintain, it is a lot.
JP came to our rescue and let us pick up 6 cattle panels to make seperate feed stalls. And that was a godsend. It literally shaved (shaves) an hour off our routine in both the morning and the afternoon.
Coleen is helping us survive this with not only her medical expertise, but her genuine compassion for every single horse on the property...and her kick ass spreadsheet creation skills!
Adam not only has been splitting much of the morning loop feed, but doing double time hanging up hand sanitizer stations and with Orlando's help, extending fences to seperate cootie and non cootie horses, building feed stalls, and separating shared water troughs.
Stacia has jumped in and taken over management of our scheduling, which may not sound like much. But when you take a look at the spreadsheet we keep for the Agricultural Inspectors, managing volunteers and extra helpers, logging temps on 70-something horses, and keeping up on her normal schedule, she is an absolute fu***ng rockstar and no one will convince me otherwise!
Myrthe has started coming at 6am with her trusty assistant (who has also been very patient) and helping with temps, feeding, grooming, literally helping with whatever needs to be done.
Hana has been double timing to help with extra feed shifts as we are trying to split up things so we don't overlap the feeding of non exposed horses with the feeding of exposed horses.
Boarders, parents, and friends we haven't seen in forever have been going above and beyond to help us in so many ways. Anne clipped one of our hot horses today and scrubbed three others. Ava stayed today and helped me get the hair off two more. Cat comes whenever she isn't working and helps Stacia with chores. Jess brought us homemade soup and pie and did a BJs run for more sanitizer and cleaning supplies. Karen replenished footbaths today. Everyone has been so understanding and helpful. And it doesn't end there. Students have been understanding that we are doing lighter work with all of the horses right now, so the healthy ones stay that way and the ones under the weather have fuel in the tank to heal. I will say it could not have been better timing for our Lead Instructor to be on break. It gave us time to regroup find our new normal.
Lessons learned for me personally, wear gloves when you're doing feet, especially with a new rasp. Not that I haven't learned this lesson 100 times over, but when one is using hand sanitizer 1,000 times a day, all those little cuts take so much longer to heal. Also that the thought, "next week when things quiet down..." should stop entering my brain. Oh! And Amazon has a great deals on 20 packs of thermometers. 😂
When I left my apprenticeship, I don't want to even calculate how many years ago, to start college, I told my advisor something along the lines of, "I'm here because my parents are helping to pay for my degree. This isn't my priority. My priority is my training. I need to get a degree, but what is easiest? Like what can I put the least amount of effort into, because again, this isn't my main focus?" I was told business or psychology. I picked business because I figured one day I would run a business. I always say that I should have picked psychology because horse people are crazy. Oh come on, don't get offended. You know it's true! But this time my business degree and my 12 years in Corporate America have really paid off. This, just like a large scale hurricane evacuation, is just project management.
As we work to find what will be our new normal for the foreseeable future, we are diligently working to keep our older citizens safe and to get everyone healthy at the same time to get into our 21 day countdown, not only for everyone here, but also for our winter clients who are still keeping their fingers crossed for December arrivals. All the while we are trying to keep some sense of normalcy with the family. Lucas has dive meets in and around Philadelphia and Benjamin is in the midst of his senior year and planning for graduation. Basically I'm giving up on the theory that next week things will be a little quieter because next week always has some surprises for us. We finally got rid of 2025 and 2026 said hold my b**r.
I can't thank our staff, our clients, our friends, and our community enough. It has been a wild ride and this is only the end of week one!
