Barbaro in Surgery
Update: Barbaro is out of surgery and standing in an intensive care stall at New Bolton. “Things right now are good,” said Dr. Dean Richardson. “He practically jogged back to his stall … He’s very comfortable right now.” The news is about as good as can be hoped for, but Richardson did caution that Barbaro still faces a challenging months-long recovery from his injuries. “To be brutally honest, there’s still enough chance for things going bad that it’s still a coin toss even though everything went well.”
Photos: Here’s one of Barbaro coming out of the recovery pool and another of him walking back to his stall. The image below shows the x-ray of Barbaro’s leg before surgery on the left; on the right is an x-ray of the leg after surgery:
Images courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania/New Bolton Center
Richardson put in a bone plate and 27 screws during surgery to reconstruct Barbaro’s leg. The x-ray showing his incredible work is not only amazing but testament to how much equine medicine had advanced in the past couple of decades.
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Surgery on Barbaro’s injured right hind leg began shortly after 12:30 today at the New Bolton Center and is expected to take at least three hours. “It’s a very complicated procedure,” said Dr. Dean Richardson. “We’ll be attempting to fuse the entire joint. I don’t want to give any prognosis for success until further review during the surgery.”
It was revealed this morning that the injuries Barbaro suffered in yesterday’s Preakness were more severe than initially reported: In addition to the cannon and pastern bone fractures, the colt also has a fractured sesamoid and his ankle was dislocated at the fetlock joint. Richardson called the damage “very, very serious,” and said that he had not worked on a horse before with such catastrophic injuries. “You do not see this severe injury frequently because the fact is most horses that suffer this typically are put down on the race track,” he said. “This is rare.”
The news might be grim, but its sounds as though Barbaro has so far been the perfect patient (“He was very brave and well behaved under the situation and was comfortable overnight“) and that he’s getting the best possible care. And, as the Blood-Horse reassuringly points outs, while the situation is dire, “broken legs aren’t death.”
After surgery, surgeons plan “to place the leg in a sling and place Barbaro on a raft on a pool before the horse emerges from anesthesia.” The pool is used to prevent a horse from reinjuring itself as it wakes from surgery. Here’s a short video that shows another New Bolton equine patient waking from leg surgery in the recovery pool and then walking to his stall in a cast.
