My TB mare in foal to Sharkey and due to foal a race baby April 19th 2003, instead foaled premature twin colts on April 7th in a snowstorm. I had just returned from Las Vegas very late the night before and the next morning I noticed her lying down in the snow. My thoughts were, "that doesn't look right". I went to get her and she nickered to her companion sheep, like a mare does her newborn, and I knew she was foaling early. I was thinking that maybe it was a girl since it was coming so soon. Ha! I brought her in, wrapped her tail and checked the position. I couldn't feel anything yet, but her water broke. 10 minutes later I checked her again and I could feel two little shoulder blades and a neck pointing the wrong direction. I called the vet and then tried to push the foal back to reposition it. No luck, my arms were too short. Time was running out, Mark came home and I told him what he needed to do to reposition the foal, he nearly fainted. After what seemed like eternity, and luckily for Mark, the vet arrived and repositioned the foal, and on his final check before he and Mark pulled, he said, "There's another one." I said, "there can't be." At the stallion farm she had a twin pinched and then the vet confirmed by ultrasound that there was one foal. Well, I guess it survived the attempt on it's life and hid out after that. All survived the birth process and then the work began. The vet said not to do anything with the little one and focus on the bigger one. Mark was to have nothing to do with that, he wanted to save the little one too. It crawled after him when he went to dry the bigger one off. He used a blow dryer to dry and warm them both. We hauled a mattress from the house out to the barn in the middle of the night and put waterproof covers on it. Turned the heat up to 95 degrees and baked from then on. Mom got milked and both babies got feedings every 45 minutes via nasogastric tube for the first 2 days, then hourly thereafter, and held up on their legs to strengthen them and to ward off pneumonia. The mare was an angel she would stay in her stall and come into the warm part of the barn where her babies were, to be milked then go back to her stall without any fuss. We even sat on a stool to milk her. On day 5, I was getting the bigger one to stand and nurse his mom. On day 6, I put him with his mom and he weighed in at 79#. The little one weighed 34# on Friday day 6 and 39# on Saturday, and he continued receiving hourly feedings. He couldn't get up on his own, but he tried. I stood him though and he could stand for about two minutes and took a few wobbly steps, he even tried to buck. Needless to say I was slightly busy, fortunately we got help with the night shift after the second night so I did get 4-5 hours of sleep per night. My son and his girlfriend took the night shift and worked their regular jobs by day. Without them I couldn't have done it.

It was on one hand a disaster and on another a miracle that they survived, especially the little one. There were so many obstacles ahead, but what a little fighter to be here at all, he was born with the heart of a Thoroughbred. He just wasn't done cooking, so premature. No ossification in the knees and multiple other areas, ears laid back, prominent forehead, little parrot mouth, but you couldn't help but love him. He laid in my lap to sleep and gave a little tiny whinny when he saw me. What a heart wrenching experience. There is more to the story though. When they were born another orthopedist came to visit just after the birth. I was OK with euthanizing the little one because I knew he wouldn't survive the day. It was the two orthopods who had the tears and said we had to try to save him. They insisted the vet place a feeding tube in him too, not just the bigger one, and when the vet had only one tube with him they went to the hospital and got a human one. The bigger colt was windswept pretty badly on one hind leg, the orthpods planned to make sequential casts to straighten him in the same fashion used to straighten kids with a club foot. The other orthodedists name is Samir, so Mark named the little one Samir after him.

On Tuesday, April 15th at 3 AM we took the little one to Iowa State, he acted like he had a belly ache and was colicking. His temp was 102.5. I hadn't given him his tube feeding since 8 PM because I didn't know what was going on with his belly. The ultrasound of his belly and lungs looked good. They did find a hernia that was easily reduceable. They put in a large bore 5 1/2 inch IV catheter which we are sure went SVC because he immediately decompensated and his gums darkened. It looked exactly like vena cava syndrome in humans. They took forever finding O2. Then they rapidly infused 500cc of cool D5LR to his core, he completely decompensated again with gums turning blue and began violently shivering. I did not want to leave him there after that, because I felt the care was pitiful, but they had the fluid and needed equipment. By that evening he had pneumonia, on Wednesday he developed profuse diarrhea but the smear showed no overgrowth, we decided to take him home and give him his mom's milk. When we got there he was covered in his own manure and looked terrible. My thought was to euthanize him right there. Mark had the same thought, but wanted to try him on Levoquin a human pneumonia drug. They had said that he had no ossification in his knees and could not bear weight for a couple of months. That's OK we would have made him a sling suspended from a frame with wheels so that he could propel himself with his hooves. Also, we would have swam him in the hot tub to strengthen him. In addition, on Wednesday, the larger of the two developed a snotty nose and I restarted him on antibiotics. His last dose was on Monday night when he was seven days old. We took little Samir home Wed evening and he had a very fancy liquid O2 system from Excel medical, but it was not enough, he had what appeared to be another belly ache about 2:30 AM we held his next feeding, but he died Thursday at 4:30 AM, at 9 days old. Then Thursday evening the larger one was appearing weaker and he rapidly declined. I called my friend whose husband is a vet, to euthanize him at about 10:30 PM. Mark then named him Benjamin. The vet came and the little stinker got up and nursed, although fairly weakly. So we started him on levoquin and decided to see how he was in the morning. I fed him with a syringe through the night, but at 4:30 AM he had a spasm and stopped breathing. I didn't try to resuscitate him. He died at 10 days old. Both are buried next to each other in their mothers paddock facing the barn. We are planning to plant a tree between their graves to provide shade for their mother and older sibling Rubi. Their bodies will nourish the tree. Little Samir was Mark's favorite, when Mark buried him he said he had a little body, but a huge spirit, Benjamin too. Mark buried Samir in one of his t-shirts from a human race, and if you compare he had the very same leg markings as Secretariat. These two little souls touched us profoundly and although I miss them terribly, I'm thankful to have been a part of their short lives. As for Mark, he says he has a new perspective of the equine, and oh how he loved that little one, Samir.