Waiting on the Vet

Wednesday was Spring vaccinations and horse health care day at this little place here. Not that they don't get cared for every day, but this was the annual draw blood for Coggins tests, check and float (if necessary) teeth, listen to their heart and listen to their gut with a stethescope, give the full compliment of horse disease vaccines, vet visit.

And, like every non-emergency vet visit, you call in advance to get put on their schedule for a certain day that will work for you.  Then, the morning of that day, you call into the office at a particular time (typically 8:30 a.m. unless it's a staff meeting day) and they give you an estimate of what time the vet will be to your farm.

An estimate.  Sometimes their day is going great and the vet arrives half an hour early.  Most times, they are running a tad late.  Say half an hourish.  Because horses don't always stand quietly and cooperate, or, more often than not, the owner(s) want to ask the vet about this or that other thing "while you are here".  No big deal.  It's part of the horse life.  

There's also driving distance/time between farms and traffic to factor in.  The vet office does their best to anticipate these things and roll those into the estimates they give for arrival times.  But unforeseen things do pop up. . . accidents slowing down traffic on the route, weather delays, construction zone detours, etc.

Sometimes the vet is very late.  An hour or more late.  And, while it's kind of frustrating if you've got a tight schedule, it's also a part of the horse life.  The vet could get an emergency call. (a horse colicking, a mare in distress during foaling, a horse with a wound that is gushing blood and flesh fileted open. . .) and that shuffles the non-emergency farms to later in the day.  Or, the vet could get to a farm and have an extremely uncooperative horse to deal with.  Or, they get to the farm and the person (owner, groom, farm manager, whoever) that is supposed to meet them in order to fetch and handle the horse(s) for them is running late.  It happens.  Horse life.

Wednesday was one of those very late days.  Just how late, you never really know until they pull in the driveway, so you try to keep busy while you're waiting, yet stay where you can see them pull in.

So, for me, after bringing in horses a half-hour before my estimated appointment time, in case the vet was running on the early side, I:

--groomed horses

--called Crockett and Tubbs' owner and talked to her about some potential changes in how/where their supplements are acquired, as well as the possibility of changing farriers for them since theirs had rescheduled four times since Spring 2025 (typically a horse only sees the farrier about 9 times in a year).

--emptied the compost bucket (kitchen scraps) into the bin by the garden

--pruned back barberry and forsythia bushes near my garage

--ate a cheese stick (it was now lunch time but I don't have a good view of the driveway from my kitchen so I didn't want to be inside with a lunch that needed making)

--ate two pieces of chocolate (now it's after lunch time and I'm still watching for the vet)

--took the load of towels out of the dryer when they were finished drying (very quickly, can't see the driveway from the basement laundry room)

--gathered the trash since it goes to the end of the driveway on Wednesday nights

--looked up online sources of supplements for Crockett and Tubbs (while sitting on the mounting block keeping an eye on the road)

--ate a protein bar (body was telling me I should have had a decent lunch)

--found my shedding blade (I'd looked for last weekend with no luck)

--read some articles online

--ate some more chocolate (this was a very poorly nourished lunch day)

--wrote a blog post

And then the vet arrived, very apologetic for being about an hour and a half late.  Her day had started with an emergency call that, according to her, hadn't been a real emergency but that horse's owner had thought it was.  Add on to that the fact that she didn't have a vet tech with her to assist and she'd had two farms prior to mine where she had to float teeth.  Floating teeth is kind of time consuming, especially without an extra set of hands to prep and hand the vet things.

I assured her I totally understood.  My only limitation was that I needed to leave at a particular time (two hours hence) because my granddaughter and I were supposed to go test ride a horse I was looking at buying.

It turned out that, after examination, three of the four horses in residence at this little place here needed their teeth floated. Two were pretty cooperative, one not as much.  Of course that one was the one that needed a more involved filing of hooks and sharp spots worn into his back teeth. We finished up exactly at the time I needed to be leaving.  So that worked well.  And, in retrospect, that barberry bush really had needed the pruning I gave it.  Something I probably wouldn't have prioritized if I hadn't needed to stay where I could watch for the vet truck pulling up my driveway,