Photos of Bonnet's accident and surgies, VERY GRAPHIC!!!

[SlitherinSisters]

I've mentioned things about her accident several times before, and I finally got around to scanning the pictures. I sent an email to the place that did her final surgery and they were really excited to hear from me and wanted to share my story and wedding pictures online/in the office. I think that's pretty cool

Anyhow, here is a pretty picture to start with, this is what she used to look like, she was 16 years old in this picture


And here is a picture of her about 6 months later, this is a picture of her head, the flap of skin is where her eye was supposed to be. She completely broke off her brown bone, and shattered a lot more of it. I was 17 years old at the time, my sister and I went out to ride her and found her like this, my sister was 9 at the time.


After the first surgery, she had a constant bloody nose for a week. It has been 8 years and she still will not eat carrots to this day. We used to feed her carrots during the surgeries to distract her.


Her eyelid started dying, there was puss coming out of her eye and dripping from both nostrils, she had another surgery after this one. The infection was dangerously close to her brain at this point, she smelled like death, it was so bad. She was on antibiotics non stop.


This is when we found out that she also fractured her skull, that place on her forehead that looks like a gun shot. I literally thought she got shot by a hunter, I did hot compresses on her face and put ointment on her every day and that happened in 24 hours.


I called the vet out once again after I saw her like that, he did a 3rd surgery on her and told me she needed to go to a horse surgeon because there were so many bone fragments he couldn't get them all out, and the skull fracture had him worried. So...we drove a couple hours to a horse surgeon, she stayed there for two days in a padded horse stall after her 4th surgery, and she was fine after that! When I called the surgeon a few weeks later to tell him she was doing good he admitted that he didn't think she would make it, but said that if he told us that we wouldn't try as hard to keep her alive. He also didn't charge me hardly anything for what he did, he said he didn't want to leave me with a huge bill and a dead horse, I couldn't believe how awesome he was. He only charged me for the supplies, it ended up being $230 dollars for her surgery, x-rays, meds, and the padded stall, unbelievable!


She has been through heck and back, but I'm so glad I gave her a loving forever home, she never had that before. I was her 6th owner when she was 16 years old. She is a very high strung horse so I'm not surprised at all that people didn't keep her. People just don't understand that pets are a commitment, not a car that can be bought and sold with disregard. When I found her she was by herself in mud up to her knees in a pen no bigger than a garage. The seller told me I didn't want that horse and pointed me towards several other "nicer horses", but she nickered at me so sweetly as I walked by I just had to have her. She was on our farm the very next day.

This is a picture of her right after I got her, she was 200lbs underweight, even at 24 years old she doesn't look anything like this.