Frolic? Yes please

Colic? No thanks.

There is one thing that seems consistent with horse-based businesses, which is a certain flaky vagueness in the front offices. I showed up for my one-on-one time with Doc tonight only to be warned off riding him or giving him the usual apple: He colicked up hard yesterday and is still recovering. My irritation at the lack of notice is small next to my relief that he's okay.

It sounds odd that colic is such a serious disease in horses, when it's a byword for nothing worse than chronic fussiness in babies. Well, I say "nothing worse," but obviously it's hell for the sleep-deprived parents. Still, colic in humans isn't generally a fatal condition; in horses, the term refers to a variety of issues that sometimes do kill. Horses' digestive systems are one-way roads, so anything they take in has to go all the way through their GI tracts and out the back. Unfortunately, that long coil of innards isn't entirely anchored in place, and sometimes a bit of food gets stuck or a section of intestine kinks like a hose, and the pressure starts to build. If the obstruction isn't moved along or the twist unflipped, the tissue can lose circulation or gas can accumulate; death can come in a matter of hours, often sooner than the vet. Even the vet is hampered unless there's a surgery nearby; you can't really do a sterile operation in a working barn. Colic is more common in stalled horses, who cannot walk and graze all day the way the animals are designed to do, but it can appear in almost any horse.

Horses have not yet evolved to the point of being able to hold up a sign reading, "Hello, I am colicking," but the indications are usually clear: The horse seems dull or uninterested. It won't eat or drink and may begin to sweat heavily. It may turn to look or bite at its sides to try to find the source of the pain. It may exhibit stretches that look like the flehmen response. Given anything like enough space, it will roll and roll (most horses roll for a few moments to scratch their backs; a colicked horse will thrash around for much longer). Treatments depend on the cause of the colic, but walking the horse and letting it roll once or twice at a time is a basic start.

Somehow or other, with the help of a dose of a muscle relaxant called banamine, Doc got things back to where they should have been, but he's still on what Stephen Maturin would call a low diet. I gave his usual apple to QC, then spent some time in Doc's stall grooming him and disappointing him by not turning into a pile of hay. I had missed the barn's annual Halloween trick-or-treating extravaganza, going to a Last Train Home show instead (Eric Brace? Still one of my favorite singers. IOTA? Still my favorite DC-area club, and made untritely Halloweenly with webs of tiny lights and huge glowing orange paper lanterns hanging from the rafters over the stage. Guy wearing a fake furry spider and a Phantom/Harlequin mask, offering cigs to everyone in the club? Still...not sure what was going on there), but the giant bats, strings of novelty lights, and corn shocks showed that the barn staff did a great job with the decor for the trick-or-treating kids. Among the costumed (sorry, Expat, no dancing) horses, QC had been dressed as an Oreo and Sterling as a plumber. The photos cannot come soon enough.