De-gloved front leg, recovery stories please

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phoenix26

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My friend's veteran mare had a freak accident while being lead and ended up trying to jump a 7 bar gate, unsuccessfully, she broke through the top half of it and has a horrific injury to her leg.
The mare has de-gloved her front leg from the knee down, approx 60cm x 6cm, skin and tissue all gone, right down to the bone.
She underwent 3 hours of surgery to fix the leg back together as best as possible, the vet is positive about her future which is great.

My friend has never seen anything like it and is understandably completely distraught, she is her pride and joy and its killing her to see her like it.

I am really just looking for anyone who has had experiences with a similar injury with good recoveries. The bone is undamaged and I know there are high success rates of recovery. I want to reassure my friend as well as I can.

Please comment or message if you may be able to help.

Thankyou xx
 
Sorry, I've not dealt with such an injury myself, but I wanted to reply to send your friend and her mare my best wishes for a full recovery.
 
A friends horse did sometimes similar.
Got his leg through a gate!
It was a deep and very large injury
although he didn't have surgery.
He made a very good recovery and quite quickly too.
Only a relatively small scar to show for it.

I wish your friends horse a speedy recovery.
I bet she was/is distraught.
 
Oh no, no wonder your friend is so upset.

When my mare was four, she had a freak accident where she ran full force into the front wing and bumper of my parked landrover. She didn't de-glove her leg but she completely ripped just about everything from her shoulder down.

She completely recovered, is now twelve and has been in work/competing and sound as a pound since then.

The body is truly an amazing thing, and heels incredibly quickly. My advice would be - be prepared for it to get worse after the initial healing before it gets better again. a lot can be done to prevent/treat proud flesh. I have found that bandaging and turnout gets the best results - obviously I haven't seen your friends mare, but I firmly believe that continual movement in a field, with support is the best.
 
My friends mare impaled the base of her chest and ripped right across under her front left leg when she was a youngster. The wound was huge at least a couple of hands width! She would have been put down but her owner was away on holiday and they couldn't contact her so the vets operated. She was a complete mess but several years on has not only survived but is making a rather nice job of being a decent dressage horse for her teenage daughter. She does have an area of just pink skin when the hair won't grow back as it was so badly damaged but to be honest you don't really notice it that much as she was a grey.

Good luck to your friend, horses are amazing healers just make sure she puts on a derma gel type of protection so the wound can be encouraged to heal from inside out as that reduces the scarring. Once she is further down the line with the healing closed then tell her to look for Calendular oil (Neal's yard sell it for approx £9 bottle and it lasts for ages) as it is brilliant for soft tissue healing and a few drop of rosemary in it will trigger any hair folicles to try to regrow if they are able to. My KS horse had a 12" operation cut down his spine and you can't even see the scar. Fingers crossed!
 
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BethH said:
My friends mare impaled the base of her chest and ripped right across under her front left leg when she was a youngster. The wound was huge at least a couple of hands width! She would have been put down but her owner was away on holiday and they couldn't contact her so the vets operated. She was a complete mess but several years on has not only survived but is making a rather nice job of being a decent dressage horse for her teenage daughter. She does have an area of just pink skin when the hair won't grow back as it was so badly damaged but to be honest you don't really notice it that much as she was a grey.

Good luck to your friend, horses are amazing healers just make sure she puts on a derma gel type of protection so the wound can be encouraged to heal from inside out as that reduces the scarring. Once she is further down the line with the healing closed then tell her to look for Calendular oil (Neal's yard sell it for approx £9 bottle and it lasts for ages) as it is brilliant for soft tissue healing and a few drop of rosemary in it will trigger any hair folicles to try to regrow if they are able to. My KS horse had a 12" operation cut down his spine and you can't even see the scar. Fingers crossed!
Click to expand...

We had a horse on our yard that did something stupid and I kid you not, you could put your hand right inside its chest to its elbow. In my experience, the bigger and more horrifying the wound the better it heals and with fewer problems. The little nothing much to see wounds are the killers.
 
Blummin horses! Wishing your friends mare a speedy recovery!
I had a big, gormless 3 yr old Irish horse that followed the ponies onto a roped off muck heap - the groom on the yard chased them off with a lunge whip whereby the ponies ducked under & my boy got entangled in the rope, ran off causing it to tighten round his hock & de-gloved his leg to the fetlock...
It was horrific to look at, couldn't be stitched because of the location, so therefore had to be bandaged & kept clean. He was on box rest for a total of 5 months but it healed (it was amazing to see how the body mended itself). He did have a good scar but went on to be the most lovely working hunter, winning many classes & giving me a lot of happy memories!
This was (ahem, blimey) 23 years ago now & I bet there are even better ways of helping mend such injuries now :)
 
A stallion at the stud I help out at de-gloved one of his front legs on a weaving gate. It was a mess!

He was a veteran (22 at the time). There was nothing to stitch so vet came and cleaned it and then we slathered manuka honey on it for a few weeks. After that we cleaned it very gently using a home made oil that the stud owner makes (which is excellent for preventing proud flesh) - just rubbed the oil in every day to take the scabs off. It took a couple of months but it did heal with only a tiny bit of proud flesh. He carried on for another 3 years.
 
I will tell you now, this injury will recover and you will hardly know it had happened in a few months time.
My friends horse about twenty years ago was tied to a rope tied between two metal posts set in the ground by flimsy concrete. She was being shod and whilst the farrier worked on her she put her head under the rope brought it back up and panicked and ended up galloping down a track into the menage, through the menage fence, straight down the track and through an old wooden five bar gate (whcih just shattered in half) and galloped half a mile down the field, and was degloved from her chest downwards. A huge flap of skin hung down from her chest to her knees and she stood their shaking in terror with the post still attached to her lead rope.

They got her back to the yard slowly and painfully and the vet came out, flushed the wound and stapled it. No word of a lie about 10 weeks later all that was present was a scar. Healed remarkably well.

The huge big wounds like your horse has had heal well, its the small almost miniscule puncture wounds that are the deadliest.

Manuka honey and silver plasters are very good.
 
Thankyou all so so much for sharing those with me. I am seeing both my friend and her mare later ao i will be sure to pass all of these on to her. Thankyou thankyou! Xx
 
If it's still there in the top bit of this Vet section where you can put up images of injuries etc there used to be someone's updated pics of a horrid leg injury I think if I'm remembering correctly. It always astonishes me how well horses heal from such injuries so I'll wish the same for your friend's horse.
 
My friend's retired exracer has done it twice in the field over the last 12 months. Both hind legs and we cannot find where she is doing it! !!

Literally both times degloved front of a hind leg from hock to fetlock. Both times she has made an amazing recovery even after nicking into the extensor tendon and is still currently holding her place on the yard as the ginger ninja galloping around with her mates. She is retired through back issues, her legs are just fine!
 
I have seen plenty... I work in Australia where an awful lot of horses are fenced behind ringlock... Most of them have done fine, even with tendon involvement. We had one pony who managed to deglove 3 legs with cannon bone exposed on two of the legs.. He healed.
The biggest thing to remember is the TIME... At first they heal really fast (wound shrinkage) they they take forever (re epithelialization). New skin grows at about 1mm a day so covering a large wound takes forever.
The longer you can bear to keep bandaging, the less scarring there will be BUT the leg will become dependent on the bandaging meaning you have to wean them off it, and there will be some swelling and some apparent "going backwards" when you first stop bandaging.
Manuka honey is brilliant. So is OpSite if there is bone exposure. We used OpSite with antbiotic capsules mixed into it to place directly against the bone. There's a million and one lotions out there for proud flesh but I find it responds best to the vet cutting it off.
Listen to the vet.. He will know what he's doing.
Here's a good link to a nasty injury that thoroughly documents the healing process:
http://www.bakersfielddressage.com/home/category/izzys-leg
 
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