Meddleton Equine Hospital

Back before Mark and I were married, I was running a riding stable with my sister. We had about 20 horses. But one saw the vet more than all of the other horses combined. He was a big, beautiful, dark bay thoroughbred named Fudge. You've heard the expression, "scared of his own shadow"; Fudge really was scared of his own shadow and everything else too.

Strangely, the one thing he wasn't afraid of was his vet. Despite the countless hours my sister spent patiently working with Fudge, she will tell you that his favorite person was his vet, Mark Meddleton. He loved all of the special attention he got from his vet. The horse we couldn't walk from his stall to the pasture without taking our life in our hands, stood perfectly still for the vet. He was a vet's dream horse: frequently injured and a perfect patient. As a result, Mark had a real soft spot for Fudge.

One afternoon, my very pregnant sister, too pregnant to ride, went out to lunge Fudge. Retractable lunge lines had just come on the market. Always eager to try new equipment, my sister had bought one and went out to give it a try. Fudge, as was his nature, spooked hard, pulling the lunge line out of her hands, and proceeded to gallop around the arena. The plastic retractable casing on the end of the line then hit him with each stride, spooking him further.

He became so frantic that he tried to escape the evil pursuing him by jumping out of our 4 board fenced arena. By then, the line was tangled all around his legs. He jumped, and hobbled by the line, impaled himself on a 4" x 4" wood post. It sunk deep into the underside of his chest between his front legs. My sister brought him to me in the barn, handed him to me saying, "He's going to die and I can't bear to see it," and retreated to the house.

He had a huge gaping hole with buckets of blood pouring out, literally buckets. My father, the only non-horse person among us, came out to help while my mother comforted my sister and made sure she and baby were okay. I called the vet clinic whose number, thanks to Fudge, I knew by heart. Horse farms in upstate New York are spread far and wide. Their practice area was huge and it was common for the vets to be as much as 2 hours away. As God's good timing would have it, Mark was in his truck on a nearby road, just 5 minutes away.

Mark has never ceased to amaze me with his calm demeanor. On arrival, the only indication he gave of how disturbing this horrific scene was, especially as it involved his favorite patient, was that for a brief second, he started to reach for his thermometer. Then, just as quickly, he abandoned his thermometer and got to work getting the situation under control.

He whispered to me to get my father away from Fudge, because he would likely collapse and die at any moment and he didn't want my dad getting pinned beneath him. Mark stuffed every package of gauze he had in his truck up that wound trying to stop the flow of blood. That barely made a start in filling the hole, so he started shoving towels up in there. Miraculously, Fudge never collapsed.

Mark turned Fudge's stall into an ICU. He pumped him full of fluids to compensate for all of the blood loss, gave other supportive therapy and monitored him throughout the night. His prognosis for survival was bad and for ever being sound again, even worse. Fudge not only survived, he returned to 100% soundness.

The only evidence of that horrific day was a scar the size of a dime. If Mark had been more than 5 minutes away, Fudge would have surely died.