SASKATOON -- A woman’s quick actions were the difference between life and death for her daughter’s horse Dime.
On Saturday, Kayt Dressel was out pitching hay for her two horses, Bambi and Dime, when she said he heard the two rustling around in what seemed to be the beginning of a fight between the two mares.
“I turned to see Bambi attempting to boot Dime, which caused Dime to rear up and pivot to get out of the way,” Dressel wrote in a Facebook post.
As Dime pivoted she hit the top of the metal tin roof and the edge sliced her neck, Dressel said.
With the sight of blood gushing “like a faucet” from the horse’s neck, Dressel said she calmed the two mares down and then froze for a few moments unsure what to do.
“All I remember was thinking, ‘you need to put pressure on that spot, you need to stop that blood from flowing."
Dressel stuck her hand in the wound and found where the bleeding was coming from and held that spot tightly for about 30 minutes waiting for veterinarians to arrive, her hands, clamming up in the cold.
Knowing she couldn’t let go, Dressel continued to put pressure on the wound.
“That was the longest 45 minutes of my life,” she said.
A Warman-area vet arrived first. Dressel said they were able to pinpoint the source of the bleeding to two arteries in the horse’s neck. They managed to clamp the arteries to momentarily stop the bleeding.
Dime was eventually transported to the veterinary college at the University of Saskatchewan where she underwent emergency surgery over the weekend. She might be able to return home within a week.
Dressel’s daughter Jolie, who rides Dime in barrel racing competitions and rodeos, said the night this happened still haunts her.
“It was terrifying, the scariest day of my life. My mom looked at me and said ‘this horse is going to die on us.’ I couldn’t handle that, hearing those words really scared me,” Jolie said.
“This is the horse I planned on doing everything with.”
