Barn Life & the Equestrian Bridge

The Lawless Territory of the Checkout Counter When we are on a road trip, nutrition rules are suspended in our family. Cookies for breakfast? Sure! Chips as a main food group? Why not? It's one day in a life of healthy eating, and my kids always enjoyed the "no rules" rule of the road. This plan requires a lot of stops at mini marts along the way, and as a doc, I always notice the dangerous things that are sitting right next to the register at every checkout. Every parent k

This week our emotional support mini, Sally, ended up in the ICU at Bend Equine Medical Center after multiple wasp stings triggered a severe allergic reaction. Her face swelled shut within hours. Watching her fight through it as an emergency physician who couldn't fix it myself was humbling, and it reminded me how fast a sting can turn into an emergency, in animals and in people. Good news first. After a rocky few days, Sally is finally turning the corner. Her vitals have st

Daisy, who likes to tie up Every rider knows the feeling. Two days after a hard lesson or a tough class, your inner thighs announce themselves the moment you try to get out of bed. That soreness has a name: delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, and understanding what is actually happening in your muscles makes it a lot easier to manage. DOMS shows up after unfamiliar or intense exercise, especially the kind involving eccentric muscle contractions, meaning the muscle is le

Our show got canceled this weekend because of poor air quality, and I know a lot of you were frustrated. I was too. I just want to camp out in my horse trailer, hang out with cool people, and ride horses. The show organizers did the hard thing, which is also the right thing. Keeping our animals and our humans healthy has to be our highest priority. I want to use this as a teaching moment, because "the air is bad today" is one of those warnings people tend to shrug off. It s

This weekend's forecast for Eugene is rough for anyone showing. Friday is hitting 9 degrees. Saturday backs off slightly to 89. Sunday finally breaks toward 85. That's three days of real heat, and none of us get to dress for it. Show attire means long sleeves, long pants, and often a hat or helmet, no matter what the thermometer says. I see the effects of that every show season. Riders push through headaches, nausea, and dizziness because they think stopping to cool off means

Every horse property I have ever set foot on has one. A stock tank. An irrigation ditch. A pond for the cattle or the geese or just because it was already there when you bought the place. We walk past these things a hundred times a summer without a second thought, because our brains are trained to watch the horse, watch the footing, watch the weather rolling in over the ridge. Nobody trains us to watch the water the same way, and that is a problem, because for the smallest ki

Cough. Cough. The air outside your window right now is not the air you grew up breathing. Smoke from the current wildfires has pushed air quality into unhealthy territory across much of the region, and it is worth understanding what that smoke is actually doing to your lungs, and why the pollution problem does not stop at your front door. Wildfire smoke is a different animal than ordinary city pollution. It carries an unusually complex mix of fine and ultrafine particles,

Sweat patches, WHOOP bands, Oura Rings, and performance vests are showing up on elite World Cup athletes, and the teams deploying them have a specific goal: catch fatigue before it becomes a problem, personalize recovery, and find every possible edge. England's team has been tracking jet lag through heart rate variability. Brazil's squad wore sweat patches to dial in hydration in real time. You may even have one for your last ride, counting strides and turns and transitions.

Lulu's T post incident. We updated her tetanus shot. You can ride a 1,200-pound animal at full speed through a sliding stop. You wrap your horse's legs before your own. You tape your fingers, ice your knees, and push through things that would send most people home. The last time you got a tetanus booster, though? You probably cannot remember. Neither can most of my patients. Tetanus cases are rising. The people getting sick are almost entirely those who were never vaccinat

Horse people are meticulous. We read labels on feed, we research farriers, we debate supplements like it's a doctoral thesis. We would never buy a generic wormer and call it good. And yet, somewhere between the tack room and the trailer, a lot of us are slapping on whatever SPF was on sale at the gas station and calling it a day. That ends now. PresenceMD is officially carrying EltaMD and PCA Skin, and we are bringing their best sellers directly to the horse shows. No dermato