Good grief! I have already paid £425 for 9 days livery and physio costs and £150 hunt fees for Jazz. On top of that I now have over £700 of vets bills to pay, bringing his total to £1275.
Ace's bill is £1760, including a £72 discount and at least one scan that I was not charged for. £170 is hospital livery, £200 is four sets of bandages at £50 a time (HOW do they use that much just in bandages!!!) and most of the rest is antibiotics over and over and over again. He would have been dead without the treatment so I can't complain.
Whew. It's a darned good job I saved up all the money that I would have spent on insurance over the last ten years, isn't it? Believe it or not I am still in credit on that account in spite of losing Smartie and Jazz, and paying for Jazz's tie-back. Money-wise, insurance just does not make sense once you own more than one horse.
No-one is going to get ridden today. Radar has worked two days in a row so I didn't intend to anyway. But the weather is absolutely disgusting. It's 6 degrees outside and raining. Ace is fine after 36 hours off the antibiotics. He stiffens up if he stands still for a long time but he's fine after a few strides. If the rain backs off enough I may lunge him for a few minutes to get him moving, because they've been hiding in the barn most of the night and all day.
Meanwhile I think I'll just go and curl up in a corner and lick the wounds to my wallet :-)
C
Ouch!! I just finished paying off my vet bills from last year--regular vaccines and such added to by Toby's laminitis and hoof bruises on Chance and Tucker--and now, I have the bill for routine Spring stuff--teeth, vaccines, coggins, etc. I totally agree about the insurance.
ReplyDeleteMy friend has some kind of wellness contract with the vet that covers a lot of stuff, but paying for three horses still would be more than my average costs per year. As for the "catastrophic" coverage...I can't afford it.
Good report on Ace. Hope you get to lunge him a bit and that he is sound. You deserve a break, and so does that wallet.
I did get a moment between rain to lunge Ace for 5 minutes and he was fine. I even trotted him on a tiny circle on my sloping tarmac yard and he was pretty good there too. I'm going to let the tail end of the hurricane that you have kindly sent over the Atlantic to us pass over the next few days and then ride him gently in walk on the flat and see how we go.
ReplyDeleteI paid the vet bill so I can move on and forget it!
C