Sunday, May 21, 2006

Waffles II

Today I purchased waffles. All is right with the world. Maybe not all. Much is right with the world.

On another note, the Preakness was yesterday. I suppose this probably means little to most people, but it's usually exciting for me. This year's version was pretty darn scary, though. Last year's was scary, too. Last year Afleet Alex put on a little circus show. This year Barbaro, who I am quite convinced would have finally won the Triple Crown after 28 years of no Triple Crown winners, busted the hell out of his leg. It looked gross. TV kept showing it. Apparently he had three broken bones in the bottom half of this one leg (one of the bones was pretty much shattered) and had dislocated his ankle. He had 7 hours of surgery today, has 23 screws in his leg, and a whole lot of not moving to look forward to for the next couple of months, but he survived. They didn't have to put him down. Granted, he's certainly not out of the woods yet. Now they're worried about infection and something awful called laminitis, that leads to foundering, which is really quite nasty, but he's got a lot of people giving him lots of medicine so hopefully that doesn't happen. Apparently horses with that severe of a fracture are generally euthanized on the track right then and there, but since Barbaro is worth millions of dollars they actually bothered to attempt to save his life. The doctor that did the surgery said he'd never worked on so many injuries on one horse at the same time. It seems he did a good job, though.

In the '70's there was a horse named Ruffian who was all kinds of awesome and she beat up on all the other fillies she raced. Her owners put her in a match race with Foolish Pleasure, winner of the Kentucky Derby and other things I'm sure, and she shattered her front leg then kept trying to run on it. They tried to operate on her leg to save her, and actually managed to get the surgery done, but when she woke up she freaked out, kicked everything, destroyed everything the doctors had done in surgery and caused even more damage. She had to be put down. ESPN is making a TV movie about her. She was something awesome, but that's not going to be a fun movie to watch.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I heard about that. A friend here was watching yesterday and told me about it, made me think of you. I guess Barbaro had an early jump-start too. It's a shame, sounded like Barbaro was itchin to race.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, yay for the acquisition of waffles and righting all that's wrong in the world.

Buttercup said...

Yeah, Barbaro thought he'd get a head start on everybody else. I want to say luckily they caught him real quick and got him back in the gate, but maybe had they not caught him he would have just been scratched from the race and he wouldn't have blown up his leg. But that is in the past. Now, waffles.