Dr. Kelsey Jurek, Dr. Rodrigo Sanchez and the whole veterinary team saved mare Lovely's life, and nine days later she gave birth to Grace in the hospital. Photo courtesy of Dr. Jurek.
August 21, 2025
Words and photos by Jens Odegaard
Izzy Olsen is an Appaloosa breeder. Her place is a gorgeous spread tucked into the tendril foothills of the Cascade Range near Lebanon, Oregon. Jack Creek meanders through the meadow, and Olsen named her operation for the waterway.
Of the many horses at Jack Creek Appaloosas, Lovely was her first mare. Over the years, Lovely had foaled twice with Olsen and five times before coming to Jack Creek. “She’s been a career brood mare,” Olsen said. “She’ll always have a special place in my heart.”
In spring 2024, Lovely was once again round in the belly with another foal.
Down in the Mud
A colicking horse is a terrible thing to see. Especially when it’s your prize mama.
“Lovely was almost due: it was about 10 days before her due date. I noticed that she was lying flat out in her paddock and thought, that’s kind of funny. She never usually lays flat out,” Olsen said. “So, I went to check on her, and she was all muddy. She'd been rolling.”
Colic is a catch-all term for abdominal pain in horses, and rolling to try to relieve it is a classic sign.
Olsen called her vet, Dr. Palsgaard from Cascadia Equine Veterinary Clinic, for a farm visit. “After an examination, she was like, ‘This is a pretty serious colic case, you should probably go to OSU.’ And so, we loaded her up, threw her in the trailer, rushed over there. By the time that we got there, she was really super painful.”
Large Animal ER
The Lois Bates Acheson Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Oregon State University’s Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine is in Corvallis, Oregon, which is about an hour drive from Olsen’s place.
It’s the only veterinary teaching hospital in Oregon, and one of only three on the West Coast — Pullman, Washington and Davis, California being the other locations.
As a teaching hospital, its faculty clinicians are board-certified veterinary specialists. One of them is Dr. Kelsey Jurek. She’s a board-certified large animal surgeon and heads up the hospital’s large animal after-hours emergency service.
Lovely arrived in the evening while Jurek was on call.
“She couldn't even stand for very long without just bucking and wanting to roll,” Olsen said.
Jurek and the team immediately put Lovely on “heavy-hitter pain meds” as Olsen described them. But the meds weren’t helping. “So, we knew that something pretty serious was going on with her right from the start,” Jurek said. “The trick with Lovely is that she was about nine days away from her due date. She was heavily in foal at that point, and so the size of the uterus precluded us from doing a lot of the normal workup that we would do – all of our imaging was a bit limited.”
Without clear imaging to show exactly what was going on, the veterinary team had to rely on experience and deductive reasoning.
Lovely was 22 years old. Her age and acute level of pain pointed to a likely culprit. “One of the first things that we think of is a strangulating small intestinal lesion involving a lipoma, where they have these benign fatty tumors that can grow stalks on them,” Jurek said. “Those stalks get wrapped around portions of the small intestine, cause really severe pain and can actually cause the intestine to lose its blood flow and become devitalized or necrotic.”
Surgery was the only option to save Lovely and her foal.
Back Against the Wall
To do the abdominal surgery, April Simons, veterinary technician specialist in anesthesia, put Lovely under anesthesia. The team — including large animal clinical fellows Dr. Julia Gaida and Dr. Rodrigo Sanchez, large animal resident Dr. Bob McCarthy and fourth-year veterinary student Chad Cooper — then hoisted Lovely onto a surgical table, where she was secured lying on her back to give access to the abdomen.
“The uterus took up quite a lot of her abdomen. It was pretty hard to work around, and it also meant that under anesthesia we had some pretty significant concerns regarding her ability to breathe or oxygenate,” Jurek said. “It's hard for horses to do that when they're on their back anyway, and then add in a hundred-pound foal, and there's not a lot of room left for the lungs. So, we already knew that that was going to be a problem going into it.”
The team didn’t want to do a C-section to deliver the foal, because a foal’s lungs don’t finish maturing until about three days before birth. So, the best option to save the foal’s life and take care of Lovely was to work around the uterus during the colic surgery.
As the clock ticked, Jurek made an incision along the bottom of Lovely’s belly and slid her hands inside the abdominal cavity. With the uterus bulging with the near-term foal, Jurek couldn’t see the intestines where she suspected the strangulation to be.
Working by feel, she went in further and further, hand over hand, loop by loop along the small intestine until she felt the distinctive fibrous tissue band choking out the gut.
“It almost feels like a scar tissue band. It's tough. It's not very elastic, it's not squishable. It's just a very tight band of tissue that, if we can kind of get our finger around it, often it means it's not associated with the intestine itself, but with the lipoma,” Jurek said. “And so very carefully is how you try and get those bands identified and isolated so you can transect them.”
Elbow deep with one hand on the band, Jurek pulled her other arm out and grabbed a meniscal knife. “It’s a small, hooked instrument that has a blade on the inside curve of the hook,” she said. Shielding it in her hand, she slid back down to the band.
Using her pointer finger, she hooked the band away from the intestine and then carefully moved the meniscal knife alongside her finger and slit the band, freeing the intestine. “It is always a very nerve-wracking part of the surgery because you're not physically laying eyes on what you're cutting,” Jurek said. “You're having to trust your feel and trust that what you've isolated is in fact the band of that lipoma.”
After making the cut in a colic surgery, Jurek would typically work each section of the intestine slowly back out through the incision in the abdominal wall to give it a visual inspection to make sure there were no nicks or other concerns.
With Lovely, this proved very difficult as the uterus blocked most of the space to work. Additionally, Jurek’s concern about the weight of the foal on Lovely’s lungs and the stress of a major surgical procedure came into play.
“We were able to get that portion of small intestine up to look at it,” Jurek said. As she and the team were working on further assessment, “Lovely had a crisis under anesthesia in which her heart rate slowed to the point where it essentially stopped, and she went into an unexpected cardiac arrest.”
Simons and McCarthy quickly responded to bring Lovely out of cardiac arrest. “They did a fabulous job,” Jurek said. “We were able to revive her heart rate using some aggressive medical treatment but determined pretty quickly that she wasn't going to survive under anesthesia much longer.”
The team decided that the best chance of keeping Lovely and her foal alive was to skip the rest of the intestinal inspection and quickly close Lovely up, get her off her back and recover her from anesthesia. “It really is a risk-versus-benefit situation and just having to make those executive decisions as best as you can,” Jurek said.
Thankfully Lovely recovered well and was put on post-operative care in a stall in the hospital. Her incision was wrapped up in a manner to keep it clean and provide support to help carry the weight of the foal and reduce pressure on the incision.
Foaling Out
With Lovely so close to foaling and still recovering from the operation, Olsen and Jurek decided to keep her in the hospital until the foal came. Board-certified large animal surgeons Dr. Mike Huber and Dr. Katja Zellmer helped oversee Lovely’s care during this time.
Nine days after surgery, Lovely gave a safe and natural birth to a healthy filly. Olsen named her Grace.
“She foaled with no complications, and Gracie was healthy. I think they came home that next day, and they've both been great since then,” said Olsen during a visit to the farm by Dr. Jurek a year after Grace’s birth. “She's an amazing mare. She's definitely a fighter.”
Olsen credits Jurek and the rest of the veterinary team with saving both lives. “(Jurek) really made a lot of executive decisions, and I'm not sure if it would've been the same outcome with anybody else. I think she just made all the right choices and saved this mare and baby, so it was really miraculous.
“When I'm 80 years old, I'll still be telling people how amazing Dr. Jurek was in saving Lovely.”
Dr. Kelsey Jurek (left) visited Izzy Olsen's (right) farm a year after saving Lovely's life to reconnect and check in on Lovely and her filly Grace.
Loping Along
Grace has grown into a rambunctious and friendly yearling filly while Lovely is enjoying a new role at Jack Creek Appaloosas. Grace was her last foal.
“She's done really well for me, and she just gets to be retired now and be the farm mascot,” Olsen said.
Olsen also has plans for Grace’s future. “I'll keep Gracie, and Gracie will be Lovely's replacement,” she said. “I'll keep her forever.”
Izzy Olsen and Gracie enjoy each other's company.
OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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