Serious setback puts Barbaro back in sling

Instead of preparing for an imminent departure for a horse farm in Kentucky, Barbaro is back spending hours a day in a sling after his recovery from life-threatening laminitis in his left hind foot took a turn for the worse.

The Kentucky Derby winner, who has been at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center for 71/2 months, had "a significant setback," hospital officials announced yesterday, forcing surgeon Dean Richardson to remove more damaged tissue from the foot.

"He became acutely more uncomfortable on his left hind foot," a statement from the Kennett Square facility said. "The foot cast was removed, and some new separation of the medial (inside) portion of his hoof was found. This required some additional debridement (removal of the damaged tissue) last night."

Barbaro remained in stable condition.

The setback came one week after a new cast was put on the left hind foot. The cast, with a horseshoe glued to the outside to help correct the alignment of the coffin bone, had been an expected part of the treatment, Richardson said in an interview Monday.

Scott Morrison, the equine podiatry specialist at the Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Ky., who put on the cast, told the Louisville Courier-Journal yesterday that the tissue in the foot was not strong enough to support Barbaro, which caused the separation.

"It's all part of that same story," Morrison told the Courier-Journal. "This is all part of that rehabilitation of the foot. The horse's foot had a grim prognosis in July, and I wouldn't say that's changed much yet."

Laminitis had been a highly feared complication since Barbaro suffered "catastrophic" fractures in his right hind foot in the May 20 Preakness Stakes, an injury that Richardson repaired in surgery the next day. The disease, involving inflammation and structural damage to the tissue that bonds the bone to the inner wall of the hoof, commonly occurs when an injured horse is forced to put weight on a healthy foot. It has killed many horses, including Secretariat.

Soon after visiting Barbaro in his stall in the intensive-care unit yesterday morning, co-owner Gretchen Jackson said in an interview in the New Bolton lobby that the horse did not have a fever and had eaten the grass she brought from the Jacksons' farm in West Grove. But she couldn't accurately assess his overall comfort, she said, because he was lightly sedated.

When she saw Barbaro the day before, Jackson said, she knew he was not comfortable as he had been in recent weeks.

"He just was not using his foot as much," she said.

She reported later yesterday that her husband, Roy, had visited Barbaro in the afternoon and that the horse had seemed brighter.

"We all know most horses don't get this far," she said. "The bottom line with Barbaro is the fractured leg is the one that would have been the end of most horses. He won't be getting to the big green field any time soon, but I don't think this is insurmountable."

Richardson had continually warned of the potential for a setback since the laminitis cropped up in July, Jackson noted.

"This is what we were being told the whole time," she said.

Before his injury at the Preakness, Barbaro was an unbeaten racehorse. He and Smarty Jones were the only undefeated Kentucky Derby winners since Seattle Slew in 1977. Barbaro's 61/2-length victory in the Derby was the greatest in six decades.

When the laminitis was diagnosed, causing Richardson to remove 80 percent of Barbaro's left rear hoof, he said, "As long as the horse is not suffering, we're going to continue to try" to save him. He added that the laminitis was "basically as bad as laminitis gets."

In the interview Monday, the surgeon used the same phrase he had used since July: "Not out of the woods yet." Richardson made it clear that the laminitis still could be Barbaro's downfall.

"Part of it has grown almost to the bottom, pretty much," Richardson said Monday. "The lateral part, the outside part of the hoof wall, is almost all the way to the bottom. But the inside part of the hoof has probably a tenth of that. It's really slow. It's very disparate between the different parts of the foot, and that's going to be a real problem for us."

"For a foot to rehabilitate," Morrison said, "it's got to grow hoof wall around all regions of the foot. Not just half. The fact that he's growing half a foot doesn't mean he's halfway there. You have to show signs of true growth everywhere."

Morrison said a lot of secondary complications could still occur.

"And this is one of the complications here, but hopefully just one of the bumps in the road," he said. "Hopefully, we can find a way to get over it and go on and give him more time, and hopefully he'll grow that wall that he needs to do."