Blind Faith
Losing sight in one eye doesn’t hinder this Hanoverian’s performance. By Liz Cornell
Dressage professional Christy Scotch of Birmingham, Alabama knows all too well the common veterinary warning, “If you see an eye problem of any sort, take it seriously.” Despite her efforts to heed that advice when she noticed eye trouble in her black Hanoverian mare’s left eye, Darya became completely blind in that eye in less than four months.
Damenwahl and her sire is Desper- ados FRH (by De Niro), a world class stallion who competed in the 2012 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, earning team gold and the indi- vidual bronze medal under young rider Kristina Bröring-Sprehe. Desperados was Hanoverian Stal- lion of the Year in 2016 and was also ranked the top dressage horse in the Rolex/WBFSH (World Breeding Federation of Sport Horses) rankings the same year. Darya’s dam is Fiorella Queen by Fleurop (a Westfalen by Floristan I). Like many riders, Christy grew up riding western but in 2005 she became serious about dressage. For many years she rode frequently with Conrad Schumacher and has been riding with Anne Gribbons for the last two. Today Darya is nine and, despite her newfound blind- ness, Christy and Darya conquered their first Prix St.
C 48 May/June 2019
hristy imported Darya as a four-year-old from Germany. Her registered name is
Georges test at a schooling show in March, earning a 69.117%.
Mysterious Case of Uveitis It all began in the summer of 2018, when Christy first
noticed a small spot in Darya’s left eye. “I was very concerned and took a snapshot of her eye and sent it to a veterinary ophthalmologist friend of mine,” she says. Immediately, the vet diagnosed it as uveitis, a form of eye inflammation, but the cause was unknown. Was it from trauma, was it hereditary or did the mare’s recent vaccinations play a factor? “We have no idea where this came from; all we knew was that she needed treat- ment to get this under control. And, thankfully, she didn’t have any other symptoms,” she adds. Uveitis has many forms and
unfortunately, regardless of the type, there is no cure. Christy administered drugs to stop the disease from spreading but the spot soon turned into a small stripe on her eye. “We upped the treatment to a more aggressive medication but after a week, I
Darya and Christy in 2017 when she still had good vision in both eyes.
was afraid it wasn’t working. I took her to Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine, where they
recommended surgery,” she says. They first recommended Gundersen flap surgery, a procedure that involves a superficial keratectomy, which removes a piece of the cornea. The missing piece is then replaced with a graft— or Gundersen inlay flap—of conjunctiva, pink tissue surrounding the eye. The conjunctiva acts as a sponge and pulls water out of the cornea, which the damaged endothelium is supposed to do, but can’t. Whenever water comes into the cornea, the new graft sucks it out instead.
Courtesy Christy Scotch
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