05/22/2026
Here is my explanation of what happened to Huckleberry. Having time to process and put the pieces together of his life, what the vets told me and develop an understanding. This isn't official, but the closest I can get to a medical diagnosis maybe this will help another horse and owner.
Also, you deserve to know what happened to Huckleberry; as I understand. But we have to go back to the beginning...
Huckleberry came into this world small. Tiny. The kind of tiny that made me ask the vet the morning after he was born if something was wrong. I was told he would grow into himself. He never did. He stayed small, stayed compact, had the muscle of both his parents but never the frame to match. Jeremy and I both clocked it. Neither of us ever said it out loud. Because we loved him so speaking it felt like disregarding the blessing he was in our life.
Huckleberry was a double cryptorchid. Both testicles never descended. A congenital deformity, a genetic trait, written into his blueprint before he was ever born. He started cribbing around a year old. I thought it was pain from the undescended testicle. I thought a lot of things that made sense at the time. What I know now is that his brain was built differently from birth. His nervous system was wired to need what cribbing gave him. He wasn't acting out. He was never acting out. He was coping the only way his body knew how, self medicating.
After Huck's gelding surgery at around a year old, his reactivity increased. I chalked it up to the surgery, to young c**t hormones, to the natural craziness of a young horse finding himself. But what I think is that the surgery was a significant immune stressor, likely the first major trigger that caused his congenital immune dysregulation to activate more forcefully. His system was already wired differently. The surgery turned up the volume on everything thus I had myself a young cribber.
I have spent my life learning to read horses. Not just work with them. Read them. Feel what they are giving me, listen to what they can't say out loud, meet them in the space where trust exists. That conversation that happens without words is what drew me to horses in the first place.
Working with young horses and rescue horses is my passion. I absolutely LOVE bringing a horse along, creating the connection, feeling the moment they decide to trust you. I have worked with horses that most people had already given up on. Rescue horses that were shut down, damaged, convinced the world was not safe. I found a way in. I have always found a way in. Reading what the horse gives me, adjusting, trying something different, never forcing, always listening.
So when Huckleberry started showing me things I had never seen before, I did what I always do. I didn't question I just kept trying.
Berry was so smart and sweet. He would pick something up in three tries and have it down. But his reactivity was unlike anything I had felt in a young horse. His responses to simple asks were sometimes out of the blue explosive and didn't make sense to what I was asking. I tried different methods. I adjusted my approach. I searched and paid attention to every signal he gave me. He actually kicked out one day and tore my MCL. In that moment something in me said Just Wait. Give him more time.
So I went softer. I stripped it all the way back. I started working with him without a halter and lead, just walking our property together, using my arms and hands, light touch, body language, energy exchange, communication without the one tool I have always used.
I felt discouraged. I won't pretend I didn't. I kept thinking Huck just needs more time to mature. That his brain wasn't ready. There is one school of training that simply lets young horses be young horses until it's time to break. I thought if I gave him enough time and enough patience and enough of the right approach, we would eventually find our way together. I kept asking trainers and vets. They all said a similar thing. Young c**t. That's what you signed up for. Nothing to worry about.
The voice inside my head, my gut kept telling me...
JUST WAIT. Give him more time.
So I waited. I didn't pony Huckleberry on trail. I didn't take him to the round pen the way I would have with any other horse. I kept going back to that soft quiet work, walking our property together, light hands, no pressure, just presence. I kept listening to a voice that was louder than my frustration.
I think that voice saved both of us from a real dangerous situation. But in those moments I felt robbed of the experience we had foaled him for coupled with guilt that I should be doing more, be better for him. What I know now, is his body was fighting a battle deep within itself and the reactivity was the outward manifestation.
There was something else that never made sense to me.
Huckleberry had to have sedative gel every single time for the farrier. And yet I could pick his feet out myself with no problem at all. That distinction never sat right with me. He was getting better, but his reaction again didn't match with his personality.
Here's what I think, that I was picking out his feet in brief contact at natural angles with no pressure. Farrier work requires holding a horse's leg in extended fixed positions for minutes at a time, compressing specific vascular structures in the legs. If his vasculitis was already present in his lower limbs, those positions would have caused him real pain that casual handling never did. His body was telling me what was wrong. It was so subtle and easily explained as "just a young c**t."
After weeks of fighting for him, I can see that Huckleberry was born with congenital immune dysregulation. I understand what the vets were suggesting when they said maybe autoimmune and why at the end they knew.
Congenital. Meaning it was there from the first moment of his existence.
His immune system was built without one of its most critical instructions. The ability to know when to stop. My vets told me in the end, I was still searching for ways to stop it. The impossible.
In the last 24 days of his life, that dysregulation activated fully and unleashed a cascade that his small body was never built to survive.
Immune mediated vasculitis attacked the walls of his own blood vessels. Not a virus. Not an infection. Not a toxin. His own immune system turning on his own tissue. I kept saying while he was fighting for his life "It's like his body is fighting against itself." His vessel walls became inflamed and began to break down from the inside, fluid leaking into surrounding tissues. It's why he was always "my little fly magnet." And why his symptoms were only on his left side. Horses develop unilaterally; his left side was the weaker.
Immune mediated thrombocytopenia destroyed his platelets, the cells responsible for clotting. Without them his body lost its ability to stop bleeding from within. The hematomas appeared perhaps triggered by a bump or a roll because his vessel walls had been weakened to the point they could no longer hold. There was nothing left to clot the bleeds when they gave way. He did not suddenly crash overnight, which is why his presentation was so confusing. He had been fighting this longer than originally believed.
Immune mediated hemolytic anemia destroyed his red blood cells. The cells that carry oxygen to every organ, every muscle, every part of him that was still fighting. This cascade was impossible to stop and there was no way for him to heal fully. His own body was betraying him.
Through all of it his white blood cell count stayed normal. That detail sheds light. This was never something that came from outside. This was his own immune system misfiring against itself, doing what it had always been misprogrammed to do since before he was born.
There was a moment at the equine hospital that I keep coming back to.
When Huckleberry was on high dose steroids he stopped cribbing. Completely. When they began to taper the dose the third hematoma appeared and the cribbing came back at the exact same time. Steroids went back up. Cribbing stopped again.
That was not a coincidence. That was confirmation I have come to believe.
Horses who crib have more than double the endorphin binding sites in their brains compared to other horses (deep dive research). A brain difference present from birth. The steroids were quieting the same neuroinflammation that had been driving his cribbing, his reactivity, his hypersensitivity his entire life. The cribbing and the immune cascade were never two separate things. They were always the same biological blueprint expressing itself in different ways. His reactivity in training, the behavior that felt so off, the way the farrier positions caused him to get weird, the cribbing, and the vasculitis that ultimately took him. All of it had the same origin. All roads led back to... he was born with it. The conclusion the vets gave me in his final days. It just took me a while to get it.
The voice that told me JUST WAIT was not fear. It was the deepest part of my connection to horses reading a horse that I hadn't learned to fully understand yet. The soft halterless work, the light touch, the walking our property together in the quiet, that was the right thing. I couldn't name what I was sensing but I felt it. And I honored it every single time.
Skippy knew too.
She would walk up to him, press her face to the back of his belly, and make this low repeated vibration sound, her whole body moving with it. I had never seen that in all my years with horses. I wrote it off. "I have a weird Mare". What I know now is that horses have a specialized sensory organ that detects inflammatory compounds and biochemical signals completely invisible to us. She was scanning him. She was reading what was happening inside his body long before any instrument could confirm it. Interestingly, the moment he was weaned she wanted another baby immediately. I thought it was because she had loved being a mama.
She knew. She had always known. Her baby was born different.
I was the last one to figure it out.
I was blinded by how much I loved him. And I am not ashamed of that. Love does that. Love is supposed to do that. But I can see the full picture now. From the morning I asked the vet if something was wrong, to the halterless walks around our property trying to find a way in, to Skippy's face pressed against his belly, to the cribbing that stopped the moment the steroids quieted his immune system. It was always there. The blueprint was always incomplete. And there was never, not on a single day of his life, a single thing any of us could have done to rewrite it.
This is what I need his people to hear. Huckleberry was the miracle we prayed for. It's a miracle he was born. It's a miracle he didn't live his life suffering. It's a miracle he lived to two years old.
The life we gave Huckleberry is the reason he was here as long as he was.
A horse with a congenital blueprint like his does not typically get the kind of life he had. From what I have read they are often very sick and have a lot more problems. I believe the life Jeremy and I gave him provided him with more time than his biology alone allowed. You helped the end of his life be filled with love, he was at home and he was comfortable. Thank you for your prayers and support.
He was not meant to be my old lady horse. I understand that now. He was meant to come here, be amazing, teach us things we could not have learned any other way, and leave showing us what miracles look like.
He gave so much. He kept giving even as his body was failing him. That vibrance, that force, that enormous spirit living inside that small c**t.
He was the greatest gift I have ever been given.
He was born to be here for a short time.
My sweet, complicated, one-of-a-kind baby boy.
You were so loved. You still are. You always will be.
Run free, little Huckleberry
