On steroids 

A thousand pounds of cure

WHEN JOHN AND CARLA Gerding of Henry County went to Denver to see their grandchildren, a neighbor offered to care for their 25-year-old Icelandic horse named Hraunr, a derivation of the Nordic word “hraun,” meaning “lava field.” 

“When he was born he looked like a lump of lava rock,” John recalls. 

But we digress. While the Gerdings were in Denver, the neighbor called with news that the horse, which has a pulmonary condition, was having some difficulty breathing. Veterinarian Chase Turner of the Henry County Animal Clinic in nearby New Castle made a night visit to treat Hraunr with a steroid that helped relieve the symptoms. He left steroid tablets to be given the animal over several days. 

One morning after the Gerdings returned, Carla was in a “huge rush” to keep an appointment. 

“It was the typical Gerding morning,” she says. “The trash can fell over, spilling trash and coffee grounds on the floor, and the telephone rang … and I had laid the pill for the horse on the counter, and had failed to take my pills. In my rush to leave, I swiped up that little pink pill and popped it in my mouth. A steroid pill for a 1,000-pound horse! 

“Before it hit my esophagus I knew what I’d done, and I thought, ‘What an idiot!’” 

She immediately phoned the vet clinic and was told that the vet who treated her horse was in surgery, so she called Muncey Pryor, a veterinarian friend who lives near the Gerdings in the Lacie community of rural Henry County. He recently retired, but helps part-time at the clinic, and told her he thought she’d be okay, but that she might have trouble sleeping for a while. He checked on her in the hours that followed. 

“I’m not a particularly quiet person to begin with,” Carla says, “so this just exacerbated a personality problem that I have. As the day went on, I felt stranger and stranger—like my arms and legs were going to fly off in opposite directions. I slept absolutely not a wink, but I soldiered on. When you take a pill for a 1,000-pound horse, there are side effects. But after three or four days I came back down to what we call normal.” 

It wasn’t the first such incident Pryor had encountered, he assured her. He shared the story of a woman with an autoimmune disorder who accidentally gave her dog one of her pills, and took a pill that Pryor had prescribed for the dog. 

When Carla asked the outcome, Pryor said it all ended well: the dog was fine, and the woman never contracted worms. 

Pryor, who like the Gerdings is a consumer-member of Shelby Energy, says he’s kept a journal of many unusual stories over his 48 years as a country veterinarian answering calls for all kinds of animals—including a bison that got into a swimming pool! 

He’s considering publishing the collection.