WESTERLY -- D'Victor spent his first summer at the 100-acre farm on Haversham Road grazing and galloping through the fields with his four stablemates. Over Labor Day weekend, all that changed.
Jon and Annette Knight found their 1,000-pound Hanoverian stallion lying flat on his side in the middle of his stall. When Annette helped him up, D'Victor staggered around "as if he had been drinking 20 bottles of wine," Annette recalls.
He had no muscle control, Jon says.
Annette called Dr. Stephen Morrone, a North Stonington, Conn., veterinarian, who they say diagnosed D'Victor with West Nile virus.
Morrone drew blood and gave D'Victor several antibiotics and an experimental antibody serum. He also vaccinated the four other horses on the Knights' farm.
Worried about D'Victor, Annette moved into the barn. She hooked up her TV and created a bed of hay. Annette and Jon also set up a patio table in the barn so they could entertain visitors and still keep watch over D'Victor.
At night, they iced D'Victor's head to reduce the swelling and fed him vitamin supplements. D'Victor started regaining some of his strength.
Two days after being vaccinated, one of the Knights' other horses, Rodney, began experiencing similar symptoms. Rodney and D'Victor were born in Germany together and were "best pals," Annette says.
Annette gave Rodney, also a Hanoverian, the medications the veterinarian had prescribed for D'Victor. Nothing helped.
"Rodney lacked strength to get up, unlike D'Victor in the first few days," Jon says. They would pull him up and then he'd slump back to the ground.
To keep his muscles from deteriorating, Annette and Jon rolled Rodney over every two or three hours. He stopped eating and drinking, and fell into a coma.
About a week after D'Victor got sick and a few days after Rodney's symptoms surfaced, tests from the National Veterinary Science Lab came back showing that both horses had Eastern equine encephalitis.
Rodney died a few days later; D'Victor's recovery faded.
"A day after Rodney was gone, D'Victor relapsed. He was grieving. His buddy had died," Jon says.
He would lie on the ground and thrash around. Jon lined D'Victor's stall with straw bales to protect his head.
For the next three days, Annette and Jon sat with D'Victor around the clock, rolling him over and feeding him herbal treatments. They also fed D'Victor "snowballs" of frozen wet grass to make sure he got nutrients and stayed hydrated, Jon says.
EEE IS AN almost-always fatal neurological disease transmitted by mosquitoes. Humans, horses and large birds are susceptible to EEE. The disease causes swelling of the brain and often leads to coma or death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although both EEE and West Nile are transmitted by mosquitoes, EEE is more rare and more deadly.
At least six horses were diagnosed with EEE this past summer in Rhode Island; five died.
D'Victor may be the only horse in the state to have survived EEE in the last 10 or 15 years, according to Dr. Christopher Hannafin, the state public health veterinarian.
"The incident of survival is severely low because the animals suffer serious nerve damage," Hannafin explains.
(A quarterhorse in Lincoln became infected with a neurological disease last month; officials are awaiting final test results to determine whether the horse has EEE, West Nile or both, says Dr. Hollie Stillwell of New England Horse Care Center. Whatever the eventual diagnosis, the horse is recovering and will probably survive.)
AS ANNETTE and Jon Knight struggled to save D'Victor, they were determined to find a way to stand him up. They feared that D'Victor's muscles would deteriorate and that he might die if they couldn't get him upright.
Horses can crush themselves if they lie on the ground for an extended period of time, Hannafin says.
The Knights set out to find some sort of sling to raise D'Victor up and keep him there.
Annette got in touch with the Holistic Horse Health center in Jacksonville, Fla. The center, which is owned by Raymond Taglione, recommended a horse ambulance -- a hoist and harness.
Taglione, who is a native of Johnston and still has relatives in Rhode Island, created the horse ambulance as a way to allow animals to stand up and move their limbs, even when not able to walk.
". . . We can reverse the disease and keep the muscle toned until they can move on their own," he says.
Taglione is a licensed massage therapist, hoof specialist, and a certified equine dentist. He has a patent pending on the horse ambulance.
He agreed to ship a sling to the Knights in Westerly as quickly as possible. It took eight men -- Jon and seven of his construction coworkers -- to lift D'Victor into the sling and on to the horse ambulance.
Jon first started walking D'Victor on a flat road, pulling the horse ambulance with the tractor, in mid-September. Then he moved on to fields. Now D'Victor walks three times a day for 45 minutes at a time, up hills and over branches that Annette sets up as part of an obstacle course.
After using the horse ambulance for about a month, D'Victor's front legs grew stronger. D'Victor's back legs, which were filled with fluid, were still weak. So Jon added another exercise to the regimen. Along with the three tractor-pulled walks each day, Jon pushes D'Victor's ambulance back and forth with his hands to make him practice walking backward.
"His balance is still not there, but it's improving," Jon says.
D'Victor is still taking several homeopathic and herbal remedies. He also receives acupuncture and weekly massages. Annette, who has a master's degree in natural health, uses magnets on his legs daily to increase his circulation.
Although D'Victor survived EEE and was not vaccinated, Hannafin still recommends vaccinating horses. The five Rhode Island horses that died of EEE this year were not vaccinated.
"Besides the vaccination, there is nothing else proven to prevent EEE -- unless you can guarantee your horse never comes in contact with mosquitoes," Hannafin says.
Sometime this week, the Knights plan to test D'Victor's strength by taking him out of the sling to see whether he can walk unassisted.
"We kept telling him, 'D'Victor, you have to have victory in this,' " Annette says. "This apparatus [the horse ambulance] allowed all this progress to occur."
The Knights rented the horse ambulance from the holistic health center in Florida and will keep it on their farm after D'Victor's rehabilitation. They believe it is the only one now in New England.
"We'll keep it here so anyone else in the area can use it for sick animals," Annette says.
Although he was weak, D'Victor never showed signs of pain, Annette says. "I think he understands we're helping him. He has a wonderful temperament," she adds.
In just a few more weeks, D'Victor will be able to return to the field "to play and nuzzle" with the other horses as he did in the summer, Annette says.
Annette is still sleeping in the stable. "It's as soft as the bed I have at home, and if there's a lump, I just change the bale," she says.
That's how she is able to see D'Victor dream of being out of the sling, she says. At night, while he is sleeping, she sees him moving his mouth and kicking his legs as though he's galloping.
Annette is so optimistic about D'Victor's recovery that she is making plans to breed him soon. She has taped photos of female horses to the wall of the stall to motivate him.
