Lost in the Fog Has Cancer and Awaits Risky Operation
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By BILL FINLEY
Published: August 17, 2006
Lost in the Fog, a sprinter whose blazing speed has carried him to 10 stakes victories, has been found to have a rare and potentially fatal case of lymphoma.
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He was taken to a veterinary clinic at the University of California-Davis this week after developing what appeared to be a routine case of colic. While he was there, doctors performed a sonogram that revealed a cantaloupe-size cancerous mass in his spleen, his trainer, Greg Gilchrist, said. The horse’s racing career is over, Gilchrist said, and the focus has shifted to saving his life.
“This will not be unlike the situation with Barbaro,” Gilchrist said, adding that the owner Harry Aleo was prepared to spare no expense in an effort to save Lost in the Fog, a 4-year-old colt who won a 2005 Eclipse Award. “We have always put the horse first, and nothing will change,” Gilchrist said. “We will just do the best we can for him.”
Gilchrist said that if the cancer went untreated, Lost in the Fog would survive for no more than a year.
“We could go with radiation and chemotherapy, but I don’t think that will happen,” Gilchrist said. “We will probably choose to remove his spleen and hope that the cancer has not metastasized and spread.”
Few surgeons have performed this type of surgery, Gilchrist said. “The tricky thing is that he is 50-50 to make it through the operation,” he said. Further tests will be done tomorrow to see if the cancer has spread beyond the spleen. If it has, no surgery will be performed, he said.
If Lost in the Fog recovers, he could go on to a career as a sire.
After winning his first 10 races, including the Grade I King’s Bishop at Saratoga, Lost in the Fog had his lone defeat in 2005 in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint.
He was not the same horse this year, losing two of three starts, including a ninth-place finish in his last race, the Smile Sprint Handicap at Calder on July 15.
“Something like this is very rare,” the New Jersey-based veterinarian Dr. Allan Wise said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case of lymphoma in a horse that age. Usually, it would involve an older horse, like an old broodmare. I never heard of it in a fairly young, athletic horse. There are some theories that a horse can get this when something goes wrong with the immune system, but we don’t know what or why. That’s why it is usually the very old that get this; their immune systems are too old.”
Gilchrist says he thinks the lymphoma was at least partly responsible for Lost in the Fog’s poor form this year.
“It could have been there for a year and it’s definitely been there for the last six months,” Gilchrist said. “It shows you that this horse has the heart of a lion. It certainly could explain why he had some subpar performances.”
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