At the time I got that text message at 6:30pm on Thursday night, I was on Day 2 without a truck, snowed in at home with our only other vehicle (my husband's RWD sports car) unable to get me out of the garage, let alone up the steep and winding barn driveway. I texted a barnmate and asked if he could pick me up and take me out there, on a night that saw a low of 4F.
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| Barn driveway after Snow #1, we got another 8" on top of this a few days later that was still hanging around when all this Aeres stuff happened |
When I got out there, I honestly couldn't tell if she was choking or colicing. She had good gut sounds, but kept looking back at her flanks and laying down. She coughed up that brown paste once or twice, but didn't have any discharge coming out of her nose. I gave her banamine just in case we were dealing with a choke that had led to a colic and called the vet. Not my horse - I wasn't messing around.
The vet (my new vet, an older gentleman with decades of experience) was perplexed. He found only a very slight fever that he mused could have been the result of getting stressed over the choke. He found good looking poop during the rectal exam. He tubed her and confirmed there was no current choke bolus and no stomach reflux. He did mineral oil in case of colic, and water to get some hydration into her system.
(I also have to add that she had gotten her shots from this vet two days before, his first time meeting her, but we quickly ruled out vaccine side effects that only started two days later and weren't accompanied by any injection site swelling).
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| Not happy |
By the time he left around 9:30pm Thursday night, she was resting quietly and looking for hay, although none of us were convinced it was either a colic or a choke. For both ailments, all of the symptoms lined up except one, which was so frustrating. He gave me some specific feeding instructions and told me to text him in the morning.
The texts I sent him in the morning were not encouraging - picking at her breakfast and general malaise, but with two new symptoms: foaming at the mouth and quidding her hay. I had a different barnmate pick me up at home and run me out there (where we both did the Work From Home thing in the barn's office and tack room respectively), and from there I texted the vet with updates throughout the morning. He decided he needed to come out again and arrived around 2pm. This time, he sedated her and looked in her mouth, where we found these:
Two identical big yellow swellings on either side of her tongue, in the same spot. It was such a damn relief to find A Thing we could point to as The Problem rather than this nebulous collection of symptoms that didn't quite line up with any known illness.
The vet thought they looked like the result of trauma, and rounded the nearby teeth off just to take pressure off of them while they healed (although her teeth didn't cause this, I had her done in September when she first got here and they still looked good). She had had no fever since the very slight possibly false positive the night before, so we weren't thinking infection. He gave her a steroid injection, but no antibiotics.
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| Only the beginning of Aeres' no good very bad week |
We were all so elated by this finding and the vet's confidence that this was it, plus the fact that she felt good enough to eat relatively normally the rest of the afternoon. It really felt on Friday afternoon like we were on the right track, which was a relief especially to me. Ever since I got that choke text on Thursday evening, I had had this constant feeling of existential dread. Not my horse, not knowing what was wrong, not being free to go to the barn anytime I wanted to and feeling so helpless - helpless to help her, helpless to get myself to the barn - was gut wrenching. If I wasn't at the barn, I was sitting at home wondering if I was going to walk into a dying horse the next time I found a way to the barn, and that went on all weekend.
But on Friday afternoon, we thought we were on the right track. Even Saturday morning, when she ate chopped hay normally and went straight out and took a long drink at the trough, we thought we had it licked.
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| Connor shyly telling his lady friend he missed her |
Then Saturday night rolled around...
...to be continued
UGHHHH...
ReplyDeleteSo if I had to guess, I'd say strangles or some other strep infection. But no fever doesn't align well with that.
I suppose I have to wait for the next installment.
Also, why do these things always happen at the least convenient times?! Not that there's a convenient time, but during the worst weather with you having no vehicle is certainly far less ideal that any other time. Thank goodness for good barn friends who were able to help you out!
Yeah, and when she's already sold and waiting to leave! Horses!!
DeleteI figured you guys would play along with the guessing game along "with" me through this series. Strangles wasn't mentioned at this point, but would start to be discussed after Saturday's new symptoms.
Man what is it lately with infections presenting without a fever - I've seen it in a couple horses. :(
ReplyDeleteI don't know. Obviously more details to come on this, but four different vets very thoroughly inspected her over the course of all this before we began advanced diagnostics, and not a single one suspected an infection, aside from a half-hearted "well we're obligated to act as if it's Strangles because enough symptoms line up but we really don't think that's it". They're all excellent vets too, there were just no signs.
DeleteI’m so interested in this series.
ReplyDeleteAnnie did not present with a fever AND her bloodwork didn’t show anything concerning. However, upon scoping and doing a lung wash, they found a huge infection. Interesting how it does that sometimes.
Yeah for sure. If there's one thing I've learned from all this, it's that there ARE things even good vets can't diagnose standing in your barn aisle. As you'll see shortly, this infection was absolutely hidden from all of us for who knows how long.
DeleteCRAZY!!!
ReplyDeleteNoooooo kidding! I could use a little more 'boring' in my life right now.
DeleteStrangles would be weird unless she’s been around a new horse or someone brought it in.
ReplyDeleteYou're not wrong. Even when me and my vet started talking about strangles (the next day), it was in the context of "This looks a little like strangles, but it can't possibly be strangles". And then the vet hospital basically had to pretend it was strangles until proven otherwise in the culture.
DeleteUgh, the worst thing as a vet is to have that sense that you are missing something but not able to put your finger on it. The yellow mouth swellings seem like a red herring, I would be curious what bloodwork and a thoracic ultrasound look like. To the above comments, she could have strangles in her gutteral pouches, but that wouldn't be a first guess of mine.
ReplyDeleteAlso I went to school with your sports vet who is relocating to Florida, I was an undergrad while she was in vet school and we rode at the same barn at U of I. Small world!
I completely agree they seemed like a red herring, and it worked, we got way too fixated on that for about 18 hours.
DeleteThat's so cool! I miss her so much already :( This vet and maybe one other one are my only remaining options for shots/Coggins/keeping them alive, but I think I'm going to have to haul to Cincinnati (2 hours away) for chiro, bodywork and more advanced stuff. And even then it's not a vet I particularly like the way I liked Angie. We are rapidly approaching a large animal vet crisis in this area, and to hear this vet talk about it, it's in large part (but not entirely) due to the amount of debt new grads are coming out of school with. Can't pay the student loan bills with large animal.
That is part of the problem for sure. Especially in some areas- if you spend half your day driving you aren't going to be able to make as much money as you could working small animal and having several exam rooms full at once. Not to mention some (not all) large animal people are not willing to spend the same sort of money on their animals as small animal owners, or are more likely to try to vaccinate and treat things themselves.
DeleteThere are also a lot of new grads who leave large animal/equine after a few years because it is *SO* hard to have to work the sort of hours and on call shifts that we do. I can't imagine doing anything else, but it's hard to imagine being able to do this if I also had kids- this week for example the earliest I got home any day was 7:30pm.
I'm sure there are areas that are even more underserved by large animal vets and that's worrying!
I very much get both sides of that and do not begrudge any vet that chooses work/life balance. But I am definitely concerned about having no one to call in the middle of the night someday too. I don't have answers, but I feel for both sides.
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