Cob Jockey

On Saturday evening, I again hitched a ride to the barn from a barnmate. It was quickly obvious Aeres had relapsed - more foaming at the mouth and picking at her feed, but this time her entire muzzle was swollen, and there were large swellings under her jaw right above her chin. So the swellings were not where I'd expect to see them if this was strangles, which would affect the lymph nodes closer to the throatlatch.

Saturday morning, muzzle wasn't really swollen yet

She had been perfectly fine that morning, so I surmised that one of two things had happened: either this was caused by a plant she wouldn't normally eat that she was eating in turnout due to the snow, or the steroid from the night before had made her temporarily feel that much better, and when that wore off, she relapsed. 

The vet warned me it would be 90 minutes before he got out there because he was already at an emergency, so I used my nervous energy to walk her snowy field looking for signs that she'd eaten a plant at the edge of the field out of boredom or something. Nothing. 

Took pictures of all of the plants she has access to over the fence just in case

I'm not proud of the amount of horsey WebMD'ing I did during this particular wait for the vet. The vet honestly and apologetically admitted he was stumped at this point, and so was I. So many things lined up symptomatically except for a single symptom: colic, trauma, strangles, vesicular stomatitis, botulism, even rabies. 

This of course had me nervous that it was something transmissible, despite the fact that none of the other horses had symptoms, everyone eats the same diet, and no one had shipped in or out in nearly two months, since Connor came home. The vet was confident it wasn't infectious, but also didn't know what it was so his confidence wasn't exactly comforting.

Checking for the coronary band lesions that would indicate VS and finding none

(Mildly Related Public Service Announcement: During my incessant Googling I learned that early symptoms of rabies in horses looks a whole lot like colic, and if you come into contact with that horse's saliva while treating it for "colic", you have to get the extremely painful series of rabies vaccines or you die. So if your horse is not vaccinated for rabies, at least have that in the back of your mind any time your horse is sick.)

When the vet arrived, he noted that she still had no fever, and her salivary glands (near the chin) were the fullest he'd ever seen on a horse. He'd seen swollen salivary glands twice in his career, but both were on seniors, and like me, was perplexed that there was no lymph node involvement.

He wondered if maybe a calcification had blocked her salivary ducts, so we took a series of X-Rays, which showed nothing.

Getting increasingly tucked up on Saturday morning, but still passing the tent test

He tried to insert a catheter into the salivary glands, but they were too swollen for even that. He spent multiple hours out there with me, apologizing profusely for being so stumped by this. In the end, he hit her with another round of steroids and for the first time, some antibiotics (literally put a needle in her neck and emptied syringe after syringe into her) and left me with two syringes of Dex to give orally the next day. 

At 9:30pm I finally went home, in a vehicle borrowed from yet another barnmate so that no one had to wait that whole time with me (except Meatloaf - best wingman). Barn family really came in clutch for me through all this.

The next morning (Sunday the 21st) she was again foaming at the mouth and just generally blah, so he had me give her Dex and that immediately perked her up. She ate an entire tub of chopped hay which was great because she hadn't had a full meal in over 72 hours at that point and I was very concerned about both starvation and colic. Her poops were small and infrequent due to how little she was eating, but she was peeing normally, probably in part due to the steroids.

It was Sunday evening that I noticed something weird about her drinking. During this whole thing up to this point, she had been drinking a lot. I watched her do it, and watched the muscles of her throat "swallow" each time. But on Sunday I noticed she was backwashing into her auto-waterer via her mouth (which unfortunately is not one of the models that has a counter on it), so I gave her a bucket and observed her drink out of that now that it was finally above freezing.

Horrified, I realized after 30 seconds of "drinking", the bucket had barely gone down at all, and I realized she had been trying and trying to drink without getting hardly anything into her body at least since Saturday morning - getting just enough to keep her alive and from colicking for real, apparently.

Frustrated "drinking"

It was at this point that the vet said he was referring her to Centaur (Purdue University's state of the art satellite equine clinic located 2 miles from my old barn) first thing the next morning, Monday. Monday would also be the first time in weeks I had even a prayer of getting the truck and trailer safely down our very steep snow covered driveway.

...to be continued