Cob Jockey

You're now entering the stretch of the story with very few photos, since I'm not allowed to accompany her into any of the veterinary hospitals (thanks, COVID), so you're going to get some unrelated Meatloaf pictures.

On Tuesday morning (February 23rd) at 8:55am, I got a call from the vet. Aeres had finally spiked a real fever (of 103) for the first time throughout this whole thing. After going over the risks of putting a horse under with me for what felt like the millionth time (coming out of anesthesia is extremely dangerous for horses and they make SURE you're crystal clear on that before they start anything) she hung up to go put her under.

A while later, she called and said the CT scan didn't show a foreign body, which was what we all had been hoping for. That would have been the simplest answer. But it did show a massive abscess under her tongue, which they wanted my permission to drain while she was still under. 

Meatloaf has developed a strong preference for the bucket sets in my husband's Kia Stinger GT while my truck is STILL in the shop!!

Of course I gave it, and when she called with another update a couple of hours later, she told me Aeres had come out of it fine, and had "briefly thought about going up" while coming out of anesthesia before reconsidering her poor life choices and putting all four feet back on the ground, where they stayed the rest of the time.

While she was under, they made a sizable incision between the branches of the mandible to drain an 8-10" long abscess that ran most of the length of her face and also involved the tongue. They sent off a sample for a culture to see what kind of bacteria was contained in the abscess, which almost a week later came back unfortunately negative - whatever antibiotic my vet gave Saturday night had killed the bacteria off before they cultured it on Tuesday. The negative culture didn't change much, besides the fact that we had to continue to treat her with a broad spectrum antibiotic rather than a targeted one. 

I couldn't take her to the barn for over a week, and when I finally got her out there she ran so hard, she slept from 6pm to 8am the next morning.

Her recovery was pretty straightforward until 48 hours post surgery, when I got a call that they had had to cut 2-3" of her tongue off that day due to necrosis. The pressure of the infection, which they think started in the tongue and spread outward from there, had caused the tissue of the tongue to start dying from the tip in. 

This came completely out of the blue for me, and I had tons of questions for the vet, who very conveniently had owned and competed a 3'6 eq horse that had almost his entire tongue removed so she was able to talk me through both Aeres' medical prognosis (good) and her riding horse prognosis (also good). 

Apparently horses don't need their tongues for much, and you can remove almost all of it without hugely impacting their life. ("But if she was a cow, we'd have a real problem" - vet) At the amount they took off, it might make it easier for her to get her tongue over the bit (which she thankfully has never done before so there's no pre-existing habit to worry about. If this was Connor though...lol. He'd be living that hackamore life forever), but that's it, the vet said her prognosis for a full return to work as a Dressage horse or eventer was great.

After the first tongue amputation, they had to take another centimeter off on Saturday (the 10th day after this all started and her 6th day at Purdue if anyone is counting), but that was the last of it, and she had no further complications. Six days later, on Friday March 5th, we got to take her home...temporarily.

...to be continued