Cob Jockey

Warning: at the end of this post there are gory surgical site pictures with pus, blood and the insides of Aeres' head visible. I'll give you an opt-out point in the post if you don't want to see that.

On Friday March 5th, I drove up to Purdue in my husband's Kia Stinger, because I was still (am still!!!!) without a truck, and met Lisa there to pick Aeres up and bring her home. I had to be there to learn how to care for her wound, and Lisa offered to chauffeur her home for me.

Aeres probably thinks she lives here now

I was given extremely strict discharge instructions. Once a day, I was to thoroughly clean the open wound so that it healed from the inside out and not the outside in. I was to take a gloved hand and run it around the inside of the wound ("don't be surprised when your fingers disappear into it, it's pretty deep") and to take two syringes of saline and shoot it all up in there. Then I was to dry her chin off and apply Vaseline so the pus and saline didn't irritate her skin. I was also to give her an IM shot of Exceed every four days starting on Monday the 7th.

Okay, I got this, finally putting that Equine Studies degree to good use.

Driving home was uneventful, and she was alert and happy with a bright expression as her feet hit the driveway, practically dragging Lisa into what she knew was her stall.

I took some pictures for Alice, on request. First of her condition, which she has lost so much of, although it will definitely come back once she is capable of eating enough to sustain herself. She looks like a two year old right now though.

Next I took some wound pics, which are at the bottom of this post with a buffer before and after so you can skip them and still comment without seeing them. 

(One rather ironic sidenote to all this: Alice is an oral surgeon, so she has an above average interest in (and stomach for) gory post-surgery photos, haha.)

Aeres settled in well and got right to awkwardly eating her chopped hay the same way she was pre-surgery. They said this was expected, and she was slowly getting better at eating and drinking, but she wasn't 100% normal yet. We did her first wound flush and Vaseline, and then went back to my house for tacos, feeling guardedly celebratory.

When I brought Lisa back to her rig at the barn a couple hours later so she could go home, we checked on Aeres. Lisa was first into the barn, and my heart dropped when she said "She's laying down."Not that she's not allowed to lay down, but any unusual symptom is gut wrenching after all that we've been through.

But then she tried to roll. And then she looked back at her flanks. Next she strained to pee. And I saw that dull look in her eyes and the slight wrinkles over her nostrils that I know as signs of pain in her by this point. And this was within a couple of hours after she had just gotten bute, so she really should've been feeling okay.

Trying to pee - this is not normal

I called Purdue's emergency line and the on-call vet listened to her symptoms and said "She needs to see a vet tonight, whether you use your vet or bring her back here." With the exception of the weird peeing, all of these symptoms were exactly the same as that Thursday night in February when this all began, so I knew although it looked like colic, it might not be, and if it wasn't colic (and maybe even if it was) she needed to be back in a veterinary hospital. Barn aisle-level care would be wasting precious time.

So four hours after she got home, Aeres got hustled back on Lisa's trailer for another two hour ride back to Purdue, where they arrived at 10pm Eastern on Friday night. She presented with a fever of 102, a mild lack of coordination, an irregular heartbeat, a blood clot at the original IV site, and "swishy" gut sounds.

...to be continued (but the gory surgical site pictures are below)

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