Cob Jockey

At 1:30am on Saturday, I woke up and rolled over to look at my phone where I saw Lisa had texted that she was driving home and to call her if I was still awake. Of course I called her, how could I sleep? She ran through what the vets did that evening and let me know about the additional symptoms that had developed, but nobody really knew what was going on yet. 

Still with colic surgery in the back of my mind, I said, "We probably need to at least start having the conversation about how much is too much to put her through," and Lisa agreed, but said that she was grateful to have seen her in person that day, and that her eyes still said she wasn't done fighting this.

Hollering at her friendos when she got home

At 7:55am on Saturday, the overnight resident called me with an update. They had run bloodwork and discovered she was extremely deficient in a particular electrolyte which could have been responsible for the irregular heartbeat and the mild lack of coordination. After putting her on fluids and that electrolyte, she was "much better" and her irregular heartbeat was becoming more and more infrequent.

They thought her stomach pain was likely caused by bad ulcers (hello, take a horse with a history of ulcers, get very little food into her for 3 weeks and treat her with antibiotics - it's like a recipe for bad ulcers). Starting Saturday they told me they were going to scope her for ulcers, but in the meantime they started her on GG and Sulcrafate anyway. By Tuesday, they still hasn't scoped her, and also she hadn't produced poop in four days, so I finally put my foot down and told the resident at Tuesday morning's call I wanted her scoped, even if they didn't think they needed to.

Happy 4th(ish) birthday, Hanko!

This ended up being the best call I've made so far, because not only did they find "severe ulcers in both the glandular and the non-glandular regions of the stomach", but they also intentionally scoped her un-fasted to see how much food was getting into her stomach (normally you fast horses prior to being scoped) and it was...totally empty. 

This is the first time I've been upset with Purdue throughout this whole thing. Obviously I cannot go see and observe her eat myself due to COVID, I can't get any further than the parking lot, so I have to trust the vets when they tell me she's "ingesting 75-80% of what we give her", as was the update on Monday the 8th. Clearly that was not the case, whether it's because she's masticating it and the food is only making it as far as her mouth (we know that's partially the case, they have to syringe her mouth out to clear the food particles once a day) or it's because it's falling out of her mouth. Either way, the food is not making it to her stomach and probably hasn't been for a while. AND they discharged a patient that was not capable of EATING on Friday! What was I supposed to do with that at home?!

First porchin' of the year with a fresh Screwdriver. Had to find a way to use up all the oranges we mostly only use for peels for garnishes!

While I was upset that the horse has basically been starving for three weeks, I was also relieved, because her other majorly worrying symptom (it's Tuesday as I write this and she hasn't pooped since Friday) is likely caused by just not having enough food in her system to make any poop. That's  upsetting to me in that I hate that she was starving, but it's also a relief that we're not dealing with a colic or a perforation or twisted guts or any number of other seriously concerning problems.

So they placed a feeding tube and she's getting an alfalfa slurry fed through that three times a day. She's tolerating the naso-gastric tube well, and the irregular heartbeat cropped back up again after ~36 hours off of fluids, so she's back on fluids and electrolytes as well. 

Hopefully it's uphill from here, although someone still has to answer the question of why she's unable to swallow.We know as of Monday the 22nd when they tested her swallowing reflex everything past the tongue was normal. So is something now wrong with the esophagus? Or is this just a result of the nerves in her tongue taking their sweet time coming back to life after a pretty traumatic event? Nobody knows yet.

And now you're caught up. At the time I started writing this, it seemed like she would come home and I would settle into multiple weeks of boring wound care with very little of interest to write about, but of course with Friday night's complications, that turned out not to be the case. So I'm going to have to throw in some non-Aeres posts too, but rest assured, I'll continue updating this series as I have new updates!