Less-good horse updates
Feb. 6th, 2019 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickPatapsco responded well to the antibiotics. Sinus-type infection improved rapidly, breathing cleared up.
Yesterday she didn't come up for chow in the AM. Sometimes she doesn't, particularly if it's nice out as it was yesterday. (She is fed All The Things and not terribly hungry, ever.) So Trys wasn't too worried. She had to leave for work, but checked in again that evening when she got back from work. (The baby horse is at Trysta's house because the fencing is better and there is not a herd of big horses to beat up on her over there. It's a safer environment for a baby horse than the big field where Bird lives. Since the baby horse is at Trysta's house, she's point man for looking in on her, as I am point man for looking in on Tinnie (Trysta's horse) and Bird and The Ladies.)
Yesterday evening, both of Patapsco's eyes were swollen clear shut and she could not see b/c swollen shut eyes. (People who have been along for the whole ride recall that "eye hugely swollen shut" was what happened to left eye before it went allaway blind. If you are just joining us now, you can read the summary of Baby Horse Woes here which mentions The Eyeball Thing in passing en route to the Kidney Failure Extravaganza and The Week Of IV OxyTet.)
Trys had the vet come out today to suggest a course of action on the swollen-shut eyeballs. Vet suggested to do the Week of IV OxyTet thing again, which I do not expect to be very useful, but that's the Vet Plan so we will Do The Vet Plan. We already have the OxyTet and Trys is a vet tech so she does her own IV'ing and we don't have to pay the vet for that part. (I would be more gung-ho on the Vet Plan if I thought it would work. I do not think it is going to work because at nearly-fifty, I've heard the sibilant lies of Hope often enough to know that all that fucking cunt offers is more and better pain.)
I strongly suspect that this is an immune response thing wherein rogue t-cells hungering for lepto or whatever are amped up to fight SOMETHING and head off to attack the eyeballs in lieu of a better plan. If that is indeed what is going on here, IV antibiotics will not help.
Hope sez Maybe it's not that. Shaddup, bitch.
Last time baby horse had swelling in nose, it moved to the side of her face and her eyeball and then boxed the shit out of her kidneys for good measure. And, $1300.00 later, I had a permanently-wheezy baby horse who was blind in one eye and I was damn glad to have her.
So maybe it's not lepto. Maybe it's just that every time this horse gets sick her eyeballs swell shut for three days and then when they open up they are blind. Magically. I don't really give a shit what it is, if the babby horse is blind when the swelling goes down, we're going to kill her.
There are some statistics on what lepto does to eyeballs (when lepto goes for the eyes, it's called Equine Recurrent Uveitis, or ERU) and the nicest summary I've seen of the expectable outcomes is in this educational talk for vets which I have queue'd up for you to the useful part of the talk.
The odds are not great for ERU... about half of the horses with it go blind in one or more eyes. But fifty-fifty is better than none, so we didn't shoot her when we hit the first eyeball down.
Also it's not a given that if you lose one eyeball to ERU you will lose the other eyeball to ERU. Sometimes, for reasons nobody really understands, the ERU eats one eyeball and leaves the other alone for years and years. Sometimes, the lifetime of the horse. You just never know until it happens.
I just... it's happening. I am really kind of wrecked about this.
Trys wants to be totally sure that Patapsco is all the way blind before we put her down. Since she will be second-guessing herself forever if I don't let her Be Sure, we're going to drag this out a while longer. Last time we went from Swollen Eyeball (Oct. 15th) to Blind in Left Eye (Oct. 30th) but in between we were doing Kidney Failure and not really paying any attention to the eyeball issue. This time, hopefully, we can skip Kidney Failure because Jesus Fuck that was not any fun at all. If we get to lethargic and dull and not eating anything, we're going to skip directly to Putting Her Down because I am not playing Kidney Failure twice. No, no I am not.
Yesterday she didn't come up for chow in the AM. Sometimes she doesn't, particularly if it's nice out as it was yesterday. (She is fed All The Things and not terribly hungry, ever.) So Trys wasn't too worried. She had to leave for work, but checked in again that evening when she got back from work. (The baby horse is at Trysta's house because the fencing is better and there is not a herd of big horses to beat up on her over there. It's a safer environment for a baby horse than the big field where Bird lives. Since the baby horse is at Trysta's house, she's point man for looking in on her, as I am point man for looking in on Tinnie (Trysta's horse) and Bird and The Ladies.)
Yesterday evening, both of Patapsco's eyes were swollen clear shut and she could not see b/c swollen shut eyes. (People who have been along for the whole ride recall that "eye hugely swollen shut" was what happened to left eye before it went allaway blind. If you are just joining us now, you can read the summary of Baby Horse Woes here which mentions The Eyeball Thing in passing en route to the Kidney Failure Extravaganza and The Week Of IV OxyTet.)
Trys had the vet come out today to suggest a course of action on the swollen-shut eyeballs. Vet suggested to do the Week of IV OxyTet thing again, which I do not expect to be very useful, but that's the Vet Plan so we will Do The Vet Plan. We already have the OxyTet and Trys is a vet tech so she does her own IV'ing and we don't have to pay the vet for that part. (I would be more gung-ho on the Vet Plan if I thought it would work. I do not think it is going to work because at nearly-fifty, I've heard the sibilant lies of Hope often enough to know that all that fucking cunt offers is more and better pain.)
I strongly suspect that this is an immune response thing wherein rogue t-cells hungering for lepto or whatever are amped up to fight SOMETHING and head off to attack the eyeballs in lieu of a better plan. If that is indeed what is going on here, IV antibiotics will not help.
Hope sez Maybe it's not that. Shaddup, bitch.
Last time baby horse had swelling in nose, it moved to the side of her face and her eyeball and then boxed the shit out of her kidneys for good measure. And, $1300.00 later, I had a permanently-wheezy baby horse who was blind in one eye and I was damn glad to have her.
So maybe it's not lepto. Maybe it's just that every time this horse gets sick her eyeballs swell shut for three days and then when they open up they are blind. Magically. I don't really give a shit what it is, if the babby horse is blind when the swelling goes down, we're going to kill her.
There are some statistics on what lepto does to eyeballs (when lepto goes for the eyes, it's called Equine Recurrent Uveitis, or ERU) and the nicest summary I've seen of the expectable outcomes is in this educational talk for vets which I have queue'd up for you to the useful part of the talk.
The odds are not great for ERU... about half of the horses with it go blind in one or more eyes. But fifty-fifty is better than none, so we didn't shoot her when we hit the first eyeball down.
Also it's not a given that if you lose one eyeball to ERU you will lose the other eyeball to ERU. Sometimes, for reasons nobody really understands, the ERU eats one eyeball and leaves the other alone for years and years. Sometimes, the lifetime of the horse. You just never know until it happens.
I just... it's happening. I am really kind of wrecked about this.
Trys wants to be totally sure that Patapsco is all the way blind before we put her down. Since she will be second-guessing herself forever if I don't let her Be Sure, we're going to drag this out a while longer. Last time we went from Swollen Eyeball (Oct. 15th) to Blind in Left Eye (Oct. 30th) but in between we were doing Kidney Failure and not really paying any attention to the eyeball issue. This time, hopefully, we can skip Kidney Failure because Jesus Fuck that was not any fun at all. If we get to lethargic and dull and not eating anything, we're going to skip directly to Putting Her Down because I am not playing Kidney Failure twice. No, no I am not.
