Our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown, came out today to work on several of our blind horses in the medical suite at Beauty's Barn. The first patient was Hannah, whose right eye had become inflamed and painful and non-responsive to treatment. We've learned that the best thing to do in this case, when the eye is already blind, is remove it. In this first photo, Bill has sedated Hannah in the horse stock. You can see why we call her "Big Red."
In this photo, Bill is prepping the eye for surgery. Bill and his vet tech Lynn have clipped the hair around it, scrubbed it, and scrubbed it some more. The orange color is from an antiseptic called Betadine. At this point, Hannah's ready for surgery.
Surgery is just beginning here. I generally don't post photos taken after this stage because it gets quite bloody, and if you're not used to seeing this kind of thing, it can be disturbing. The operation itself takes only about 30 minutes.
This is what Hannah looked like immediately afterwards. She's starting to wake up, and soon after I took the photo she was whinnying from the horse stock for her friend Luna. It's amazing how fast horses respond to the surgery to remove a painful eye ... as serious as the operation is, they actually can feel better within an hour afterwards.
Following Hannah's surgery, we took X-rays of a swollen knee on blind Laddie. Then Bill did a dental on new arrival blind Darby, and also removed a small tumor above her left eye. We'll send that off for a biopsy to find out if it's cancerous.
Then came the last event of the day ... cleaning up blind baby Brynn. Brynn has lots of medical issues, one being an ectopic ureter. This means that the ureter, or tube, that is supposed to take urine from the kidney to the bladder is actually delivering the urine to someplace else -- in Brynn's case, her uterus. (Her other kidney and ureter are working just fine.) As a result she leaks urine constantly, and now that it's winter, it's become harder to keep her clean and dry. She'll have dried urine caked on her skin, which causes urine scalds on her rear end, around her vulva, and between her thighs.
Brynn will let Alayne and me hose her down and clean up her flanks, but she does not like us cleaning between her legs and around her vulva. The last time we tried this, she tolerated it for a bit but then let loose with a double-barreled kick that reached four feet up the wall. (Missing me, thank heavens!) So the plan today was to hose her down -- we have hot and cold running water at Beauty's Barn -- then sedate her and do a thorough "deep clean." We also trimmed her tail, which should help keep her drier.
In the photo Bill has finished cleaning her up and is applying antibiotic ointment to her skin. Lynn is holding a twitch on Brynn's nose, because even sedated this afternoon, she managed to slam me up against the wall while I was holding her when she didn't like what Bill was doing. (She may be small for a horse but she still weighs about 300 lbs, so it's kind of like having an NFL offensive lineman plow into you ... except with four legs, not two.)
To make it easier to keep her clean, we're going to move her down to Beauty's Barn so she can stay in the heated medical stall at night. This will allow us to hose down her hindquarters every evening, then put her in the warm, dry stall. Her ectopic ureter condition is potentially fixable with surgery, but it costs about $4,500 -- which we can't afford -- and we need to wait to see what happens to her neck vertebrae anyway. (See Brynn's page for more on her medical issues.)
And that was how the afternoon went ... working our way from one end of a horse all the way to the other end.
(Click on photos for larger image.)
