Stupid Guest Tricks

My yearling horse got really sick on Friday, ended up having to have
emergency surgery this weekend. I got to watch, it was really cool, but
would have been cooler if a) it weren't my horse and b) it wasn't done
during the hours of 1am thru 3am.

Could you just please keep her in your thoughts/prayers for me? The vet
says she's still got a long way to go, the recovery is even more difficult
than the surgery. Everyone at the hospital has already fallen in love with
her, she's such a sweet girl. I'm just praying that no complications arise,
coming up with the $10,000 for if everything goes perfectly is hard
enough. We hand walked her on the grass today to try to cheer her up
since she's been acting depressed... it seemed to work, but she was
exhausted after just two minutes of it, poor thing... we're going to start
walking her every day now, but only for a minute or two at the most for
the first few days... she gets so tired out and we need her to keep her
strength and rest to get better.

Oh the poor thing. Well let us know what is happening. Good luck I hope she will get well soon.

awww what a pretty horse! i hope she feels better!

Thanks... I talked to one of the vets there today, the surgeon who treated
her was off today so I'll have to wait a couple days to be able to ask him
all my questions... they did say that they'll usually spike a fever between
the 5th and 7th days after surgery, and that's the time when they're most
likely to develop an infection, so they'll be keeping a really close eye on
her. Most her bloodwork is still looking pretty normal, her hct is back
down really low again, they've had her on blood thinner as well since her
clot factor was so high. Her wbc is in the high normal range.

I got to hand walk her on the grass some more today, we let her eat a
few nibbles of grass. She was totally exhausted after the 5 minutes but
she seemed to really enjoy getting out, it seemed to perk her up quite a
bit.

It's so funny, she's got full grown horses in the stalls next to her, and
she's bigger than one and the same size as the other... here's a picture to
give you an idea of her size, I'm around 5'8...

Beautiful horse!!! But, what happened to her? What did she get sick with?

She had really severe colic. For those who aren't familiar with it, colic is
used to describe any type of adominal discomfort. Usually it is classified
as gas colic (meaning the horse's intestines are filled with too much gas),
impaction colic (meaning the horse can't pass manure), sand colic
(meaning the horse's gut is filled with sand), etc... Well, she was really
bloated so we figured it was gas... she was so full of gas tho, her insides
litterally jumped out as soon as they cut her open. But it wasn't just that,
no... she had MULTIPLE impactions. And then to top it all off, her colon
was very badly kinked and bruised... talk about the supreme colic :roll:

They think that the bacterial infection she got not too long ago could have
been a contributing factor. It's possible that it just messed up her system
a bit, slowing it down so that she wasn't passing things as quickly as she
normally would and it all just got built up.

Aw poor thing! My thoughts are with you.