March 9, 2021

The Infection: Part 6

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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23 comments:

  1. Wwwoooowww, that surgical site is intense!

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    1. Yes it is, and the SMELL was the most intense part. The vets didn't seem concerned, but my gosh, the whole barn smelled like her, and even after washing the blanket she wore for four hours, I could still catch faint whiff.

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    2. Ugh the smell of necrosis is the worst :(

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    3. I thought it was necrosis too, but the vets acknowledged the smell but said everything was perfectly normal about her healing with no necrosis to be found so, what do I know? This is my first time dealing with a serious wound of any kind, horse, human, dog or otherwise.

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  2. OMG about the whole saga, and I know it's not over yet!

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    1. Yeah! Tomorrow will catch you guys up to present day. I really thought at the time I started drafting these posts (a few days before they sent her home last week) that we would be through the rollercoaster and onto boring at-home wound care by that point.

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  3. Wow. Just wow. Been following along hoping that things work out. Those wound photos are something else. Poor girl.

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  4. My heart sunk to the floor right along with you. Definitely the right call to bring her back to the hospital. But OMG what a nightmare.
    While I was reading along I was thinking the discharge instructions were for the tongue and was thinking wow that seems really hard to do... But seeing the photos makes a lot more sense. Ha.
    I used to be a barn manager and we had a boarder's horse come home after having a temporary tracheotomy for a sinus surgery, and omg that smell was awful. And the pus. Ugh. I'm not particularly squeamish, but I'll take blood and guts over pus any day.
    I really hope you're closer to the bottom of this craziness by now. Sending lots of good thoughts to you guys.

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    1. Yeah, it was super gross. I honestly don't know where we are at this point. Some things are improving and some things are holding steady and some things are getting worse. I'll definitely have an update post tomorrow.

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  5. Ignore if you don't want to say, just curious at this point who actually owns the horse, and if you had to make all the decisions on their behalf?

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    1. No it's a fair question. The buyer still wants her, but she has not officially changed hands yet (and wasn't going to anytime soon regardless, she was/is still going on a long lease before she is officially sold). She's still owned by the breeder, so decisions are jointly made by me and the breeder. She trusts me a lot, so I have the latitude to ask for things myself, especially because I'm the one the vets call twice a day with updates (and I trust her too, she's my emergency contact for Connor and has the right to make end of life decisions on my behalf if I can't be reached).

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    2. I should add that although the buyer doesn't own her yet and isn't making decisions, we are keeping her in the loop with daily updates and pictures.

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  6. This is a nightmare scenario, I am feeling stressed just reading about it! My fingers and toes are crossed for poor Aeres!

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    1. It really is :( Thank you! We all appreciate all the good thoughts and prayers and jingles!

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  7. Ugh... poor mare and poor you guys!! I've known plenty of horses who have lost parts of their tongue, and have seen worse than the wound, but the fact that she's showing signs of discomfort again is really worrying. I really hope she's just a run of the mill normal colic secondary to maybe not eating and drinking normally and getting a super tiny and easy to resolve impaction- nothing more serious!!

    Do they have any idea what caused the initial abscess? A foreign body or they have no clue?

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    1. Well you'll get a big update tomorrow, but I'll give you a preview. What we thought was colic turned out to be (extremely not surprising) severe ulcers. And also, they thought she was eating, but it turns out she hasn't been getting anything into her stomach. I am pretty frustrated with Purdue this evening and have had enough wine to put this in the comments, lol.

      They have no idea what caused the initial abscess. There were no tracks, no signs of trauma, nothing. I still can't shake the fact that it might be related to her vaccines two days prior - like, maybe the infection was already brewing and the vaccine kicked it in high gear? Or the needle introduced something into her? But I would have expected swelling at the injection site at least if that was the case. I'm not sure. I keep telling Lisa it's not worth wasting calories thinking about, and it probably isn't because we'll never know, but it does still bother both of us.

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  8. I had an older horse who had a very similar thing happen to a lesser degree about 10 years back. It started with the tongue, there was a wound (we also thought a foreign body but never really found anything), then some necrosis, then we lost part of the tongue, it appeared to be healing and then he developed a giant softball sized abscess that blew out with a huge flap of skin and crazy amounts of horrible smelling yellow pus, revealing things in his head that you are not supposed to see. He was under the care of a vet the whole time and we never really saw that coming. Wishing her a speedy recovery!

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    1. Wow, that's crazy! Thank you for commenting, this whole thing is so weird, and it's helpful to know other people have been through something at least a little similar.

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  9. YOU are going to need that ulcer supplement after this!

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    1. Girl tell me about it :( I can hardly ride Connor I'm so anxious and heartsick over all this.

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