Cob Jockey

 January

I brought Connor home from CGP's and had to learn how to ride my new horse! It turned out all that Dressage gave him newfound confidence over fences. I decided to keep Aeres for one more month and got to experience owning two riding horses for the first time. Also, sigh, I realized (again) that my saddle didn't fit.

 February

The story this month was what I didn't post about: the lady flying out to try Aeres, falling in love with her, and then Aeres getting desperately sick. I only wrote six benign posts, including one about my truck stranding me at the worst possible time, but privately I was dealing with a LOT.

Love you too, jerk

March

This month, I finally wrote up the Aeres medical saga, and at the time I wrote it, I thought she was out of the woods, but unfortunately that wasn't the case, so I ended up basically live blogging the last few weeks of it. We spent a solid two weeks keeping her alive on feeding tubes without knowing if she would ever be able to swallow again, and the day before we were going to make the call, she began swallowing again, and eventually made a full recovery. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Final Thoughts. Outside of that, this was also the month I started virtual lessons, which were such a game changer.

April

I showed 2-3 for the first time at Heartland, got my amateur status back, hauled my mom's geriatric donkey from Illinois to Tennessee, and...a very special colt was born on April 28th, which just so happened to also be the day I got my second shot, something that made the entire show season ahead of me actually feel possible after everything was cancelled in 2020. I didn't speak for him immediately, but I had a feeling that I might.

"Why yes, hello world."

May

I officially bought Dyma Hi's colt, who I named Disco (Castleberrys Deja Vu). I rode with my trainer's trainer, who was the non-traveling reserve for the Olympics this year, and showed twice: once schooling, and once rated, for the first time with my trainer and her crew. I also rode the now-healthy Aeres one last time before she left, and tried a Bua.

June

Holly from Party Pony Eventing came to visit and rode Connor, I bought a Western saddle, and then I (finally) bought a Dressage saddle (that I still don't have as I write this post!). I showed at Waterloo for the first time, again with CGP's crew, and had a blast.

It was, um, wet.

After all this, the woman who flew in to try Aeres (Alice) in February still wants her.

She and I have texted off and on over the months, and she calls Aeres her heart horse. The big question, though, was how would she be as a riding horse after all this? 

In April, I had finally gotten a chance to see her amputated tongue, and it was nowhere near as bad as I had envisioned from the vets telling me they had to take 2-3" off. It's clearly short, but unless you're looking for it, you almost can't tell.

So based on that, I had a feeling that she would be pretty good under saddle, and I volunteered to put a ride on her before she went anywhere so Alice would know what she was getting into. And with her wound finally healed enough for it, we did it last weekend.

She was very out of shape, but no different from before.

Reminder that my GIFs are in slow motion. Driving me crazy that I can't figure this out!

Lisa asked if I wanted to lunge her first, and I said no. This horse may be an absolute weirdo on the ground sometimes (mostly when she has ulcers) but I trust her more than I even trust Connor in the saddle. Even knowing I would be riding her in an open field next to a loud road far from the rest of her herd when she hadn't been ridden in months, I wasn't worried.

I only rode for about 10 minutes, but we did w/t/c both directions, leg yields, and circles of various sizes, and it all felt the same as before. She was rushy and flat, but only due to her lack of strength, which will of course come back with time. Alice is sending her straight to her trainer when she gets out there, which is a good thing.

I had Lisa take some portraits of us, because it's almost certainly the last time I'll ever ride her, and might be the last time I ever see her too. After this ride, it sounds like Alice is making quick plans to get her to the east coast. (And she's taking my CWD Dressage saddle with her - it fits Aeres and Alice well, and I was having trouble selling it here anyway, so everybody wins)

I'm going to miss this girl, but it's been so fun to be a small part of first bringing her into the world and then helping her find her place in the world. She helped me too - helped me figure out what I wanted in my next horse and gave me the confidence that I could afford two. Without her, I'm not sure I would have been able to pull the trigger on Disco.

Be a good girl, Aeres!

One last failed ears up picture for posterity, lol

No news is good news on the Aeres front, but I figured you'd all want an update anyway.

Just...swoon. I miss riding this movement! PC: Lisa

She's doing absolutely amazing.

No filter. PC: Lisa

On my way to my parents' on Thursday, I stopped to see her for the first time since that early March night when we hustled her back onto the trailer four hours after she got home. 

I could just stand there and watch her eat and swallow grass for hours. Every swallow seems miraculous.

She spends her days with "Dr. Grass" as Lisa says, gaining weight by the day. Her wound, which I didn't get any pictures of, looks amazing and is almost completely healed except for a couple of spots. That last bit of healing will take the longest, of course, but it's made incredible progress in such a short amount of time.

I can't believe you're alive <3

Her wound has to be fully healed before we can put a bridle on her and see how her tongue amputation affects her, but I did get a chance to look at her tongue for the first time last weekend and it's WAY better than I thought it'd be. They really didn't take much off at all, and I don't think it'll affect her as a riding horse. Her prospective future owner agrees and still wants her, but as I've said before, it doesn't matter one way or another, she has a forever home regardless.

Keep eating and keep healing, little girl

Horses are fragile

I know this comparison is going to make me sad, and I'm doing it anyway.

November 2020. Someday she's going to look like this again!

You think you know this, and then you're suddenly slapped in the face with it like this and suddenly the reality of that statement sets in. One of the vets said horses' bodies are poorly suited to fighting off infection compared to other animals, which I've never thought about before, but it makes sense. There are probably fewer opportunities for a long convalescence as a prey animal than there are as a top-of-the-food-chain human, so humans have gotten the chance to evolve infection-fighting immune systems more completely. "They're just big, fragile, poorly designed animals in a lot of ways," the one vet said.

There's still much we don't know about equine medicine.

Me, age 5-ish, with Sammy, my family's first African Grey

After having African Greys for almost 30 years, I'm used to working within the constraints of incomplete veterinary understanding of my pets, following guidelines that are more "old wives tale" and "err on the side of caution" than published study because I don't have anything better to rely on. But I always thought horses were closer to dogs and cats on the animal science spectrum until this. I've never been told "I don't know" as many times with a horse as I was during this ordeal, and that's not a knock on the vets in any way, I appreciate the humility it takes to say that, but they really just did not know in many cases from start to finish with this. Even the amount of time she was on a feeding tube (2 weeks) was uncharted territory!

There are things much worse - emotionally and financially - than (successful) colic surgery.

Far, far less gory than it was a few weeks ago!

Obviously if your colic surgery ended tragically, there's nothing worse than that. But I spent my whole life thinking colic surgery was a worst case veterinary medicine scenario. Planning for it financially, holding it up in casual conversation as a big tragedy. But I found myself many times WISHING this was something as simple as colic surgery, something where, within a matter of minutes, you have a concrete diagnosis of a well-understood ailment, an action plan, a firm cost estimate, and you can take a big step  to fix it almost immediately.

Contrast that to what we went through: we don't know what caused this, we don't know how long it will take for her to leave the hospital, we don't really know how to fix it, we don't know how much this will cost. We'd authorize the bill through a certain amount, and they'd call a week later to get another authorization to continue, having used that amount up. We faced a situation where every day was a gamble, every dollar we spent was a bet placed that her nerves would come back to life before we got to the point we couldn't afford to keep her up there and alive anymore. The uncertainty was gut-wrenching in a way that I never thought was possible.

Pre-existing vet relationships are important.

Happy to be back at Lisa's, who is better set up for small pen turnout than I am

I am so grateful we had my new vet out for spring shots way earlier than we usually did this year, so he had just seen her two days before all this started. I used to do my own shots, back when that's what I could afford, but now I will cheerfully fork over the farm call fee to have my vet see my healthy animal once a year, just so I have someone to call in an emergency like this. And it has transformed my relationship with this vet for the better - nothing like trial by fire!

The list of people I would co-own a horse with is now up to two.

Lisa with Connor's stallion full brother, Cadence

I used to say Mary was the only person on the planet I could co-own a horse with, but after this experience I can confidently add Lisa to that list. We worked as a team throughout this entire thing, often making decisions together, but sometimes we both had to make decisions independently too. It meant a lot that she had that much trust in me, and that 11 years into our friendship, I know her well enough to read her mind and confidently authorize treatments even when I couldn't reach her to double check. Sometimes the way we arrived at a decision took different paths, but we always arrived at the same place regardless, and that was pretty cool.

There are differences between private practice hospitals and university hospitals, and now I know them.

Anyone who's read this blog knows Purdue had a big miss on this case, but they also saved her life. The downsides to a teaching hospital are the rotating cast of characters, (if your horse is there longer than one rotation) and the relative inexperience of the non-senior vets. The upside is that it's cheaper - I am not saying this was cheap by any means, but it was a heck of a lot cheaper at Purdue than Rood and Riddle would've been, and then the longer we were there, the harder they worked to find "teaching funds" for things like bloodwork to make our bill even a little smaller. Honestly, if she had been at R&R, our money might have run out before her ability to swallow came back, so being at Purdue may have saved her life in that respect. 

COVID-19 sucks.

Back home again at Lisa's

COVID-19 complicated every bit of this ordeal, from the hours I spent waiting in the truck, to peeing in my trailer, to not being able to see with our own eyes whether she was eating or not when they discharged her the first time. More than once when we both wanted to question the vets on whether something was or was not happening, I reminded Lisa that we did not have a choice but to trust them, because we weren't allowed to go see her. This virus can go to hell, and I can't wait to flip it the bird (and honor my healthy 49 year old CrossFit friend that died of it after contracting it while traveling for Thanksgiving) by signing up for my vaccination first thing Wednesday morning.

I am still not insuring Connor after all this.

I know, a lot of you probably think I'm crazy, and that's fine, insurance is 100% the right route for a lot of people. But if anything, this experience just validated my choice to self-insure (pay the amount I would be paying in premiums into a savings account every month), and I was grateful for the freedom we had to make decisions purely on what the vets said and how much we could afford, and not what insurance would/would not cover. I cannot deny that that is privilege, but it's also 11 years of planning ahead, prioritizing saving before spending every time I get paid, and being grateful that it was there when I offered to help defray some cost.

This wraps up the Aeres medical saga. Sorry for all the cliffhangers, but that's what my life felt like right alongside all you guys! I'll continue to post updates on her as I get them, but for now, her life is all about eating, gaining weight, and being a horse again.

 ...Aeres was discharged from Purdue this morning and is on her way home to Lisa's as I write this <3

Her medical team vet on the left (she also had a surgical team vet) and her primary resident on the right.

She's up to eating 1 flake of grass and 1 flake of alfalfa four times a day, plus some senior feed, and drinking 20 liters of water. Her surgical wound is more like a scab than a crevice now. And as far as we know right now, she should make a full recovery and go on to lead a normal riding horse life, but even if she doesn't, she of course has a forever home at Lisa's.

This resident "worked her ass off" on Aeres, according to the vet, and really fell in love with her <3

They're going to do a case study on her. Even though we'll never know the cause of the infection, the amount of time, effort and supportive care required to get her through this really pushed the edges of current equine veterinary science, especially, I get the impression, where the feeding tube was concerned, and they think it's worth sharing.

After her early discharge last time, I think we're both on pins and needles this time hoping she settles in well at Lisa's, but the vets weren't going to make the same mistake twice, and have lots of datapoints and videos on how much she's actually been ingesting.

And so, after 33 days at Purdue plus four days of treating her at home, I can finally put the Aeres medical saga to rest, although I do have some thoughts on this whole thing I'm going to share another time.

I have an Aeres update, and unfortunately it's not a positive one, but I'm sharing it because we need all the prayers and good juju the universe can throw at us, and I know you all are good for that.

When I last left you guys hanging, she was on a feeding tube, getting Gastroguard, and we also switched to yet another new antibiotic (which we hit bingo with this time!). She did really well on the feeding tube all week, with good amounts of poop, steady electrolytes and a cheeky attitude. She tried to escape her stall once and trashed an IV line another time, which the vets were honestly happy about, lol. 

On Tuesday of this week, they pulled the feeding tube and did extensive diagnostics, specifically a head x-ray, ultrasound and a scope of the esophagus and mouth. The surgical team also re-evaluated the wound, and that all looks absolutely perfect, both the amputated tip of the tongue and the chasm under her jaw are filling in with healthy pink granulation tissue. If that was our only problem, we'd be home free.

Unfortunately though, the diagnostics identified that her soft palate isn't working. The x-ray showed that it's lower in the mouth than you'd expect, which the vets guess might be because the base (back) of the tongue "isn't there to support it". They tried to get her to swallow a couple of different ways while the camera was in there, ways that "should have elicited a strong reaction", and there was no reaction at all. 

Basically when she swallows, from the outside it looks like it works, but on the inside, the soft palate can't flip up like it should. And the most frustrating part is - this is literally it. If she could swallow, she could come home tomorrow and we could continue her aftercare at home. But if she can't swallow, she can't live.

At this point, the vets are concerned that this soft palate thing is permanent. As of today, we're a month out from when she was last able to swallow normally, and 3+ weeks out from her surgery. They don't have any further concerns about active inflammation or infection, so at this point it's all nerves and tissue damage we have to deal with.

They said they're happy to continue to treat her as long as we want, she's a "nice mare" and "worth it", but her prognosis gets bleaker with every day she can't swallow. There's a possibility the nerves could come back to life in 3, 6, 9, 12 months (often in humans it's 9-12 months, says oral surgeon Alice), but horses can't stay on feeding tubes that long. They get esophageal ulcers and other complications. Not to mention a 9 month hospital stay would be more than any of us could afford.

So at this point, we've had to set a limit. Not financially, but on how long it's fair to put her through all this. Tuesday marks 30 days since the surgery, the point at which the first vet (with the 3'6 eq horse) said we would know how much damage was temporary and how much was permanent. So basically, if the soft palate miraculously starts working between now and Tuesday, she's going to pull through, but if it doesn't, that's the day we make the hard decision.

So please, pray, jingle, whatever your religion or not religion is, send some good vibes out into the universe for us over the next 5 days. We need it.

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!

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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You're now entering the stretch of the story with very few photos, since I'm not allowed to accompany her into any of the veterinary hospitals (thanks, COVID), so you're going to get some unrelated Meatloaf pictures.

On Tuesday morning (February 23rd) at 8:55am, I got a call from the vet. Aeres had finally spiked a real fever (of 103) for the first time throughout this whole thing. After going over the risks of putting a horse under with me for what felt like the millionth time (coming out of anesthesia is extremely dangerous for horses and they make SURE you're crystal clear on that before they start anything) she hung up to go put her under.

A while later, she called and said the CT scan didn't show a foreign body, which was what we all had been hoping for. That would have been the simplest answer. But it did show a massive abscess under her tongue, which they wanted my permission to drain while she was still under. 

Meatloaf has developed a strong preference for the bucket sets in my husband's Kia Stinger GT while my truck is STILL in the shop!!

Of course I gave it, and when she called with another update a couple of hours later, she told me Aeres had come out of it fine, and had "briefly thought about going up" while coming out of anesthesia before reconsidering her poor life choices and putting all four feet back on the ground, where they stayed the rest of the time.

While she was under, they made a sizable incision between the branches of the mandible to drain an 8-10" long abscess that ran most of the length of her face and also involved the tongue. They sent off a sample for a culture to see what kind of bacteria was contained in the abscess, which almost a week later came back unfortunately negative - whatever antibiotic my vet gave Saturday night had killed the bacteria off before they cultured it on Tuesday. The negative culture didn't change much, besides the fact that we had to continue to treat her with a broad spectrum antibiotic rather than a targeted one. 

I couldn't take her to the barn for over a week, and when I finally got her out there she ran so hard, she slept from 6pm to 8am the next morning.

Her recovery was pretty straightforward until 48 hours post surgery, when I got a call that they had had to cut 2-3" of her tongue off that day due to necrosis. The pressure of the infection, which they think started in the tongue and spread outward from there, had caused the tissue of the tongue to start dying from the tip in. 

This came completely out of the blue for me, and I had tons of questions for the vet, who very conveniently had owned and competed a 3'6 eq horse that had almost his entire tongue removed so she was able to talk me through both Aeres' medical prognosis (good) and her riding horse prognosis (also good). 

Apparently horses don't need their tongues for much, and you can remove almost all of it without hugely impacting their life. ("But if she was a cow, we'd have a real problem" - vet) At the amount they took off, it might make it easier for her to get her tongue over the bit (which she thankfully has never done before so there's no pre-existing habit to worry about. If this was Connor though...lol. He'd be living that hackamore life forever), but that's it, the vet said her prognosis for a full return to work as a Dressage horse or eventer was great.

After the first tongue amputation, they had to take another centimeter off on Saturday (the 10th day after this all started and her 6th day at Purdue if anyone is counting), but that was the last of it, and she had no further complications. Six days later, on Friday March 5th, we got to take her home...temporarily.

...to be continued

Overnight Sunday, it rained a ton, which melted a lot of the snow...except on the barn's winding uphill gravel driveway, which, after two weeks of trucks going up and down it, had coalesced into 2" thick ice.

Despite being completely mentally frazzled by this point, I somehow had the presence of mind to think "I'm going to want a picture of this driveway for the blog" #dedicatedhorseblogger

I had borrowed my former trainer's 2500 to get Aeres to Centaur, and it barely made it up the icy driveway, so I knew going down would be a challenge. It was going to get well above freezing that day and would be thoroughly melted by Tuesday, but Aeres needed to go to Centaur NOW. Waiting was not an option.

I texted my former trainer who had the brilliant idea to take some of the mag we had stacked in the indoor for use on the footing and salt the driveway with it.

How convenient, a literal wall of ice melt

It was while I was spreading salt on the driveway that I finally cried for the first time throughout this whole thing. I fell hard on my ass, unable to keep my footing on the icy hill, and the tears came - not because I was hurt, but because it was so damn frustrating that after keeping this sick horse alive for four straight days and spending every moment of every day worrying about her, I was 45 minutes away from handing her off to the best vets in the state, if only I could get her down the driveway!

In the end, the mag melted enough of the ice to where we could get down, and also my former trainer came out to drive the rig down the driveway for me. Truth be told, I was so mentally spazzed at this point I could barely think straight, but also, it was her truck, and I'd rather her be the one to bury it into the fenceline than me, if it came to that.

Ended up being a great, if unwanted, opportunity to see how a 3/4 ton handled the World's Tiniest Horse Trailer. Verdict: much better than my 2005 half ton, but surprisingly not as well as my 2018 half ton. HD truck suspensions are intended for much heavier loads than the World's Tiniest Horse Trailer, while the WTHT is squarely in the middle of what my half ton is capable of towing. Not that it did poorly, it just wasn't quite as planted at interstate speeds.

During the 45 minute drive to Centaur, I called my mom, who was, at the same moment, driving to University of Illinois' veterinary hospital to put her African Grey down due to cancer at an extremely young age for a Grey. I was supposed to be there for that, but I had my own shitty college vet appointment to go to. Like mother, like daughter, at the worst possible moment, but always there for our pets til the end <3

After four hours of waiting in the truck and peeing in my horse trailer because I couldn't go inside (real talk) (thanks COVID), the vet finally came out to talk to me. Everything about her was normal past the tongue - swallowing reflex was normal if they shot water into the back of her mouth, no fever, gut motility was great.

So Centaur's best guess was that there was a foreign body in her tongue, and although the vet put on a confident air with me, my vet told me later that when the two vets talked, the Centaur vet was just as stumped as he was. She needed either a CT scan ($1,500) or an MRI ($3,000) to see what was going on in there, my choice. I chose CT scan in consultation with Lisa after they told me both would provide the type of data they needed equally well.

I was accepted into this prestigious program at work and should have been in California this week for the annual conference, but of course it was virtual this year. They asked us to share selfies on Day 1 and I was like "Ok, you asked for it, bringing my whole self to work!" At least I specialize in work from home software, so this whole post (and our anywhere/anytime/any device slogan) is just one big advertisement for my products.

And that's when they informed me their CT scanner at Centaur was in the process of being replaced, and I would have to haul her to either Purdue or Rood and Riddle. Purdue was just under two hours from there and R&R was just over two hours, so I chose Purdue, not wanting to prolong what had to have been a miserable trailer ride for Aeres any longer than I had to.

I know it's a gas 2500. It says HEMI on the side. But I still texted her before filling it up to double check because putting gas in a diesel truck would have been par for the f****** course this week.

After another two hours of waiting in the truck while they got fluids into her and did paperwork, and then a two hour drive, I got her to Purdue main campus at 5:06pm on Monday afternoon, where they gave her supportive care overnight (still no fever!) and planned to put her under for the CT first thing in the morning. It was the first time in five days I felt my anxiety subside, knowing I was no longer solely responsible for getting her through this.

...to be continued

On Saturday evening, I again hitched a ride to the barn from a barnmate. It was quickly obvious Aeres had relapsed - more foaming at the mouth and picking at her feed, but this time her entire muzzle was swollen, and there were large swellings under her jaw right above her chin. So the swellings were not where I'd expect to see them if this was strangles, which would affect the lymph nodes closer to the throatlatch.

Saturday morning, muzzle wasn't really swollen yet

She had been perfectly fine that morning, so I surmised that one of two things had happened: either this was caused by a plant she wouldn't normally eat that she was eating in turnout due to the snow, or the steroid from the night before had made her temporarily feel that much better, and when that wore off, she relapsed. 

The vet warned me it would be 90 minutes before he got out there because he was already at an emergency, so I used my nervous energy to walk her snowy field looking for signs that she'd eaten a plant at the edge of the field out of boredom or something. Nothing. 

Took pictures of all of the plants she has access to over the fence just in case

I'm not proud of the amount of horsey WebMD'ing I did during this particular wait for the vet. The vet honestly and apologetically admitted he was stumped at this point, and so was I. So many things lined up symptomatically except for a single symptom: colic, trauma, strangles, vesicular stomatitis, botulism, even rabies. 

This of course had me nervous that it was something transmissible, despite the fact that none of the other horses had symptoms, everyone eats the same diet, and no one had shipped in or out in nearly two months, since Connor came home. The vet was confident it wasn't infectious, but also didn't know what it was so his confidence wasn't exactly comforting.

Checking for the coronary band lesions that would indicate VS and finding none

(Mildly Related Public Service Announcement: During my incessant Googling I learned that early symptoms of rabies in horses looks a whole lot like colic, and if you come into contact with that horse's saliva while treating it for "colic", you have to get the extremely painful series of rabies vaccines or you die. So if your horse is not vaccinated for rabies, at least have that in the back of your mind any time your horse is sick.)

When the vet arrived, he noted that she still had no fever, and her salivary glands (near the chin) were the fullest he'd ever seen on a horse. He'd seen swollen salivary glands twice in his career, but both were on seniors, and like me, was perplexed that there was no lymph node involvement.

He wondered if maybe a calcification had blocked her salivary ducts, so we took a series of X-Rays, which showed nothing.

Getting increasingly tucked up on Saturday morning, but still passing the tent test

He tried to insert a catheter into the salivary glands, but they were too swollen for even that. He spent multiple hours out there with me, apologizing profusely for being so stumped by this. In the end, he hit her with another round of steroids and for the first time, some antibiotics (literally put a needle in her neck and emptied syringe after syringe into her) and left me with two syringes of Dex to give orally the next day. 

At 9:30pm I finally went home, in a vehicle borrowed from yet another barnmate so that no one had to wait that whole time with me (except Meatloaf - best wingman). Barn family really came in clutch for me through all this.

The next morning (Sunday the 21st) she was again foaming at the mouth and just generally blah, so he had me give her Dex and that immediately perked her up. She ate an entire tub of chopped hay which was great because she hadn't had a full meal in over 72 hours at that point and I was very concerned about both starvation and colic. Her poops were small and infrequent due to how little she was eating, but she was peeing normally, probably in part due to the steroids.

It was Sunday evening that I noticed something weird about her drinking. During this whole thing up to this point, she had been drinking a lot. I watched her do it, and watched the muscles of her throat "swallow" each time. But on Sunday I noticed she was backwashing into her auto-waterer via her mouth (which unfortunately is not one of the models that has a counter on it), so I gave her a bucket and observed her drink out of that now that it was finally above freezing.

Horrified, I realized after 30 seconds of "drinking", the bucket had barely gone down at all, and I realized she had been trying and trying to drink without getting hardly anything into her body at least since Saturday morning - getting just enough to keep her alive and from colicking for real, apparently.

Frustrated "drinking"

It was at this point that the vet said he was referring her to Centaur (Purdue University's state of the art satellite equine clinic located 2 miles from my old barn) first thing the next morning, Monday. Monday would also be the first time in weeks I had even a prayer of getting the truck and trailer safely down our very steep snow covered driveway.

...to be continued