Rolling Dog Farm Blog

We ended up having to remove Madison’s eye today.  It turned out this blind mare had a ‘melting corneal ulcer,’ which is as painful as it sounds.  I told our vet, Dr. Bill Brown, it looked like someone had taken a small chisel and gouged out part of her cornea.  You could see the cornea sloughing off, which gave it the ‘melting’ look.  The best possible treatment in her case was enucleation, or removal of the eye.  Bill did the surgery in the medical room in Beauty’s Barn this morning.  In this photo Bill has just completed the surgery and sewn up her eyelids. 

Bill is able to do these surgeries with the horse under sedation and still standing in the horse stock, rather than under general anesthesia.  They don’t feel a thing, but are spared the risks of full-blown anesthesia.  Plus, they recover so much faster.  We took this second photo of Madison literally just 30 minutes after the surgery.  I walked her out to the corral, where she was eagerly greeted by her worried boyfriend Bridger ("What happened?  Where’d you go?  What did they do to you?").  She immediately began eating the hay left over from her breakfast. 

(Click on photos for larger image.)