Rolling Dog Farm Blog

We noticed yesterday evening that our blind horse Chance hadn’t eaten all day.  Usually he plows through all the hay and grain we can give him.  He is beginning to deteriorate from his two-year long battle with lymphoma.  Just in the past two months he’s begun losing weight and his hair coat has become dull, and we know the cancer is taking its toll.  So we wondered yesterday if his lymphoma had something to do with it … or whether it was something else, like being pre-colicky.

From the barn I called our equine vet, Dr. Bill Brown.  Bill asked me to listen to Chance’s heart rate, take his temperature, and report back. Alayne went to the  house to get the stethoscope and thermometer, and then she held Chance while I took his vital signs. They were, in a word, bad:  His heart was racing at 80 beats per minute (normal is 30-40) and his temperature was 104.8 degrees (normal is around 100).

I called Bill with the results.  "That’s a sick horse," he said.  Bill had us give Chance a massive dose of Naxcel, a powerful broad-spectrum injectable antibiotic, and a dose of Banamine, an anti-inflammatory.  The Naxcel dose was so large — 40 cc’s — that I had to inject it in three different places on Chance to avoid overloading any one injection site.

This morning Alayne and I went out to the barn with stethoscope and thermometer in hand, not sure what kind of condition we’d find Chance in.  That’s when Alayne took this photo of me listening to Chance’s heart.  We were relieved to discover his heart rate had dropped to 48 beats per minute, and his temperature had dropped to 102.6 degrees.  I called Bill to report on the progress.  Bill told us to give Chance another (smaller) dose of Naxcel and to repeat the Banamine, then take his vital signs again this evening.

And tonight, Chance’s heart rate was normal at 36 beats per minute and his temperature was 99.5.  That’s a remarkable turnaround in 24 hours — whew!

(Click on photo for larger image.)