Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula, called early this afternoon to say Tonto had taken a serious turn for the worse.  Given his symptoms and following further examinations, she concluded that he might have a nephrosplenic entrapment.  She explained that in the horse there is a ligament that extends from one kidney to the spleen, and the colon can sometimes get wrapped around, or hooked, on that ligament.  Erin was going to try a fairly simple procedure  to "bounce" the colon off the ligament.  She’d know in 30 minutes if it worked and would call me with a report.

It didn’t work, and he was getting worse.  There was another possible procedure, in which the horse is put under general anesthesia, placed on its back, and then rolled back and forth to dislodge the colon.  She doubted that would succeed in Tonto’s case, and given the risk of putting a horse — especially an old one — under anesthesia, Erin didn’t think it was worth doing.  If it didn’t work and he still needed surgery, now we would be risking anesthesia twice.

Our options at this point were to simply wait and see if the problem could somehow resolve on its own; euthanize him; or proceed directly to surgery.  Neither Erin nor I thought the first option was acceptable or realistic.  He was in a lot of pain and deteriorating rapidly.  Erin walked me through what we faced if we decided not to euthanize him and went with the third option.  It would be major abdominal surgery, which is plenty risky for an elderly gent like Tonto, who is probably 25 years old.  Not only does he have to survive the surgery, but the recovery as well, with all its complications.  It’s also expensive — about $4,000.

I told Erin that, yes, we could definitely think of lots of other ways to spend $4,000, and we knew that some people would definitely question — understandably — why we would do this for an old, blind horse.  But the only thing Tonto has is his life, and how could we take that away from him if there was a reasonable chance surgery could save him?  We certainly understood we might lose him during surgery, or to post-surgery complications, but Alayne and I couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t at least try.

So I asked Erin to proceed to surgery.  She said, "Okay, but it will take us 20 to 30 minutes to set up.  You’ve still got time to call us if you change your mind."  I told her we wouldn’t be changing our minds.

About two hours later, Erin called to say she had just finished surgery and — surprise! — Tonto had an another intestinal problem:  he had a pelvic flexure retroflexion, in which the colon is flipped backwards 180 degrees.  Ouch.  There was a lot going on in there!  She said there was no way that could have been fixed other than with surgery. 

Tonto wasn’t completely awake yet from the anesthesia but was stirring.  They were holding him down for a while longer because horses will sometimes try to get up too quickly, before they are able to function, and break a leg or otherwise injure themselves.  She’d call when he was up and recovered.

Ten minutes later the phone rang, and Tonto was fully up on his feet and in the recovery room.  Erin said, "He’s bionic!  He got to his feet with no problem at all, he just sprang right up!"

The photo at the very top of this post is one I took last night of Tonto at the clinic; Erin was suturing his catheter into place.  The second photo is one Erin took with her cell phone camera while the vet techs were prepping him for surgery.  The third photo is another cell phone shot Erin took of Tonto in the recovery room.

We’ve cleared the first hurdles. Now we have to get through the post-operative phase, and that includes getting his digestive system working again.  Please keep your fingers crossed for this old boy.

I told Erin this evening that the photo of Tonto in the recovery room makes him look like a taxidermist just got finished with him — maybe it was the cell phone camera quality, maybe it’s his stance, but the poor guy looks a bit, well, stuffed, doesn’t he?  So here he is in a happier moment, in a photo I took a couple of months ago when he was out on pasture with his best friend, blind Scout: