Rolling Dog Farm Blog

This morning I took three of our blind horses to see our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor, at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula.  (More on the other two horses, Darby and Brynn, tomorrow.)  Blue the blind Appaloosa needed surgery for two problems:  he turned out to have a squamous cell carcinoma on his sheath that had to be removed (Erin had done a biopsy last week, and we just got the pathology results), and he had a painful eye we’d been treating for the past few days. 

The eye — his only remaining one — was not showing your typical signs of discomfort, i.e., squinting and tearing.  But it seemed uncomfortable, and the surface of the cornea was suddenly changing, developing indentations.  These weren’t corneal ulcers, i.e., ruptures in the cornea, but more like ripples on the surface of a pond.  It was hard to tell exactly what was going on, but something wasn’t right.

In the photo at the top, Erin is injecting a local nerve block around his eye before beginning the enucleation, or removal, surgery.  Blue is blind from uveitis, and although he’s been blind for years, the disease can continue to cause repeated episodes of inflammation and other problems secondary to uveitis.  We had removed his other eye a couple of years ago for similar reasons.  This time Blue was suffering from a stromal abscess, which is inside the cornea.  Ouch.

In this photo Erin’s vet tech Courtney is prepping his eye for surgery.  Blue is on top of an operating table that can be raised to different heights and then retracted into the floor, so when the horse is waking up from anesthesia, he is already on the ground.  In many cases, like with Blue today, it’s just as easy to do the surgery while the horse is lying down, and the table remains retracted.

Here Erin is finishing the squamous cell carincoma surgery.  The Merck Veterinary Manual describes this type of cancer in horses this way — I italicized all the factors that relate to Blue:  "Cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas are the most common
malignant neoplasm in horses. They generally develop in adult or aged
horses with white or part-white coats; breeds at risk include
Appaloosa, Belgian, American Paint, and Pinto. Although they can arise
anywhere on the body, these tumors most commonly arise in nonpigmented,
poorly haired areas near mucous membranes. Thus, the periorbital
regions, lips, nose, anus, and external genitalia (especially the
penile sheath) are sites most likely to be affected."

(As we mention on Blue’s Web page, we have no idea why a white horse was named Blue.)

Following the surgery, I aimed the videocamera at the clinic’s closed circuit TV monitor so we could tape Blue getting up after anesthesia.  Here’s a 45-second clip: