Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Friday started off with a trip to the small animal clinic in the morning, and ended with an emergency trip to the equine clinic that night.

On Friday morning I drove the 70 miles east to Helena to drop off three animals at Montana Veterinary Specialists.  With me were blind Stoney the Lab, Belvie the miniature Dachshund, and Joshua the barn cat.

Alayne took the photo of me with Joshua just before I left for the clinic.  He’s been limping on his right front leg, and we can’t tell why.  Joshua is one of the two cats who live at Beauty’s Barn. 

Stoney’s remaining eye, her left one, had become inflamed this past week, with lots of vascularization in the sclera.  When you start seeing blood vessels like that, it means the body is sending them out to deal with some kind of problem.  And since I was headed to the clinic, I took Belvie along so he could get a routine dental.  I left all three animals there and we’ll pick them up early this coming week. 

Dr. Jennifer Rockwell, one of vets at the clinic, called Friday evening to say that our other primary care vet there, Dr. Brenda Culver, had examined Stoney’s eye and found the pressure had skyrocketed to 45 units of mercury, which is painfully high.  Since Stoney is already blind in that eye, Brenda recommended we have it removed, which she will do on Monday.  Jennifer said they weren’t sure what was causing Joshua’s limping — it didn’t appear to be orthopedic in nature — but we’d know more on Monday.

When Jennifer called, I was in the middle of dealing with an emergency with Rocky, one of our blind Appaloosas.  I had noticed Friday evening at feeding time that he wasn’t interested in eating and seemed to be walking with a shuffle.  Odd.  We pulled him into a stall to take his vital signs.  His temperature was 104.4 and his heart rate was an astounding 76.  He was breathing rapidly … about 46 breaths per minute.  Yikes.  I called our equine vet, Dr. Erin Taylor at Blue Mountain Veterinary Hospital in Missoula, for help.  As I was talking with Erin, Rocky broke into an intense sweat, the water beading up on his hair as we watched.  Erin had me inject 10 cc’s of banamine, an anti-inflammatory, into his jugular vein, then wait 20 minutes to see if he showed any response.

Twenty minutes later, he was no better.  I called Erin again.  Erin said she and Dr. Angela Langer, one of clinic’s vets who’s worked on our horses, would go for a run while I made the 60-mile trip west to Missoula with the horse trailer.  When I got there around 8 p.m., Erin and Angela were waiting … and Rocky’s vital signs had improved dramatically, returning almost to normal.  The only visible sign of the distress he’d been in was his sopping wet coat.  Even though Erin said an IV injection of banamine can have that kind of impact — this just took a bit longer — I was astonished.  Still, we didn’t know what had triggered the problem, or whether he was done with it. 

So Erin and Angela went to work on Rocky.  In the photo at the top of the post, Erin is pumping fluids into his stomach through a nasal tube while Angela is holding his head still with a soft twitch.  (The blue cloth serves as a ‘spray shield,’ so when the horse snorts, you don’t get covered in the discharge.)  In the background is Rocky’s buddy Hawk, who came along to keep his pal company.  In this photo, Erin is listening to Rocky’s gut sounds.  Erin and Angela’s first presumption was a colic of some sort, but the symptoms could point to other causes, too. 

Thus they did a belly tap to test for
infection in his abdomen.  This involves inserting a long needle through the abdominal wall to see if there is suspicious fluid inside.  Here Angela is clipping the hair around the insertion site, which was then scrubbed antiseptically.  But the abdominal fluid that dripped out was the normal type.

After nearly two hours of examination and diagnostics, Erin concluded that Rocky had probably suffered from a fast-acting, short-lived viral infection — an equine 24-hour bug — that was peaking just when I noticed him at feeding time. The IV banamine had helped bring it to a resolution quickly.  With his vital signs continuing to hold steady, Erin thought it made sense for us to take Rocky home to the ranch and keep him under close observation, and she gave me a treatment and feeding plan for him for the next couple of days.  So we loaded Rocky and Hawk in the trailer and drove back to Ovando.

I’m pleased to report that Rocky has bounced back over the weekend and is doing fine!

(Click on photos for larger image.)