One of our wonderful supporters asked me the other day on the phone how blind Brynn was doing, and that made me realize it’s been a long time since I’ve posted an update on her. Well, she’s just about to turn two years old in early June, and that will be quite a milestone. Brynn has defied the odds, and no one — not our vets, not us — really expected to her to make it this far.
Just to recap her long list of medical problems: her neck is so short from malformed vertebrae she can’t reach the ground with her mouth to eat; she has a hole in her heart; she only has one kidney; and she has an ectopic ureter, in which the tube that takes urine from her one working kidney to her bladder is dumping it instead into her vagina, causing constant leaking. Oh, and yes, she’s blind, too. (Although we don’t really count that as a ‘medical problem’ around this place!)
When we agreed to take her at the age of 5 days, we only knew she was born blind. All these other problems we found out after her first week here.
Now, you might well question how an animal with all those medical issues can have a good quality of life, but all you’d have to do is watch this little thing in the course of a day. She is happy, affectionate, adores people, loves to eat (and eat and eat), and even likes to try some bucking and kicking in her corral like a rodeo star when she’s feeling her oats. (Given her neck constraints, these are very mild displays of bucking and kicking!) For eating, she has elevated feeders, which suit her just fine. We can’t leave her out to graze in summer for extended periods because she bends her front legs over to reach the ground, which puts too much stress on them. Yet she’s perfectly content to hang out at the barn with her hay and grain.
Her only real quality of life issue is the urine leaking out of her vulva and down her legs. She’s had two surgeries at Washington State University’s veterinary teaching hospital to fix the ectopic ureter, and both failed. Our own equine vet, a board-certified veterinary surgeon herself — Dr. Erin Taylor — is going to try the surgery on Brynn this spring.
In the meantime, we continue to bathe her every day to prevent urine scalding on her back legs. We wash her rear-end, thighs and legs with a sponge, and then apply ointments to her skin. If we stay on top of it, we can prevent the urine scalds from developing. Alayne took the photo above of me bathing Brynn this afternoon. She’s still a very small girl, for which we are grateful; it’s as if nature recognized that with all of her physical limitations, the last thing she needed was to grow into a full-size horse and put additional strain on her heart and vertebrae and remaining kidney. So she’s really not much bigger than a small yearling.
Nothing’s quite "right" about Brynn, including her overall appearance — she looks more like a small moose than a two-year old Arabian, which is why I call her Moosie!
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