Rolling Dog Farm Blog

No, it wasn't Friday afternoon when we had to call our equine vet, Dr. Steve Levine. It was worse — Saturday afternoon. I was out feeding the horses and noticed blind Bo's right eye was closed shut and tears were streaming down his face. I struggled to get his eyelid open, but when I did, I could see blood and edema, or fluid, under the cornea. There were lots of tiny blood vessels laced across the outer surface of the cornea, all headed towards the area where the blood and edema were located inside. Typically when you see this, it means the body is directing blood to where healing is needed. It looked like trauma to the eye, but I couldn't see any visible damage to the corneal surface itself, i.e., an ulcer of some sort. 

I gave Bo some oral banamine for pain relief and called Dr. Levine. I felt awful, because it was late on Saturday, it was pouring rain, and clearly this hadn't just happened. I was hoping he'd be able to walk me through what I could do to keep Bo comfortable until Monday morning, but he insisted he should come out and look at the eye. He was so gracious about it and said, "You feel worse about me coming out than I do, so don't worry!" 

About five minutes later my cell phone rang and it was Steve, saying he had just had an emergency colic call come in right after he got off the phone with me. He would need to stop at that client's farm first and then head to us. That made me feel a tad better that I wasn't the only person screwing up his Saturday evening. 

When Steve arrived, I haltered Bo and brought him up to the main barn. In the photo at the top, he's injecting a nerve block for the eyelid so we didn't have to fight to keep Bo's eyelid open. I have often said that the strongest muscle in a horse is not in the leg — it's the eyelid. Especially when the eye is painful, a determined horse can keep the eyelid closed tight. I have, over the years, become pretty good at prying them open enough to get the job done, but a nerve block makes life much easier!

After examining Bo's eye, Steve put a stain strip in under the eyelid, waited for a few seconds, and removed it. Then he pulled out a flashlight and immediately we could see where the problem was — sure enough, there was a small ulcer, right where all the vascularization was. Here we are looking at it:

The yellow stain "pools" in any break in the corneal surface, and under the light it glows like neon. You can't miss it.

Of course, at this point I felt even worse, because I could have done the stain too, but I didn't have the stain strips. If I had, I could have saved him the trip out. A corneal ulcer is generally easily treatable with topical antibiotics, which we had on hand. 

Steve started the treatment on Bo's eye and left me with stain strips to check his eye later in the week, as well as for future cases like this. On Sunday, Bo was already holding his eye open much more, a sign the healing has begun and he's more comfortable.

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