An update from Shadowood

Hello All,

It's been a trying summer here at Shadowood. Aside from a number of very serious medical crises with Joe earlier this summer and my own rather minor bout of skin cancer, the animals have been keeping me securely entrenched in "nurse mode". I've been so busy worrying and fussing and caretaking all summer that I simply haven't felt up to dumping it all on you guys. Then when I was ready to start sharing some of the stress, my hard drive died and left me stranded offline for the last several weeks. I finally replaced my hard drive a few days ago and have been madly uploading software, updates, and data back into this dratted machine that has become the repository for so much of my life.

So if you will indulge my need to expunge some of the worry from my head, here is an update on my household "patients" (only the 4-legged ones):

Tasha - To recap, she went through two cruciate surgeries on the same leg, one on June 26 and the other on July 19, from which she is still trying to recover. Because her recovery has been so slow, we took her to an orthopedic surgeon for a second evaluation and am now consulting with him regularly regarding her progress (or regress, as is currently the case). The jury's still out on whether or not she will require a third surgery, but hope springs eternal.

Raggie - We had to give our ancient cocker a final push to Rainbow Bridge a couple of weeks ago. Raggie suffered a night of grand mal cluster seizures about a year ago, after which he was diagnosed as hypothyroid. His seizures and thyroid had been well controlled with phenobarbitol and thyrosine until last week when he had another grand mal seizure. At his very advanced age and in his fragile condition, we couldn't justify putting him through any more heroic measures to maintain what little was left of his body and existence. Paul came out to the farm at midnight and put Raggie to final rest surrounded by our family.

Molly - If any of you remember what I went through last winter when Stinker (my youngest geriatric horse) stopped eating, you can imagine how stressed I was when his mother, Molly, did the same thing this summer. Molly is in her early 30's now, is very arthritic, is prone to laminitis, and is showing some signs of Cushing's. As an aged grey, it is also quite likely that she has cancer brewing somewhere in her system. She also developed hoof abscesses earlier this summer just like Stinker had done. But I don't think any of that was what caused Molly to quit eating. I believe it was the oppressive heat. Even as a young and vital mare, Molly was always very sensitive to heat. In her current condition, the sort of heat we experienced this summer might well have been deadly ... and nearly was. After several weeks of eating almost nothing and dropping several hundred pounds, Molly was skeletal and weak. All I could do was keep putting a variety of foods in front of her, give her vitamin B shots and prednisone to try to stimulate her appetite, keep her inside during the day, and give her cold showers twice a day to lower her temp (which was quite elevated for a while). I also had her on penicillin for a while on the chance that her high temp was the result of a systemic infection rather than just the heat. After a while, the cold showers managed to get her body temp back to near normal, and the air temp moderated enough to keep her more comfortable. Shortly thereafter, she began to eat again.

She's been eating very well for more than a month now, but the weight is coming back extremely slowly. Paul tells me it is because a starving animal's metabolism increases, but he can't tell me how long it'll take for her metabolism to return to normal now that the anorexia has resolved. I'm already feeding her a dangerous amount of grain, given her propensity for laminitis, and I can't add oil to her meals because her system is completely oil-intolerant. I am slowly switching her to a pelletized feed with a higher fat content to increase her caloric intake, but I know I won't have time to get adequate weight on her before winter. I also know that Paul wants me to put her down before winter because he doesn't think she'll be able to handle the cold with her arthritis. Taking things one day at a time with my old lady.

Ferouge - My little Arab mare has suffered with Moon Blindness in her left eye for years, requiring steroidal drops twice a day just to keep the eyelid from swelling shut. About a month ago, her eye swelled shut as it has done hundreds of times before in spite of the steroid. I kept administering the drops into the tiny crack I could produce by trying to pry the swollen lids apart, but this time the eye didn't get any better. I finally called Paul out to check the eye to see if there was something in it (since I wasn't able to get her lids open enough to check myself). After sedating her, he was able to get the eye open enough to see that she had somehow punctured the eyeball itself. Nothing to do but remove the eye. So now Ferouge has only one eye, and Paul has given me the grim probability that she will, at some point, develop Moon Blindness in that eye, as well. Ferouge is about 30 yrs old, so dare I hope that death will precede complete blindness? Ferouge is a typically dingbat Arab (apologies to those who own calm Arabs), so blindness will not suit her well. For now, however, she is actually far more comfortable having the diseased eye removed than she has been for years.

Phantom - Surely you guys remember my oh-so-feral boy. Phantom is quite the cat of leisure these days, happily basking in home life, though I do think he misses Raggie with whom he had developed a rather close relationship. Phantom was leisurely, anyway, until he developed a complete urinary blockage a couple of weeks ago and had to be rushed to Paul for catheterization and flushing. He spent a week back in the bedroom behind baby gates (and under the bed) where I could monitor his urinary output (which never has normalized and is still cause for concern) and give him daily antibiotics (which he REALLY did not appreciate and which resulted in no small amount of blood loss on my part). He's acting fine now, but I'm keeping a very close eye on him for any signs of reblockage.

That's it for the significant veterinary concerns right now. It's hardly worth mentioning the way my heart skipped several beats when I heard a crash out in the pasture while I was cleaning the barn and looked out to spy Molly lying on the ground right next to the fence. She had been rubbing against a post, and the post broke off at ground level, sending them both crashing to the ground. Luckily, Molly was undamaged, and I didn't have a heart attack. I also didn't have a heart attack when I found Molly with fresh blood smears on both of her sides a week earlier. After a quick but thorough "blood check", I found that the injury was in her mouth. She had apparently bumped her mouth hard enough on something to cut the insides of the fronts of both her upper and lower lips. The blood smears on her sides had occurred as she was biting at flies. By the time I found the cuts, they had stopped bleeding.

Other than that, all's well at Shadowood. Sigh.

Laurie