A bit of normality

Today was another busy day, I didn't leave the hospital until 6, and ye we only saw 3 cases! It's crazy when each case takes you 2-3 hours, but it makes the day go quickly so that's nice. They were all lameness assessments. The first was a horse that had mild lameness in all of its feet, but was exacerbated when the owners took off his hind shoes. There was evidence of white line disease, which is also a problem, but the biggest problem is the lack of shoes. When we knocked out the front feet the rear ones became much worse, so tomorrow morning the ferrier is coming to do an emergency shoeing so hopefully that helps. He also may have some sub-clinical laminitis, so they're going to take faster blood tomorrow to test for cushings and equine metabolic disease, which is like type 2 diabetes. The next horse that came in had had a 4/10 lameness when it was checked by another vet and then sent here. After running the gambit of lameness tests there was no obvious lameness in any feet. It's always confusing when that happened because I can't tell if I'm

Just not seeing a mild lameness or if in fact the horse is not lame. So we did an ultrasound, which was cool since I actually knew all of the structures that we saw! So that was reassuring. There were no obvious problems with the tendons. The vet thought maybe there was a problem with the superficial digital flexor tendon, because there was mild swelling but it could have been from the bandages that the owners were putting on the horse. The ultrasound showed us no obvious problems, but if there is some oedema the pressure of the U/S scanner will compress it so you don't always see it. We took some radiographs just to cover all the bases since it seems that this horse wasn't lame after all. And no diagnosis is almost more concerning that an actual one! The horse had some small bone scars but they were one both sides so they didn't seem to be relevant. All in all there was nothing wrong that we could find, so we sent the horse home and told them to just monitor it to make sure it didn't go lame again! Though I was kind of bummed that I didn't get to see anything cool, it is nice to get a patient that's normal since you can run into the problem of only ever having seen things that are wrong you don't get to see what things should look like! The next case was another lameness case. We didn't do the whole battery of lameness tests and just dove into doing and ultrasound. There turned out to be a calcification along the tendon sheath that cast a pretty big shadow over the tendons and as a result of this calcification the deep digital flexor tendon had torn, which is bad news because its pretty much the most important tendon in the horse. So he's going to need lots of rest, and will most likely have to retire, though he's 20 so not terribly surprising in a horse of that age. After that I helped clean the exam room and then an 'emergency' came in that one of the vets had been seeing all day that had choke, an oesophageal impaction. So we have her some drugs and IV fluids. You basically wait for it to clear on its own, she was hacking some stuff up so hopefully in the morning shell be clear. She also kindly used my shirt and trousers as a tissue and wiped her bloody nose all over me. So much for today being a clean day!