A lame day!

This morning I hitched a ride with a Glasgow student who was also seeing practice, and we got to sit in on a presentation by one of the vets on extradurals (epidurals are for humans and laymans) so that was interesting! Then one of the vets caught me in the hall and said that she had a present for me in the fridge. Well I knew it could only be 1 thing. Poop! I got to do a faecal egg count, and now I know how to do it! Very exciting. Also it solved a mystery as to why these 2 horses were wasting away, so that's good! Then we saw a 3 year old filly who was bucking and rearing and not riding well, so she came in for a lameness test. We trotted her around and the vet suspected that she had kissing spine because she was bilaterally lame and had fairly severe back pain in her lumbar spine. But it still could have been other things, so we took some radiographs, which was so much easier at the hospital than it was in Spain with the portable unit! It turns out that the horse did have kissing spine, in a number of places, so it didn't look too good. They wanted to do something that wasn't expensive, so we did an intramuscular injection of steroids to help with the inflammation along the spine. Basically a glorified IM injection, but still cool. Also I got to do an IV injection! So tick that off my list! While we were doing this a horse that had surgery yesterday started having diarrhoea, which panicked one of the vets here since there is a horse in isolation that has salmonella, so they were afraid that it my have spread. Upon further investigation it seems more like some fort of impaction, and faecal matter is just bypassing it and getting runny. But it's still relatively isolated from the rest for now and being monitored. Then a horse

Came in that's going to have surgery tomorrow. It has a quitter, or not a true quitter but something like it. I'm not entirely sure what that is, but it's in the hoof and some kind of infection that needs to be scooped out, so hopefully ill see that tomorrow! Then another lameness case came in. I should mention that while I'm seeing these lameness cases another vet is also seeing lameness cases, there was a lot today. This horse presented with a mild head nod and left forelimb lameness, but like a 1 out of 8, so barely noticeable. We trotted him on hard ground, and did the lunge line on hard and soft ground. Then did a digital nerve block, and lunged him again. He had long toes and low heels so it was most likely some sort of foot problem, probably with the way his foot was loaded. So we took a bunch of radiographs. I got to process them! Which was fun, and there's a wee widow where they pass me the cassettes, so I got to see how they position the limb and also the radiograph once it was done. They determined that there was problem with the navicular bone, most likely because of the long toes and low heels, so they did an injection of depo into the coffin joint, and because the coffin joint communicates with the navicular bursa it will go in there and help with the inflammation. And hopefully that with corrective shoes will help stop the lameness before it becomes a real problem.