August 29, 2010

It has been a bit of a grind these last few days.  Not that it has been very busy but it has been a lot of time up late sitting around checking on colics getting IV fluids.  They have done well so I guess I should be grateful but I would rather be busier doing different things than just being up late but not really doing much but babysitting.  I have been paying close attention to the “restoring honor” gathering in Washington DC that Glenn Beck organized.  It is interesting reading the different articles written about the event.  Most of them skillfully try to dissect what the people there are doing and their motives.  Most try to paint them as racist and deranged people but when I watch the footage that are ordinary and quite boring people to be honest.  I can help but think how much the church has changed Glen Beck and how much of a difference it has made in his life.  He is a great example of what enlightenment through the Holy Ghost can do to someone who is lost in life.  He has really gotten good at praying and receiving answers to his prayers.  It really makes me and so many others do as he did and look to God for answers to todays problems.  What I can’t decide is whether he will be successful in his movement to return peoples lives to Christ or if he will be one of the voices that will be extinguished in the period before the Second Coming.  I hope it is the former rather than the later.

I had an interesting day at Shiloh Horse Sanctuary and Rescue last Monday.  It is the clinics biggest client because it has somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 horses that are mostly either crippled or diseased in some way that people either tried to sell them at auction or they were surrendered directly to the rescue.  It is located in Sandy Valley which is about 30  miles southwest of Las Vegas on I-15 and then a right turn out into the desert for another 20 miles on a lonely road that climbs into the scorched hills and drops down into a dusty valley surrounded by hills completely.  In the middle there was an oasis-like clump of buildings and trees of a small sleepy community and off to the west on the slope up the hills was a bright emerald green block of land with a few buildings that is a large alfalfa hay operation.  It is amazing what water can produce in even the harshest environments.  I looked around for roads that climbed out of the dusty bowl but except for a couple dirt roads that wound off into the distance in to the hills the only road in or out I could see was the one we came in on.  We drove through the town to the opposite outskirts and visited a small horse facility to look at a horse with a bad eye and then we went to Shiloh.  Shiloh was started and is operated by Tony Curtis’s current wife and her mother and a countless hoard of mexicans.  I saw pictures of Jill Curtis recently with Tony looking exactly like Marilyn Monroe but these days with the addition of a few pounds she is quite ordinary looking but still tall and has a very kind yet strong presence while her mother Sally is shorter and even kinder in gesture and disposition and originally I mistook her for a friend instead of a mother because they appear too close in age.  Shiloh is an large piece of land covered with mesquite and geriatric horses, ponies and burrows bought from auctions all over the west, dogs rescued from the pound, and an assortment of pigs, goats, llamas and alpacas, and other farm critters.  We did a lot of lameness work, worked on teeth problems, froze tumors, and put down 4 old horses that have been wasting away recently due to disease, pain from lameness, or just old age.  What they do there is truly honorable and I am sure God approves and will reward their charity to his creatures.  We definitely need more people and places like this in on Earth.  But even though they intent to do the most they can for animals in my opinion they make a mistake by some of their ideology.  Every week they turn away over a dozen horse owners who want to surrender their horses to be cared for but they don’t have the room or ability to care for them so the owner should put them down but don’t allow them to be slaughtered.  It is probably true that if they had the resources they would like to save all animals but where they go wrong is when they tell the owners they they cannot slaughter them.  Slaughter is a bad word for doing the same thing as having a veterinarian come an put them down.  It is one of the controversial topics for vets today because the AAEP and most vets that work with horses think it would be best if there was a way that horse could be put out of its misery if its quality of life is not good buy humanly killing it and harvesting its carcass for consumption whether it is eaten by Frenchmen or dogs.  The current legislation to prevent the killing of horses for human consumption in the US does not care about all the poor horses out there who suffer unnecessarily.  It is wrong to force someone to not put a horse out of its misery or even tell them that they shouldn’t because once the horses is dead the carcass should be used and not wasted.  They don’t oppose the killing of horses they only oppose the eating of horses which in my opinion is only imposing your ideology on others which shouldn’t be done.  You can’t and shouldn’t save them all because they shouldn’t suffer for your ideology.

August 27, 2010

Finishing up on last months story of the bathing beauty, in short it didn’t end well.  Due to the craziness of the owner and the poor condition of the horse I figured the main problem was that the horse needed to be fed better and have its sheath cleaned.  The penis did have a little tumor that most likely regrew from when it was here a couple years ago to have a much larger tumor removed from the same site.  After a couple days here over the weekend it was clear that the horse had more going on.  He had very little appetite though we was very thin and his teeth were in pretty good condition for an old horse which can become a real problem as a horse ages and starts to get down to nubs or loose teeth altogether so the opposite tooth over grows.  A rectal palpation revealed a strange mass on inside body wall of the abdomen that we hypothesized was a tumor.  We then began to think it may be a metastasized tumor related to the same cancer he had earlier and likely has spread to other organs in the abdomen that you can’t reach from the rectum.  This was not good news to give the owner who was quite upset but given the age of the horse there is likely nothing we can do that the owner could afford or that would improve the quality of life of the horse.  She decided to just come pick him up but it would take a couple of days to round up a trailer.  During those two days the horse really began to go down hill quickly.  He became more and more depressed mentally and even began to show neurologic signs of stumbling, and not being aware of his surroundings.  By the time the distraught owner arrived the horse was in very bad condition.  We began to wonder if he should be put down here and not taken all the way back to Utah.  Upon seeing her horse the crazy owner became hysterical yelling that she should have never brought her poor horse here and he would have been better on the farm with his friends (all of which were probably true in hind sight).  She kept draping her arms around him and crying uncontrollably.  She finally decided she would take him home and have her veterinarian put him down when she got there so we loaded him up though he at this time was having a hard time standing and starting to act very agitated.  As soon as he climbed into the two horse trailer and the doors closed the owner reached her arm in the side window to give him a handful of hay and he collapsed and struggled until he was in a very awkward position on his back wedged at the back door.  I crawled in the window with another Dr and tried to see if we could get him up but it was clear that he was not able or willing.  It was decided to put him down in the trailer and she could drive him home to bury him on the farm.  It was quite a dramatic scene with the owner involved but the sound I will probably remember forever in the sad sobbing I heard trailing off over the noise of the engine and the tires as the poor crazed and distraught owner pulled away from the parking lot and down the road.  I felt so sorry for the owner and wished that there was something I could do to comfort her but I know well enough that there are sometimes when there is just nothing that can take those tough experiences away.

Later on that night, I was assisting Dr Schur on an emergency colic farm call and she told me a story that happened to Dr Lamb and the owners of the boarding facility we were at treating the colicky horse.  The owners were kind of shifty in that they never worked yet always had lots of money.  In Vegas there are lots of ways that people get money but the husband did get put in jail for drug related stuff in fact he may still be there now because the wife came out to see us work on the horse but he wasn’t around.  In any case, they had a daughter in her teens several years back who had a horse that got colic really bad.  In fact, the horse had ruptured his bowel and once a horse does that there is no saving them.  You can do your best for a couple days with fluid therapy and antibiotics and surgery but eventually they will die from it.  So the only thing Dr Lamb could do was put the horse down.  It was a very dramatic scene with the daughter being very distraught, laying on the horse yelling, “put me in the ground with her...I don’t want to live with out her…” and carrying on.  Later on that night the teen over dosed on drugs and was rushed to the hospital but died that same night.  Thinking of how I felt earlier that day I could imagine how Dr Lamb felt when he got the news.  Especially since he was the one who put the poor horse down that caused the daughter to be so upset.  Both events were out of his control but it really made me think about how much of an effect horses have on their owners and how as a veterinarian might effect people lives.  As a veterinarian things can be so fragile and complex and the outcomes sometimes are so unpredictable more from the human side rather than with horses who are simple animals in comparison.  

July 28 2010

Not too much interesting as far as horses today but there was a really interesting horse owner that came in. Interesting is the word you are supposed to also use in surgery when you accidentally slash open an artery or puncture a bowel instead of your normal reaction of woops! Or ough-oh! Just calmly say interesting...and then go about frantically fixing whatever went wrong. I’ve seen surgeons in Purdue use it and it is surprising how much it helps you rather than wasting energy and focus on swearing and pitching a fit.
It was after hours about 7 or so and I was hanging around reading or killing time for some reason. An old truck and trailer pulled up and a short fat middle aged lady unloaded a old paint horse that was a rack of ribs. She had came down from Utah somewhere and was quite distraught about the horses swollen penis. It looked pretty bad because it had become swollen and unable to retract up in to his prepuce so it had gotten pretty beat up by exposure to the sun and elements. He had what is called a reefing surgery a few years back because of a tumor on his prepuce that they remove a bunch of of the skin all around the penis. I suspected that he potentially had complication secondary to that or perhaps he had some cancer as well but the thing that made it look bad was the swelling and the sunburn and exposure damage to the light colored skin.
Anyway getting back the the lady. She was clad like most in the desert. A spandex aerobics like top under some kind of spaghetti string over shirt that the strings wouldn’t stay over he shoulders and slid down to her elbows most of them time. She was quite a large woman too, I’d say about 5 foot and 225 pounds or so. So there was lost of gross skin all over the place. She was quite crazy really I could tell from the start when she babbled on about how this horse was full of worms and she had beed up since 6 Utah time and really tired and her AC was broken. The first thing she wanted was the hurry and get this horse hosed down because he was really in bad shape and over heating. The horse looked fine to me, just thin and a big swollen sun burned penis. I just figured it couldn’t hurt anything but I was wrong. I gave her the hose and walked over and turned it on and when I turned around and she had the hose up over her head just hosing herself down. I could believe what I was seeing in the way she did it was like you would expect to see in the movies where there would be music playing and in slow motion the female actress would be turning and acting sexy as the water poured all over her. I just stood there in amazement. When the lady was done hosing herself thoroughly she put a little on the horses back for about 10 seconds and said OK that enough and I turned it off. Now she is soaking wet from her hair to her toe and there was a disturbing amount of wet skin hanging out all over.
Slightly traumatized I put the horse in a stall and told her to park the trailer over there and went to try and forget what I just saw but as you can tell I haven’t been able to. I came out a while later thinking she would be long gone and she was over in the parking lot lifting and heaving at the hitch of her little steel 2 horse trailer. She saw me and quickly yelled I don’t know how this stupid thing works. I assumed there was some sort of malfunction and went over to help. It looked like it was all undone and I couldn’t figure out what her hold up was. Then she said I have been lifting but I don’t
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Then she said I have been lifting but I don’tknow how to get it off. It was a normal bulldog hitch and it was all unlatched so I reached for the jack and she said,”now what is that, what does that do.” I didn’t look at her this time I just started turning it and jacked up the trailer I learned my lesson last time. I made sure she could drive away safely and thought to my self...interesting. Hopefully I won’t be around when she comes to pick her horse up but I will be floating his teeth on Monday.

July 13, 2010

Spent the first night in the new apartment last night. Well, that isn’t completely true, I spent about a half an hour the night before sleeping in the bed before I had to come in to the hospital to assist with a colic surgery. From 11pm to 11:30 I slept before I met Dr Dornkamp at the hospital where we stayed till about 7:15 in the morning. I went up stairs for about 30 minutes to sleep before the appointments came in for the day at 8am. The surgery ended up being 3 medium sized stones, 2 flat ones like hockey pucks in the large colon and one round one like a baseball in the small colon. We had to open 2 spots of the colon to get them all out. The horse recovered well and is doing well so far. I went out on 2 emergencies after hours with Dr Dornkamp (Jim). The first was a choke in a 20 year old horse that we passed a tube on and shot water at until it passed through to the stomach. When this happens it looks very dramatic because you are pumping water in to the plug of feed and a lot of water and green goo in coming right back out the nose and mouth. It looks like you are going to fill the lungs with nasty ingesta but the important thing to do is to sedate them pretty heavily so that their heads are down low to the ground so gravity will take all of the over flow out of the nose and mouth. It only took a couple pumps and this one cleared without any real problems but he got a bit of a bloody nose from the tube. The other call was a mini horse who’s stifle was locking in place. It was down on the south side of town and it was neat to drive down I-15 along the giant casinos. I never go down there especially at night and it’s kinda breath taking the marvel that has been built up by humans. The lights and spectacular buildings I could stare at for hours. It reminds me of Sao Paulo and the crazy commotion that you could always just sit back and gaze at and be entertained for hours. The mini horse indeed had a patella that would lock upward due to patellar ligaments that are too lax. The best thing to do is to exercise them and strengthen those quadriceps and tighten those muscles. Other wise you could go in there and split that medial ligament to get it to scar down and shorten or if it is severe enough you can even cut that ligament completely. Cutting it has been shown to predispose the patella to fracture so you only do it as a last resort.

July 7 2010

It was an interesting day. I met Jerry Lewis's wife today at a big horse barn in one of the only irrigated areas in Las Vegas. The whole area didn’t have the feel of Las Vegas to it and I figured out that is because the heat is not coming off the ground like it does every where else. The sun is probably not any stronger but the heat given off by the ground just really cooks you. It was a different world all together because the horse we looked at just was shipped in from Germany and costed $750.000 dollars. It is a lot like desperate house wives Las Vegas. The only males were the mexican grooms and me. I don’t know how much I would be comfortable working there because I don’t know anything about that type of horse or style of riding. We bred a few mares today with frozen semen that went well. A couple days ago a kid left a note on my car that he would like to buy it. I didn’t think much about it other than I began to worry if he was going to steal it. I called him the other day just to see what he would pay and then he came and drove it. He texted me that he has cash to buy it now and I asked him what he thinks its worth. He said that he honestly thinks it is worth about $1000 bucks so I told him if he had the cash come and get it tomorrow. So we will see if that goes down but it would be good because the room I want to rent is going to cost me about $1100 to move in because he wants the first months rent and last months rent for deposit. I like it when things sort themselves out like that. I guess the Lord knew exactly what I needed and it makes me think that I should rent the room. The guy is 30 years old and is a captain in the Airforce. He flies the predator drones and teaches others how to fly them here at Nellis air base. It should be interesting. Went of a colic emergency tonight and it didn’t look good for the poor old guy. It was a 28 year old grey arabian who was quite painful. He had 2 prior surgeries for colic many years ago. There is only so much you can do for them but you like to give them a chance even if they are in pain. This one didn’t look good though.

July 1, 2010

It was only around 95* today...at 8:30 AM. I bet it reached 108* or so at peak afternoon. It felt hotter than that standing out in the sun squeezing a liter of fluids in to a neurologic mustang stallion. The poor horse was not very tame in the first place and he had no idea where he was placing his feet. He looked some what like you would see with a West Nile Virus infection though you would think it difficult for a mosquito to survive out here in the desert. Apparently they do because they had to confirmed cases last year. It is a good thing the horses back home have been vaccinated. This horse had been down most of the day struggling to stand. It was interesting to see his frustration at his in ability to do the simplest things like get up or down or even move away from us like he would have liked to do it was clear when you looked in his eye. He still had the desire to be in control but his brain would not make his legs do what he wanted. He would grind his teeth in frustration and bite at whatever was near him like buckets, fences, even your boots if you were near enough. It wasn’t in a mean manner it was more because he was really irritated and just mad that he wasn’t himself.
I decided the old Honda needed a muffler if I was going to keep it. This morning the receptionist told me I left my lights on. I went out and the tail lights were on but not because I had left the head lights on. It was more like the car thought that it needed to have its brake lights on. I pulled the fuse so that the battery wouldn’t die. At lunch I looked into it and found the switch on the pedal had a plastic piece that had crumbled and fallen to pieces on the floor mat. I tried to find the part at autozone but they had no idea where I could get such a part. It was cleat that I was going to need to McGuyver a solution. I placed a penny on the brake arm secured with ducktape and it seemed to do just the trick. No doubt the extreme heat played a part in the crumbling plastic because I bet it reaches 150* in that poor car during the day.

June 29, 2010

Man has it been hot! The thermometer in the pickup truck says 110*F! I went up the canyon yesterday to see a horse that was down and when the temp dropped to 90*F it felt cool like I may need to jacket. Today I was able to run a nasogastric tube in a horse with colic due to a gut full of sand. It is a really big problem here as well as enteroliths that form due to the sand out here. I also performed a peroneal/tibial nerve block on a horse that is really lame in the hind limb. Other than that it hasn’t been too exciting. I have been doing the 1AM treatments on the poor rope horse that fell out of a horse trailer. Tomorrow, Dr Garth called and told me if we have time we will do some joint blocks so I need to study up the land marks and techniques. He has also asked me to breed a mare with frozen semen for him this weekend if she needs it. I will need to scan her a bunch to track her cycle progress. I actually haven’t done a lot of that though I have seen it done a lot. Dr Kevin also needs me to track his mares this week/weekend because he has had them on Regumate and is wanting to breed them which I potentially may need to do as well.