Christmas Eye, er, I mean, Eve!

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!! Replete with all manner of fun time spent with family and friends and food and drinks (and hopefully a not insignificant amount of chocolate and cheese too haha)!

pro tip: avoid the extreme mud in your horse's pasture by riding him down to the gate

Things have been quiet in Charlie land lately. It seems like every time we go out and do something big and exciting, we need an equal and opposite period of .... quiet and decidedly not exciting.

Like after we finally schooled Training XC on Loch Moy's arena derby course, and Charlie spent the next week ridiculously hoof sore after losing a shoe. Or, more lately, about a week after our clinic with PD when Charlie came out for our lesson with a weepy eye and a hot sore hoof.

hm, i spy with my little eye: a sad charlie

Sigh. It's not totally clear what was up with the hoof. Our world is mud rn. It's honestly maybe a miracle the horse's hooves haven't straight up rotted off their legs. The easiest guess would be an abscess, but Charlie's demonstrated an inclination to get equally sore and crippled for lesser woes: a bruise, a soft spot, a laminae-dwelling babadook...

So ya know. Could be anything haha. The heat seemed centered on his coronet band, so I slathered ichthammol all over it and left him to his fate.

can't you just feel the sadness emanating from this picture?!?

Luckily, the hoof seemed 100% totally fine next time I saw Charlie. But... that proved to be an afterthought anyway when I hiked out to his field on Christmas Eve and was immediately greeted by a substantially more swollen and sad looking eye.

Initially the eye had kinda just looked like maybe he had some mud in it. The surface was totally smooth, and while he was holding it just a little closed, he was producing a lot of clear watery tears as if it just needed a good flush.

don't be fooled by his pitiful looks tho. i'm pretty sure he would have happily spent the entire day hangin around the ring amidst his lesson mates

This next time I saw him tho the eye was definitely more closed, more swollen, and had accumulated some crust after continuous weepiness. Sigh. I was ok with the idea of giving the eye a day or two to clear up on its own, but IMO an eye that isn't decidedly improving is an eye that deserves a vet call.

while the foot got better, the eye unfortunately did not

Luckily the vet was able to meet us out at the farm on Christmas Eve pretty quickly. We conducted the appointment in the relative dark of Charlie's stall, since I guess it's easier to do the diagnostics in darkness vs light.

Likeliest case was an ulcer. The vet did a nerve block on Charlie's eyelid (x2 bc the first didn't sufficiently work). Then flushed with dye first, and saline second. Also x2 bc her hand held ophthalmic light tool was dead and needed to be charged up for a hot minute, so we ended up repeating the flush once it was charged.

luckily chrismas = homemade horse treats from my mom <3

Despite the double dousing with dye, there were no indications of any dye pickup - which would be indicative of an ulcer on the surface of the eye. For me, personally, it's a little nerve wracking to not see an ulcer when you expect to see one.

From what I understand, there's basically two courses of treatment for the most common eye injuries, one of which is steroid ointment. But steroid ointment is the absolute LAST thing you want to put in an eye with an ulcer bc it will increase the size of the ulcer.

see the peppermint bits too ??? these things are jam packed with goodies

But.... no ulcer was found. So that's the course of treatment prescribed to Charlie (instead of a triple antibiotic ointment that we would have used in the case of an ulcer). He got some banamine, a strip of atropine to open up his constricted pupil (which I guess helps the medicine get where it needs to go), and some dex ointment.

The dex ointment is administered inside his eyelid 3x daily. I fucking hate giving eye meds and am always so so so paranoid I'm going to jab the tip of the ointment tube right into the horse's eye. So the vet actually suggested I use latex gloves and squeeze out the necessary amount of ointment onto my fingertip and apply that way. Seems like an obvious idea haha, but I hadn't thought of it before. Definitely makes life easier tho!

The other two drugs - atropine and oral banamine - are supposed to be administered once a day. Tho Charlie's eye looked 1,000% better the next day (methinks all that flushing out during the vet appointment was a big help too, tbh) so I opted to skip the atropine.

The atropine dilates the pupil, which has the side effect of making the horse very light sensitive. Charlie refuses to wear a fly mask so this essentially means putting him outside in strong sunlight (ie, daytime turnout) could lead to greater discomfort in an eye treated with atropine. So he's on night time turnout with just a single buddy until those effects wear off. Which all means my inclination is to avoid further atropine treatments unless he needs it.

So we'll see. I'm sure the horse is fine. It's just another one of those small little dings that was jussssst serious enough to merit a vet call ($$) but probably more or less inconsequential in the long run. Just to be safe, tho, he'll get a check up appointment tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I took this week between holidays off of work in the hopes of getting a lot of saddle time. So. Ya know. Maybe by the time Charlie's eye is better, whatever was wrong with that hoof will flare back up again??? Lol it's always something!

At least in the meantime he gets to enjoy all those homemade cookies (which may or may not be laced with banamine at any given moment haha....)