Today was by far our busiest day on equine medicine. Last night, my classmate Ani was called in as two horses were presenting on emergency around 1AM with acute laminitis. Laminitis is an inflammation in a horse's foot that can be extremely painful. These horses got laminitis because they got into corn. When horse's ingest large amounts of carbohydrates (corn, grain, etc), they become at risk for developing laminitis. One of the horse's is worse off than the other and when he walks, its like he's walking on egg shells. Then, around 8:30 this morning, a miniature horse foal presented for colic. Colic is a generic term for abdominal pain. He seems to be doing alright but him and his mom are both with us in the hospital right now. I had the one regular appointment today. It was a horse that had been having increased respiratory effort for a month or so. We took radiographs of its chest and it looks exactly like recurrent airway obstruction, or heaves. So, we performed a transtracheal wash which I got to help with. You cut a hole in the skin just over the trachea and take a good sized trochar (essentially a big needle in it but that is not hollow) and pierce into the trachea (windpipe). You remove the pointed part of the trochar and slide a catheter into the trachea, push about 20mLs of fluid down into the horse's lungs and then suck the fluid back out. This gives a good sample of the cells that are down in the lower airways of the horse. It was neat to see and assist with!
This weekend will be consisting of going into school for treatments of the horses and studying for boards. Not the most enthralling weekend but a necessary one nonetheless!
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