Anne and her resident assistant came by again this morning to change the bandage on Bug's ear. They seemed surprised that her cap was still on. So was I, as a matter of fact! She had managed to get it off her OTHER ear a couple times, but the bandage on the abscessed ear was so huge and bulky that the ear covering was pretty hard to get off even for the vet!
Once it was unbandaged, the ear looked pretty messy at first.
The first thing they did was wash the ear with some sort of antiseptic shampoo stuff.
Once they had washed off all the grunge, they flushed her ear out again with lots of saline.
They "injected" the saline into the top opening and then it would run out the opening at the bottom -- bloody at first, then eventually clear.
Once that was done, she pulled the gauze out of Bug's ear canal (the gauze kept the saline flush from running down into her ear), and then they dried her ear off.
Bug seemed to LOVE that part. Apparently it felt really good to have her ear rubbed!
You can see really well in this picture how that tubing loop goes in and out of her ear to keep the incision open so it can be flushed repeatedly.
Once all that was done, they rebandaged her ear and Anne pulled back her mane and put in a braid to keep the hair away from her ear.
Then we put a clean ear covering on her and she got to go out into the big pasture with the other two horses -- a happy girl!
If she manages to pull off the ear covering and/or the bandage I will need to flush it out myself and rebandage it over the weekend. They left me all the necessary stuff including a big bag of saline, but doing it on my own with no sedation would definitely be something of a challenge! If she doesn't pull the bandage off, they said to just leave it alone -- they plan to come back Monday afternoon to redo everything again. So I'm hoping against hope that she does NOT remove the thing!
I'll tell you what, NEXT spring both girls are going to be wearing fly masks with ears from the moment the temperature hits 70 so that no abscess happens again. They tell me that the flies and gnats are what cause that - something I didn't realize before. I thought they were caused by some sort of injury or other.
I haven't gotten a bill yet, but I hate to think what it's going to cost to have had that surgeon out here! I know it'll be more than it was last year when Anne handled everything herself. But I'm going to try not to think about it until I absolutely have to. At least Bug seems to feel really good again now, and that's a fine thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment