Rico's Hospitalization

Everything exploded with my horses right around Christmas. It's not a good time to be a horse owned by me, and it's not a good time for me to own horses I guess. But they're mine and I'm stuck with them. Today we'll talk about Rico, and soon enough, TC.

If you follow me on instagram but don't talk to me in person, I'm sorry. I posted a picture of Rico at the equine hospital, basically didn't explain what had happened, then took off to Portland and ignored it. I hate it when people do that, but then I also didn't want to have to go into all this detail on social media. So I was one of those vague people.

Such a skinny old man these days

On Monday morning, the same day I posted about how well Rico had been doing (in that he wasn't getting worse anymore), the vet came out to see him. I was around because of vacation from work, so opted to talk to her as well.

Essentially, what I posted about on that Monday holds true- Rico is not getting any worse. But his fever has to be managed by bute and he is on an intense amount of antibiotics and isn't getting better. This made the vet doubt her finding that he had Internal Pigeon Fever, or think that maybe the internal abscess had burst and now his abdomen was filling up with pus. Great.

So she recommended an abdominal ultrasound down at the hospital. The hospital is about 45 minutes away from the ranch, so Rico headed down there midday Wednesday and I followed to help out. Rico likes my mom a lot, but there's a difference in his behavior when I'm around and I wanted to be there for him as best I could during my busy week off.

So cute

We got there and let Rico graze- he's still on the eat-all-the-things diet because he's still losing weight. I held him while my mom went in to let them know that we were there. Rico doesn't really need to be held, so I threw the rope over his neck and was ignoring him when he took off power walking over to some other horses. No no no! They might get you sicker! I caught him and then we went exploring.

After working with TC for so long, who has a lot of apprehension and nerves about new places, I laughed as Rico directed our exploring. There's no spook in that horse. He dragged me out the gate and started heading down the road to the highway. Like I had to tell him no, we can't go on the road, this is a real road, not the private road you live on. We turned around and he got sassy because I don't WANT to go back there, there could be cool stuff over HERE. He tried to avoid the gate by zipping past it at a trot to get to the other side of the driveway so he could go explore there, but then the vet drove in (as I'm being dragged around by a sassy and very sick 21 year old horse) so I had to pull him into the clinic.

The second he's better, were going back here

We followed the vet toward the exam room, Rico's positive attitude hiding the horrific and possibly deadly infection hiding inside his belly. He looks terrible- he's skinny, extra furry, completely under-muscled, but he was SO happy to be in a new place. During the initial exam (draw blood, heart rate, breathing, temperature), Rico heard a goat and really wanted to go see what was going on. He's a good boy though so stuck by me mostly.

Rico was running a temperature of about 102. Not as high as he's been (104) but still high enough where the vet didn't want to sedate him. He asked whether I thought Rico would walk into the exam room, get in the stocks, and be okay throughout the procedure with no sedation. I was like um yes he's the world's most perfect horse and you can do literally anything to him and he'll just rest a foot. Man I miss this horse.

So off we went. Rico loaded into the stocks with no problem, they closed the big doors so he was in the dark, doused him in alcohol, and started ultrasounding. He whinnied a couple of times and shuffled around once, but other than that he stood stock still, looking back at the vet like wtf man what are you doing or letting me kiss his nose.

Can we pause for a moment to think of the utter chaos and homicide that would occur if I tried to get TC to do that? I think he would have destroyed EVERYTHING and jumped out the window to get away. Horse will NOT be contained.

Not the best smile-r but he does it when I make him

Anyway, sure enough on Rico's liver was an abscess. There was some abdominal fluid, and the vet wasn't sure whether that fluid was normal (since it IS normal to have some fluid, he didn't have a lot, but we want to check). We decided to keep Rico overnight so the vet could pull him off his antibiotics for 24 hours and then go in and get a sample of the fluid. If that was normal, then we would go into the abscess.

The idea is that clearly Rico's bugs (what he called the bacterial infection) weren't responding well to the antibiotics. If we just experiment with antibiotics, it might take a long time to get him to be better, which means more time for him to develop other issues (Stretch got hepatitis). Each antibiotic takes 10 days to two weeks to work, so we're looking at months of just keeping him stable like this as we switch antibiotics. OR we can take some of those bugs, grow them in a lab, then put all the different antibiotics on them and see which one kills them most effectively.

Sure enough, the fluid was cloudy and full of bacteria. This explains why he isn't getting better as fast as he should. BUT the bacteria was NOT Internal Pigeon Fever. It was a different bacteria, one that is found in plants, so Rico must have eaten something?

... What... The abscess is CLEARLY Internal Pigeon Fever. But it's not leaking into his abdomen like we thought, it's a totally different bacteria.

So what this means is: Rico has two different raging infections inside his body that could kill him.

The good news is that they did grow the bugs from the secondary infection, determine what antibiotics are best to fight it, and Rico is now on those antibiotics. He is also not spiking fevers anymore, which is amazing news.

Just want to see this happy face staring at me
just like this soon

Obviously I'm happy he's doing better, but it's also never ever good news to hear that your horse has not one but TWO deadly infections inside of him.

So we just keep hoping and I just keep giving him hugs and telling him that he's got this.