What is Wrong with Sundance?

Sundance has been not feeling good for a couple of months now, so on Tuesday I hauled him down to the vet for my mom. 

I rode him all summer long, since he was the only one I had to ride with TC doing mostly ground work at the time. Mostly I rode him on the tracks and on the trails, I even took him out to HBR, the local trail facility, to walk on the flat road there.

But then this fall we noticed that he was losing weight and topline. I was surprised because he really was in more work than normal (which has been no work for a few years since my mom stopped riding). I stopped riding him in early November and we fed him more and more. Soon he was eating more than TC!

Poor naked pony

We had the vet out in early December for blood work and it wasn't great. He was anemic, showed low protein, and had a few other values that were pretty off. We redid his diet, adding a bunch of alfalfa for the protein. And he continued losing weight, so we did another round of bloodwork that didn't show much improvement. He had also started laying down more often, like many more times per day than usual and at odd times for him. So on Tuesday we took him down to the internal medicine specialist. 

She warned us at the start of the appointment that we were unlikely to leave with real answers. Her theory, which was the same as our local vet's theory, was that he had protein-losing enteropathy, essentially that his gut was leaking protein and that's what was causing the topline loss and the loss of weight. It can be caused by a myriad of things, including inflammation due to chronic NSAID use (nope), infection, lymphatic issues, and even cancer (lymphoma). 

He was truly horrified to have cold
alcohol dumped over his shaved bits

She ultrasounded his gut on both sides, looking for thickening of the walls of his intestines. His small intestine was very active and was dropped, meaning she saw a lot more of it than she expected. That's a sign of colic/intestinal pain. But the actual walls seemed fine. She went back into the large intestine and that's where she found some thickening in the wall of the cecum. It wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, she normally sees them like 3-4x thicker than normal and his was only slightly thicker. So she was comfortable saying that lymphoma was unlikely at that point. PHEW because cancer has taken enough people/animals from me this year. 

We also did abdominal x-rays to look for sand and/or stones, just since he was there at the clinic and it was convenient. Nothing showed up, so that was good to rule out. 

He's been such a good kid's pony 
this year (hopefully not just because
he has been feeling bad)

Like she warned, it was kind of inconclusive. There's no clear reason why what is going on is happening and unfortunately because the only abnormalities are in the cecum, the only way to really biopsy that area is to send him to colic surgery, which would be ridiculous. 

The plan then is to just start treatment. He is going on an all pellet diet so that the cecum doesn't have to work as hard. He's also going to get a tapering dose of steroids for a month. And he is going to be started on an antihistamine since he does have some allergy issues that she thinks could have triggered the inflammation. 

Then we wait. He gets bloodwork done in two weeks to see whether anything has improved, and he gets a recheck on his ultrasound in about a month. 

The younger kiddo is going to be so much bolder
and scrappier a rider than the older one, trying to
convince her to hold on was a no go

We're hoping that just one round of steroids and taking the pressure off of his cecum will be enough to kind of reset his gut. Although some horses need to be on low dose steroids for the rest of their lives, and figuring out the dose is really tricky because if you dip too low, you kind of have to start over because the symptoms start back up again. 

I really feel terrible for the little guy. He's only 20 years old, and for a Morgan that's basically only middle aged. It's been really sad to watch him lose weight and topline this year. He was always a round little guy, we called him an air fern! 

Fingers crossed this all works out and he feels MUCH better soon!