The end might be in sight!

First off: greetings to possible new readers over on Dreamwidth! Sorry for adding some older posts with the wrong dates – I was testing out this cross-posting thing and apparently it works! I probably won’t cross post all the old entries, but if you come over to http://www.silkyraven.co.uk/ you can see Dino’s whole story from the day we first went to meet him!

So things in pony-land are still stressful. Dino’s temperature has been pretty stable around the 37.1 – 37.5 mark all week, even after he had the last of the anti-biotics and Bute on Wednesday morning. He also has none of the other symptoms, the discharge or the lumps so it looks like he escaped the full blown illness. There is a risk he could still be carrying it though and pass it onto other horses so on Friday my vet came to see him and do a guttural pouch wash. This turns out to be a fairly tricky thing! Basically the guttural pouches are a space inside the back of the nose where Strangles bacteria quite like to hide out so you pass an endoscope up the nose, fiddle about a lot until you get a tube into the pouches, put some saline in to catch some bacteria and then pull this now bacteria laden saline back out. The bacteria is then sent to be DNA-tested to see if it’s Strangles. I’m really *really* hoping it is not. If it is it’s another 6 weeks in quarantine and then we have to do the whole thing *again* to see if he’s still carrying it.

Dino was heavily sedated but still wildly unhappy about the whole thing. Hopefully we won’t have to do it again! Vet confirmed that his lymph nodes are normal and agreed with me that the very very slight discharge he has is likely from dry hay so that was a relief and means the grill has come off his stable door and he can put his head out to see other ponies again! Yay! He’s still confined to his stable though until we get the results.

I need to start thinking about how I’m going to get him back into work. He’ll need a programme to loosen him up after being confined for so long and I suspect his hips will be very stiff. If he does end up being confined for another 6 weeks we’ll need to do a bit more of something in his stable to keep in occupied.