Ozzie lamed up

I was doing horse chores last Tuesday afternoon and all the horses appeared to be fine. Milling around the paddock and hanging out. I opened them into our front pasture and locked them in to clean poop in the padock. When I was done I opened the paddock back to them and went into the house.

My daughter Erin went to feed them about 2 hrs later and came in the house and said something was wrong with Oz. I followed her to the barn and Oz was standing in the paddock with his head down ears back and lifting his right rear leg off the ground. He would not walk or come into the barn and was in obviouse distress.

I did get a halter on him and coaxed him into his box stall and tried to get him to eat but he would’t. After investigating to see if we could find any injury, we noticed that he had swelling above his hoof and there was a noticable buldge in his right groin. We called the vet, they suggested icing the swollen area and giving bute to try to reduce swelling. We were thinking that it was a soft tissue injury to the leg, maybe from one of the other horses kicking him. And then thinking the buldge was a muscle strain due to keeping his leg lifted. We kept him in the box stall for the night.

Wednesday morning, he seemed to be putting his foot down, but still not comfortable with putting any weight on it. We did another dosage of bute and iced it again. The swelling looked to be going down a little on his hock.

By Thursday afternoon, the swelling had migrated up the complete leg and his hock was extremely swollen as well as the complete leg. And the area surounding his sheath was swollen. We called the vet again and they came for a farm call on Friday morning. When they looked the horse over, she was very concerned that the lymph node in the right rear groin was very swollen. She took blood and then were going to call with results.

She called Friday afternoon and said that he has a low white blood cell count, high parasite count and is anemic. She was not convinced that the anemia and white blood cell count are related. She thought that given his history, that even when we keep to a wormer schedule that it might not be enough to kill whatever he might have.

We have taken him off the bute, started with steriods and are giving him an antibiotic for possible infection. We are also doing high dosage of worner to try to kill the parasites. She told us to be prepared for the possibility of lymphoma. We are very hopeful that he will recover after the treatments he is getting for the next 10 days and we will find that it was only a muscle strain in his groin area. We are very concerned that the vet can not diagnose a specific condition. There could be a chance that we will have to be referred to a more specialized facility if this treatment does not work.

We will keep you posted.
Ed