Damaged eye!!

[dunthing]

My daughter's old TB came in with a very swollen eye and the surface is all white. This is a big problem as he is already partially sighted. The swelling went down very quickly but he seems to be blind on that side. He went out on loan some years ago and came back with a white splash across his eyeball. The vet says that to him, it would be like looking through a net curtain. My daughter has tried to get him to look round at her, as he always has, when walking up the side of him but he doesn't know she's there until she talks to him. Is it possible that the eye will improve? She will have him PTS if he is almost blind as he is a bit spooky and we can't stand the thought of him injuring himself if he should panic, also, he isn't the easiest horse to treat being a wuss around his head. Any thoughts/suggestions would be very welcome.

 

[Fleur100]

if it is an eye injury & not a reaction to flies the if you haven't already done so you should get the vet out immediately. Eye damage is treatable and infection is the biggest worry. Antibiotics need to be applied into the eye. If the cornea is torn it may have to me debrided to prevent continuing irritation. It's very painful for the horse.

 

[dunthing]

The eye is not swollen or weeping. There appears to be no evidence of injury on the surface of the eye either. Vet was due this afternoon. I'm just getting as much info as I can. We had a jumping pony many years ago who got hit in the eye by a low branch, she had a white bit on her eye for a few weeks but the vet said it wasn't damaged and would go away which it did. This is a bit more serious for the old chap. Hoping it all turns out ok as he is such a gentleman to handle and ride.

 

[Box_Of_Frogs]

Not an armchair vet as someone on the Forum accused some of us of being the other day but if it's any use at all, I can share my experience from the terrible battle I had with my horse Sunny. The white area on the cornea means the tissue is under terrible stress from injury or infection. The infection (of course!) can be viral, bacterial or fungal. In an older horse it could be even more sinister. You won't see the eye itself swollen but it's likely the lid and area around it may be. There may be massive tear production if the eye is very painful. The white area can recover but corneas are hard to heal since they have no blood supply and rely on the moisture bathing the eye to carry oxygen and white blood cells. The outer injury that you see may also be accompanied by internal changes in the eye such as uveitis or tumours.

Why was he partially sighted in the first place dunthing? This could be significant. The spookiness round his head is very likely to be as a result of his partial sightedness. You have to treat partially sighted horses (as you will already know) with great care since if they can't see anything on one side of their heads they will simply assume there is nothing there. So if a hand or a headcollar etc suddenly appears it startles them. Talk to your ned all the time you are working round him and keep a hand on his body so he knows where you are.

If it is a simple infection, antibiotics should clear it up though it may take some time and you must be ULTRA careful about putting drops or creams into a horse's eye, especially if he is already a bit anxious about his head. One sudden twitch of his head as you push the pointy plastic end of the ointment tube almost onto the surface of his eye and you can gravely injure the eye or even puncture the eyeball. It is far, far better to apply the cream to your clean finger tip and then squish your soft finger tip into the eye.

Sunny (now aged 22) had very bad conjunctivitis in both eyes that his previous owners hadn't bothered to clear up. For no reason that we were ever able to discover, it flipped over in one eye into a terrible auto immune disease where his own body was trying to attack the eye tissue, believing there was still an infection present. The first symptom was a white cloudy patch across his cornea. He went immediately to a specialist clinic and they managed to stabilise it. He came home after a week needing 2 different creams applied twice a day. The yard staff managed to stab him in the eye while putting the creams in and that was the beginning of the end. We lost all the progress we had made and he had to go back to the clinic for 2 weeks. When he came home, I had to walk a tightrope with him. If the eye seemed ok, I applied the immuno suppressant creams. If there was a HINT of something else happening, I had to stop the immuno suppressants and start on strong antibiotics. Many horses would NOT have let you near the eye after about a week of this. Some horses in the clinic had to be given a GA to administer treatment. Some horses need to have a fine tube stitched into the corner of their eye and down the outside of their neck so that the owner can apply drops from well away from the eye so the horse tolerates it better. Of course, if this is done, the horse has to be stabled 24/7 and nursed with great care.

After a month or so of juggling Sunny's medications and trying to give him as normal a life as possible, the disease gradually took over and ulcer after ulcer bloomed deep in the cornea. Sunny would be in terrible pain and I had the emergency vet out countless times to administer intravenous bute for the pain. In the end, it was too much for Sunny to bear and the decision was made that the eye had to be removed. He recovered very fast, has never looked back, still pops a little jump and is one of the safest hacks on the yard, a total confidence giver. The surgery was 2 years ago. My one terror is that the same thing will happen in his other eye, since he still has recurrent episodes of conjunctivitis and dermatitis in that eye. I would unhesitatingly pts if he developed untreatable symptoms in the other eye since total blindness with both eyes removed is, to my mind, not compatible with any quality of life for a prey animal such as a horse.

I think you need to talk with your vet and ask for absolute honesty on what they think is the likely progress of this problem. If it is a simple infection, ned may just need careful nursing and tlc for a few weeks. If the outlook is bleak and ned is already partially sighted and very old, then you will need to monitor him carefully to understand when he's had enough. And to echo this Forum again, better a week too early than a day too late. Got everything crossed. Please let us know how he does. Sunny is the liver chestnut in my sig and the eye patch was made for him to protect the blind side of his head when he travels! x

 

[dunthing]

Thanks for the info Box_of_frogs. The horse is my daughter's ex PtoP TB who is 18 years old. He raced until he was 12 when my daughter bought him. He had a very sore back due to numerous falls and also had/has ulcers which cause weight loss and squits. He went to a girl who said she would re-school him as he was a nutter on grass. When my daughter got him back, he was very thin and had a white splash across his eye. It hasn't improved and vet says it has affected his sight quite a lot. I have yet to hear from my daughter, what the vet said. Will keep you posted.