Eye Ulcers

Nats_uk

Nats_uk

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My horse has developed an ulcer on his left eye. He is on bute, atropine eye drops and eye ointment.

Has anyone been through this before? How long do they normally take to heal?
 
It probably varies and your vet should be able to give you an idea. My boy had an ulcer and ended up having to go into the vets for a fortnight for intensive antibiotics. Was fine afterwards.
 
Mine took around 6 weeks in the end I think, he had to been kept in the dark for several weeks then wear blinkers 24/7 until it had fully healed, this did mean he could be turned out and ridden in them though. Hope yours gets better soon.
 
Nats - do they know why the ulcer developed? That will be critical in the healing. If it was a relatively straightforward poke in the eye in the field then it should heal in a week or two. The atropine is to keep his pupil dilated so that adhesions don't form in the eye that will distort his vision. The ointment is almost certainly antibx. A word of caution, take EXTREME care putting drops and creams in the eye as the plastic ends of the tubes are usually lethally pointy and one jerk at the wrong time from an anxious ned and you can permanently damage the eye. Safest way to put creams in is to gently bathe the eye area, wash your hands thoroughly and then put the cream on the end of your finger and squish that into the eye.

If the ulcers are caused by something else, the prognosis may not be so straightforward. The cornea does not heal well as it does not have a blood supply. Sunny was eventually diagnosed with superficial keratitis and after a 6 month battle -compounded by severe secondary damage to the cornea from the end of the ointment tube - Sunny had to have his eye removed.

My (lay) advice would be to keep a very close watch on it and request immediate referral to a specialist horse eye hospital if it does not appear to be healing. PM me for more info. Fingers crossed xxx
 
Would echo Box of Frogs advice, my pony had them in both eyes and they got worse rapidly to start with. He is however fine now, you can just see a very small scar where they were.
 
My mare is doing well. After my vacation, I discovered her looking odd and realized her eye was swollen and she was squinting. My other mare had beat up on her. There was a small dimple in the surface of her eyeball and a cloudiness beneath, about the size of a pencil eraser. Vet told me corneal ulcers are very serious and extremely painful -- can lead to loss of eye. My mare is already blind in that eye, but an infection could require removal of the eye. He said to treat the wound as aggressively as possible at first and the outcome would be better. I had to put two steroid drops, Gentomycin and another one, as well as banamine paste orally and a painkilling powder to prevent colic. Vet said to put drops in every twenty minutes for the first few hours, once in middle of night and as often as I could the next day. I did my best, although it became difficult for me to put the drops in her eye. A friend told me her doctor recommended a new (has to be brand new, unused) tube of Original Neosporin ointment. I cleared it with my vet (he said fine, but continue drops). After a few days I was only using the Neosporin because I just could not get the drops in her eye, but I could easily smear a big dollop of ointment. The cut/dimple healed in about a week and I stopped the meds. The vet said the cloudiness might take a month to dissolve/heal. She is no longer squinting or showing any signs of pain and I cannot see the cloudiness any longer (after two weeks). He also said corneal ulcers heal very slowly on equines, compared to humans or dogs. Good luck. Hope you have better luck with applying meds than I did.
 
Thanks for the info.

The vet isn't sure. He had (we suspect) uvitis in his eye as a foal and has virtually no (if at all) vision in his left eye and it was always slightly cloudy. He came in from the field a week ago fine and I noticed him having a good scratch on his hay net - turned round 5 min later to see his eye puffy, half shut and red hot. Bathed it in luke warm tea and it went down and cooled within 15min. Been bathing it all week (and using brolene eye drops) but it wasn't getting any better. Called vet out on Friday and he said his uvitis has flared uo again and he has developed an ulcer but he is not sure which one caused which
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He seems fairly positive about the eye - I don't know about loss of vision as vet suspects he can't see anything out of that eye anyway
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Bane has been okay with the eye drops but I have found that using my finger with the ointment is easier as I am worried about catching his eye
 
hi nats-uk get yourself some colloidal silver 10ppm,
use a dropper and put 4 drops in each eye morning and afternoon you will be surprized it will go in no time.
hope this helps.
best regards.
will.
 
nats - I kept it short coz was hoping it would be a simple problem with a simple outcome. But from what you advise now this is likely to be a serious problem. Ulcers on the cornea are often accompanied by problems deep inside the eyeball and Sunny also developed uveitis at one point. His was as a result of the terrible damage that the ulcer - and the subsequent auto-immune disease where the body attacks its own tissue - caused. The internal structure of the eyeball began to be damaged and it was a terror of mine that the eye would implode or begin leaking fluid from inside because the cells that make up the layer behind the iris had become leaky and weak. If you are struggling to get drops etc in, your horse can have a line stitched into the corner of his eye and down his mane so you adminster medication "remotely" by his withers and he should be more accepting of it. However, you are getting into the realms of serious and specialist stuff here and if he were mine I would demand an immediate referral to a specialist eye hospital. When eyeballs get that damaged the horse can be in terrible pain. At one point Sunny was on intravenous bute and was in such misery that his entire face was blackened with tears. In the end, it was this unrelenting pain and our inability to help any further that meant the eye had to be removed. When they dissected it after the surgery, the whole cornea was riddled with deep and penetrating ulcers that no cream or drops could ever have reached.

One final thought, liquidbill, not sure if you are a vet or have specialist knowledge so excuse me if you are/do, but I would never recommend putting anything in a horse's eye that you would not happily put in your own. Never heard of colloidal silver but if it is an over the counter product it is unlikely to help in such a serious case. If it is a veterinary prescribed product then it should only be prescribed by a vet who knows the horse's case intimately.

Got everything crossed for you nats. Please let us know how ned is doing xxx
 
I believe Liquidbill sells colloidal silver. And no, there is no way I would put colloidal silver in my horses eyes.
 
Thanks for all your info.

Quick update:
Spoke to vet yesterday - advised him eye appeared less sore (Bane wasn't holding it shut), appeared less cloudy and wasn't weeping anymore. Been advised to continue til Thursday but reduce the bute and I believe they would like to see him up at the surgery so they can have a good look at his eye to decide the future prognosis of it. The plan of action is to treat the ulcer first as I need steriod drops for the uveitis but they would stop the ulcer from healing.

I have been previously warned that the uveitis would/could flare up again and it was a possibility that the eye may need to come out but vet is hopeful at this stage that we won't need to go that far.
 
Good luck Nats I really hope everything is ok, if it helps at all, I have a set of blinkers I used for Patrick, it stopped the light going into his eyes and also stopped him rubbing them and causing further problems, you are welcome to borrow them if you like?
 
Glad B is better today - poor thing. Hope the ulcer heals quickly so you can start treating the uveitis - so frustrating as is a catch-22 situation.
 
hi all im sorry if your taking me the wrong way,yes i do sell the stuff, yes i do use it in my eyes my familys and my dogs eyes. say one of us gets one of these sore eye stys they are really sore i put some cs drops in tree times for i day and its gone.
i just wish one person would use the stuff because you don't know what your missing it cures a multitude of i'lls.
look here. www.midvalleyvu.com go to the links on food.
best regards
will.
 
I'm currently battling an ulcer on Bailey's left eye. Box_of_Frogs and Butterbean have been the best support for me on here as they have gone through the whole process and I can't thank them enough for what they have done.

Bailey has had his eye issue for 12 weeks now; as you said we noticed his eye was shut, slightly swollen and he didn't want anyone near his left side. He initially had an eye ulcer and uveitis which was treated with bute, chloromfenical ointment and atropine to dilate the pupil. He is only a baby and hated the eye drops and so ended up in the vets for a week and a half and had a lavage system (what BoF mentioned) fitted to his upper eyelid, but it abcessed and it had to be moved to his lower lid. The ulcer appeared to go, but a week after he was home it came back and eventually ended up being bigger than when we started, but he no longer had uveitis.

Ulcers have to heal in from the sides, if the top heals over and the underneath hasn't healed, then it will "ping" open again as it did with Bailey. Unfortunately, his then became non healing, it just would not do anything. If your boys eye gets to this stage, they may make a serum from his blood to try and kickstart healing. Bailey ended up having a grid keratomy done - basically they score the surface of the ulcer to make the body realise something is there that needs healing. This worked to a degree; a blood vessel appeared and we had some healed corneal tissue which, as you say, was cloudy.

Bailey's ulcer appears to have gone, but we are now battling the problem of the cloudy area of the eye as it made him more painful than before the whole thing started and he had pain relief! As BoF said, get referred to a specialist if there are any problems, the earlier they find out what is happening, the better. I was told last week to prepare myself for Bailey to have his eye out when we took him to the Royal Veterinary College. It turns out that his body is effectively attacking itself, and we have 4 options to explore, one of which we are doing.

If you are worried at all, or think things are dragging on for too long, get referred - if you are able to go the RVC at Hatfield and see Josh Slater, so much the better. One of the four options we were given for Bailey is to have an immunosuppressant drug with steriods to try and stop the body attacking itself. Only problem is, he has had eye drops for so long now that it turned into a wrestling match every time, even when he was being nose and ear twitched, and we know, realisitcally, that drops are not the way forward for him, something that the RVC and my vet agree with.

I'm not as experienced as BoF on all things eye, but if you want to talk about it or ask a few things that perhaps I can help with, please PM me. Its a horrible thing to deal with, and as my vet said, eyes are long, tedious veterinary affairs and you don't mess around with them.

Really hope it works out. Kirsty xx
 
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