Help, any ideas???

[skn0404]

right i'll keep this short and sweet...
Nov 2011 horse went mental and threw me off so had the backlady out who noticed his medial lypmh nodes were massive and rock hard.
glands stayed up but no other symptoms
Feb 2012 suspected colic - vet said looked like sepsis (temp 34, pulse 58, puffing and sweating up) huge dose of antibiotics, NSAIDS & Bute.
Glands/nodes went down, pretty much back to his old self.
Mar 2012 Glands/nodes back up, nbigger than golf balls and rock hard and just doesn't seem his usual self.
Nothing in diet or management has changed and not been on the new grass yet.
Will do pulse and temp in the morning but he's been like this for over a week now with no change.
Am still paying the vet bill from Feb but will call them out again if necessary.
Any ideas please?!?!?

 

[muff747]

Could it be an extreme allergic reaction to something?? Things like that can happen out of the blue when nothing has changed, but the body suddenly decides it is going to massively object to something.
Do you feed haylage? Are you sure the bales are fresh? Have you found any soil in the bale? Just a thought, but I suppose if it was poisoning, He'd be much more poorly.
Did you get full blood work ups? i.e. tested for everything major?
Sorry, not much use, hope you find out soon

 

[kerrieberry2]

my mare gets colic most summers, to start with he thought it was because she was stuffing her face, even when she'd been out on the grass for a while but now we've come to the conclusion that its worse when she's on shorter grass. she's 27 now and her teeth and the front don't quite meet properly so she is possibly taking soil in at the same time and this is giving her gas, which she over reacts about.

also she gets reactions to fly bites, the first one i notice was under her, where her girth would sit and was about the size of my palm, it got bigger over a couple of days then she was covered in pimples all over her body, so the vet had to come out! but she seems to get these quite often now she's getting older! maybe worth in this weather trying your horse in a fly rug and see if that helps! the vet just gave her an anti-histamin and that sorted her out, but its expensive to call a vet out for just 1 injection like that!

 

[skn0404]

Thanks for the replies. My boy is only 14 and is normally very hardy for an ISH. The first time his glands came up he wasn't having haylage just nice long grass and hard feed twice a day but this time he's got not much grass and is having haylage and hard feed twice a day. My daughters pony is getting exactly the same and he's fine. My boy has been wearing his full neck fly rug since the weather got nice so I doubt very much it's fly bites as the pony has none and he doesn't even have his fly rug on yet as he's shedding so much. I'm going to book the dentist and speak to the vet tomorrow to see if they can think of anything off the tops of their heads. When he was really poorly in Feb the vet didn't do blood work as he was so ill we weren't even sure he was going to pull through. I checked his pulse this morning and its about right, he wouldn't let me do his temp this morning but im guessing its prob about right too. If its and allergy cant think what it could be other than grass as he was at my friends paddocks last time it happened so not even the same water supply, soil, feed buckets or anything. Maybe a course of antibiotics might help?? Thanks for the input