tendon sheath infection/ spiral fracture HELP/ADVICE

[phoenix26]

My 6 year old gelding came in from the field 4 weeks ago with a puncture wound 1/3 way up his cannon, after 2 rounds of antibiotics and small fragments of bone come out of the then increasing in size hole he was xrayed showing a shattered splint bone and hairline fracture to the canon. He has been referred twice and due for an operarion 3 times but the specialist was saying leave it for now but due to the fracture he has had 2 casts on to stabilize his leg. The injury is now 34 days old and he is not showing signs of improvement in the lameness so the vet came to take synovial fluid to test for infection but could only draw out blood, showing the whole area is filled with blood. They are now referring him AGAIN to see if its one of 3 things now, the rarest but one with best outcome is that area is full of blood due to it all rushing there to help with healing, the next two possibilities are 50/50 until hes scanned this week, one is a spiral fracture that the xray didnt pick up because they are notoriously hard to spot apparently but has a good prognosis and recovery rate, the other is a tendon sheath infection which will be very serious. Can anyone shead some light/experiences, or further problems with either of these 2 scenarios please? As i fear my insurance wont cover all the cost. (Up to 1k already and they will only pay 3k per incident) i desperately dont want to lose him, especially if he will have a good recovery and be rideable/ able to compete again after. Thanks

 

[Birker2020]

I don't have much clue, except to say if the horse was showing lameness with a cast then that isn't necessarily to do with the actual injury, but can be due to rubs from the cast itself. I'm not sure if things have moved on considerably from 1997 when my horse had a cast from under his foot to below his hock. He kept getting heel rubs as casting horses is a notoriously difficult thing to do. The heel rubs kept causing persistent lameness with my horse. Sadly his injury could not be cured and he was PTS after three changes of casts under GA each time. His injury was horrific and not the same as your horses injury so don't lose heart. The reason I'm telling you this is if your horse is lame in a cast it might not be the injury but the cast causing rubs.

As regards your insurance I would say in future to go for the £5K per incident vets fees and not the £3K vets fees option. Instead I'd drop the value of your horse down if your premium is too high. Insurance companies when the award owners market value (when given out on death of horse) can sometimes be considerably less than people believe the actual value of their horses to be. So if you can reduce his value on your insurance in order to allow you to afford to increase your vets fees I would do so. Vets fees increase all the time due to the new technological break throughs in veterinary science and new wonder drugs and of course the actual cost of diagnostic tools to evaluate injuries (which can be very expensive in the case of MRI for example) so it would be wise to cover your horse for the maximum.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but I wish you and your horse well xxxx

 

[justmemydear]

leg injuries involve alot of blood i'm going thro it now with my boy our vet said you need blood to heal the area cause it carries the good healing cells, yes they seem lame cause of the bandages but when i took ours off to clean he was far from lame saying that as ours was cannon bone as well he didn't want to lift his leg very high to start with. Keep positive i know its hard but the healing rate of a horse is amazing xx