The Ice Chronicles: Sand Colic, Second Phase

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

Yeah, no, that's not mud. 

Although all this little sharp shiny-looking bits? That is sand. More precisely, silicates, particulate matter. Very sharp. Very lethal to a horse's gut.

That — and another pile of virtually identical size and composition — is what Ice left on the ground yesterday.

He'd been doing so well. No colicky episodes. No posturing. No discomfort. Eating and drinking normally. He'd even put on a little weight again. Passing absolutely normal-looking manure in size and shape (with plenty of sand still present, of course, but that's to be expected). We thought he was out of the woods, finally. 

Chickens, hatch, count.



Had we been dealing with an ordinary case of sand colic — i.e., a one-off of recent vintage — then we might have been able to rely on the evidence. But there's nothing ordinary about this case.

If you haven't seen the earlier posts, this has been going on now for more than two months. When it became obvious what was wrong and we finally managed to get the vet out here (not her fault; she's the sole equine vet for several counties and parts of a couple of states, and it was an unusually severe colic season —regular colic, that is), we learned that our rescued boy might not have more than hours left.

He had a sand impaction of a minimum of 75 pounds. Very old; likely years' worth of build-up. Rock-hard. And a compromised bowel as a result. She wouldn't say it straight out, not then, but she made sure I understood that there was a very good chance that he might not make it; she later amended that to say that he shouldn't even have been alive by the point that she saw him.

She, and we, have been calling him a miracle horse. She's seen untold numbers of severe colic cases, and initially she put him at the third worst case of sand colic she'd ever seen; within a day or two, she moved him up to second-worst. Worst and third worst? They didn't make it. And she will now say outright that Ice never should've, either. He was too far gone; he was, in effect, already a dead horse walking on the afternoon of last Christmas Eve when he showed up here.

And yet, our tough guy made it. This far.

Four days ago, he colicked. so subtly that it wasn't until the next day that we realized what it was. He was out on his tie-out, grazing, which is part of his treatment. Both the substance and texture of pasture grass and the act of grazing stimulate peristalsis, which is the spasming of the gut that forces whatever's in it to move along and on out. So he gets to graze every day. 

That day, I was on muck duty while he was out. It had rained a bit earlier, and the grass was lovely, cool and damp. After 20 minutes or so on the tie-out, he dropped and began to roll. Not hard, no thrashing as you often see with colic; just gentle, graceful rolls from side to side. I dropped my scoop and started that way, but Wings was already on his way to check on him, and when he stood up and shook off, he looked simply like a happy horse enjoying a quick bath in wet grass. So we shook off our own reaction and assumed that all was well.

It wasn't. That much was evident the next morning, when it was clear he was in full (but thankfully early) colic mode. Banamine's been scarce all over the country; we have only a limited supply, and we dosed him immediately.  I walked him in the heat; tried to get him to eat his grain mixture (it contains very little grain and several supplements for the sand colic), which he ignored. Finally, I tied him out again, and he ate only intermittently. Yesterday was more of the same. At last, yesterday afternoon, he began to look more like himself. That's when he presented us with the piles of what you see above.

Today, his personality (equinality?) is back seemingly to normal. His output is also improving again somewhat, in both quantity and quality. But now we know what we're dealing with, and it means that he's nowhere near out of the danger zone.

it appears that up until now, we've been able to dislodge a decent percentage of the more recent sand that he'd ingested, perhaps from the last year prior to coming to us. It accretes within the gut, compressing and hardening the older layers below, and the treatment of the last couple of months has eroded most of what's on the surface, I think.

Now, no pun intended, comes the hard part. Because this has likely been sitting in his gut, increasingly obstructing him and certainly poisoning him, for years. Perhaps most of his life. And so it's a question of continuing to erode what remains, which is likely the majority of the impaction, and doing it slowly, carefully, in a way that causes as little additional damage as possible to his intestinal tract.

Our tough guy has come a very long way. But he still has miles to go.