Friday, October 12, 2007

Two Naughty Girls

Lutine's a bit of a cheeky Miss on the quiet. Her latest trick is shimmying under the electric fence I use to divide up our field in order to strip graze the horses. She then runs up and down because, by then, she's too excited to figure out how to shimmy back the way she came! She then has to wait until I get up in the morning so I can let her back into the paddock with the others. Anyway, last night she took one of the other horses, Mascagne, for a bit of a razz around too - partners in crime! By the time I went to let them back in, Mascagne was steaming with sweat but there wasn't a drop of moisture on Lutine!


Wednesday, October 10, 2007

The Creeping Crud

The vet came today to do Lutine's first lot of acupuncture. The crud has started to look better over the last week anyway - see the photos. However, as the vet was doing the acupuncture, I noticed that there was a patch of funny scabbiness/dandruff over her chest muscle too. Apparently there's a bunch of lymph tissue in this area so perhaps it's come from something exiting the lymph nodes via the skin. The vet had a look but didn't comment much on it. What he did say was that 'it' is on the move - the outward appearance had changed but also the reactive meridians were different this week.

Anyway, he put in a needle on the front of each coronet band in between the 11 o clock and 1 o clock points, on all four feet. Then he put a needle in the governing vessel meridian on the point just after the withers on the way up towards the ears. She also had two needles on the inside of each hind leg, half way up the thigh. The vet also did a bit of cranial osteopathy on her pelvic/sacral region.

It was quite strange at one point - he put the needle in on one side and she hiked up her hind leg on the opposite side and her 'jumper's bump' - prominent sacrum - suddenly smoothed out, making a nice round rump for once...

OK, so the vet says to keep an eye on how things change - look for changes in behaviour, any changes in the skin or other signs and he's coming back in 15 days for another session with her.

Keeping fingers crossed!








Friday, October 05, 2007

Lutine's Bobo Jambes

Bobo Jambes are 'sore legs' in French. Lutine started with a little 50p size patch of what I thought was 'mud fever' - a common type of dermatitis associated with wet or muddy conditions - by the end of winter on her white front foreleg and a couple of little crusty bits on her white hind leg. It seemed to be responding well to home treatment of antiseptic washes and Sudocrem. Then, a bit bizarrely, as soon as the warm weather arrived and the ground dried up, her hind leg blew up suddenly, to the point where serum was oozing through the skin. At the time the vet was duly called and she was given antibiotics, anti inflammatories and a diuretic. That took the worst of the problem down but it didn't go away. A couple of weeks later I called the vet back and this time was given topical antibiotic and steroid lotion. I must have used that for 5 or 6 weeks and again, the problem diminished but never really went away.

During the summer, there were a few weeks where I didn't do much to it and the condition stayed fairly quiet. Then I tried another popular remedy that didn't require water and antiseptic washing to lift off the scabs, thinking the washing had been the problem. Immediately that the scabs came off, the legs started swelling again and revealed angry, red skin underneath. I covered this with zinc oxide cream and it seemed that keeping the sun off the sore bits helped. But I resolved to call the vet back at this was clearly an ongoing thing now and not mud fever.

There's a condition called pastern leukocytoclastic vasculitis (PLV), which is a form of autoimmune disease and it also has the same symptoms as mud fever, is exacerbated by sunlight, associated with the pink skinned areas on horses and also reacts badly to other treatment. I figured this was a possibility but wanted the vet to have a look anyway. The traditional treatment for this condition is oral steroids, which basically suppress the immune system and stop the scabs appearing but steroids are powerful drugs that can cause other problems in horses, not least laminitis. I was keen to avoid steroids if possible. I'd rather Lutine have scabby legs than laminitis.

Anyway, the vet came and spent quite a while checking Lutine's acupoints on the two affected legs. Then we had a discussion. He said even if we took samples and biopsies to look for bacteria and fungus etc, we'd probably find something but they wouldn't be the cause of the problem. I mentioned the PLV and he said 'for sure, this is part of the whole picture of autoimmune issues with this horse. Yes, we could give it a grand diagnosis and called it an autoimmune this and a photosensitivity that but at the end of the day, conventional medicine can't cure it. It can only deal with the symptoms on these long standing chronic issues'.
Then he pointed out some other stuff that I'd seen but not noticed, if you catch my drift. The scabs run in lines along the meridians in Lutine's legs and the vet confirmed that the associated acupuncture points were also reactive (front leg on left, hind on right).


Now the weird thing with this vet is that he's really shy about coming forwards about the acupuncture. I thought I'd better just ask him outright if he thought a course of acupuncture would be helpful and he said he thought so and then started waffling about 'but it will need several sessions, but we'll see how it evolves in deciding how many sessions and how close together they should be' And finally, I was able to pin him down to coming back on Wednesday next week to start a course of acupuncture for Lutine.
I do think that all these outward signs are just manifestations of this core systemic, chronic ill health she's had. Fingers crossed that the acupuncture helps.