Before, during and after pictures of Lucy

And these are the most recent pictures from only a couple weeks ago.

These are from about a month after her treatment:

Her while she was sick, sometime in February 2008. She had just come back from Davis like the week before:

So these are the before pictures. This is Lucy at her first horse show. She was such good girl and won 3rd place in Cross Country! This is in October of 2007. She had come down with a cough in August that the vet just gave her ati-bioitics for. I almost didn't do this show since she had been having energy issues. I later found out that that is one of the sypmtoms of lead posioning. I even had the vet out about her energy issues and breathing but he said to just feed her more grain! Eeek! Glad I just took that with a grain of salt!

Lucy can never be bothered to actually jump over something!

Ah! Horse and boyfriend bonding!

So right after christmas I noticed that when I took Lucy out on trail rides her lower lip would start drooping. She also started loosing weight although that was harder to notice because she had a long coat and never really picked up much weight in the winter anyway.

Within about a week she progressed to having her lower lip hanging all the time. I called one of my closest horsey friends and we discussed it. She decided that we should call the local chiro since she was also losing muscle and had some neuro symptoms.

The chiro was very concerned about her state as was my friend. She recomened we start by doing a full cbc. We had another local vet come out the next day and do that. She recomended x-rays of her lungs at UC Davis. I made her appointment with Davis that same day.

She stayed the week following at my friends barn where she got to stay in a stall and just eat by herself (at home she shares with my two mini's)

At Davis they did several different tests. They started with a basic evaluation of her gait and body condition. They also drew blood and did a cbc. They tested her for strep equi myositis but felt that that came back negitive. They also did several tests on her cranial nervise system and was found to have a deficit in cranial nerve 7 as evidenced by the lip paraliysis, droppy eye lid and dull ear movement.

They scoped her upper airway to find that revealed paresis of the arytenoid carilages (vocal cords which made me realise that it had been a while since I had heard her whinny), pharyngeal collapse and no cough response when the tracheal was stimulated (which explained why she was coughing, becuase she had food in epiglottis and trachea).

They did a BAER test (brain auditory evoked responce) under sedation to test her hearing and the function of the regions of the brainstem. Not much to see there.

They also did a spinal tap while she was sedated. That was interesting to see!

We spent the night and watched her some more the next day but had to go home day. She was left there for more tests. There is another not so fun story about our way home.

They did an electromyelogram to assess the function of the neuromuscular system, which just showed abnormalitys specific to cranial nerve 7. They also did an abdominal ultrasound wich was unsignificant. Then a muscle biopsy on the right side of the neck which didn't show much.

They also submitted blood for selenium and lead, but would not come back for several days.

I brought her home that weekend after she stayed 4 days with them. We uped her feed intake considerably. She was pretty much given whatever I thought she might like, equine senior, rice bran, wet cob, molassas, all in once, alfalfa. It was difficult.

Then once night not long after when I was trying to get her to come out to get her blanket on she had her first breathing attack.

At first she just kept making odd breathing noices. Then she started having trouble standing up right. I took her out and she fell on my car and sliped down next to it got wedged between it and a wall along the road. I got my dad to help me get her up. He held her head up and out of the way while I backed the car up. At that point she seemed recoved but in shock from the episode. We let her walk back to her pasture on her own. She got to wear both her blankets that night.

A few days later we got her lead results back, they were unsusualy high although not high enough to be considered lead poisoning. But the vet felt that after some research on lead poisoning her symptoms fit very well. She was glad becuase she had been telling me that we probably would not find out what was wrong with Lucy.

She recomended that we give Lucy one dosage of Calcium ADTA and take a urine sample to see it it helped flush out the lead (the calcium bonds with the lead and then body will naturally dispose of the calcium). However admistering calcium ADTA was risky and she felt that we should bring Lucy back to Davis to do it. In the end however we choose to do it at my friends barn. We did the test and the results came back positive. In the meantime Lucy had another attack when I was walking her up my road from the horse trailer. She bled out her nose and fell again. At that point we knew that it was because she couldn't breath when exerted.

Finally in early March we were able to do full treatment. The vet inserted a iv cathiter in her neck and we hooked the calcium ADTA solution up to her for about 2 hours a day for five days straight. Within a couple days her lip went back to normal. We did a second treament just like the first about three weeks later. During that time she had one of her breathing attacks again, only this time my friend and trimmer saw it too.

She regained her weight and slowly her mucle. By May she looked much better and more like a normal 7 year old horse. She still have two more breathing attacks, getting worse every time to a point where she was bleeding out her mouth.

In July I took her back to Davis since I was going there for another horse. They scoped her again and found that one of her arentoids was moving. They also took x-rays of her lungs to be sure she wasn't hurting them during her breathing episodes.

By October she could run around unhindered and I was able to move her into our large pasture.

In November I started taking her out for very short rides. I continued through the new year with sporatic short rides. As of March I decided her condition was good enough to start riding her on a regular basis.