My Pets Are Trying to Kill Me

My pets are trying to kill me. Not in a “Kujo” kind of way, that would be far too obvious. They're more subtle than that. Which is why I want it on record that if I go missing the animals did it.

Most likely I’ll break my neck tripping over one of them. Or I’ll be smothered in my sleep when a Great Dane rolls on me during a nightmare. It’s also possible that the sheer weight of them all jumping on the bed at once will collapse it, and we’ll all be crushed.

Recently  the quadrupeds have opted for a slower, more stealth method. They’re going to worry me to death.

For instance, Lucy, my mama horse stopped eating. Oh, she was hungry. She just couldn't eat.

She’d grab some hay (or carrots, or even peppermints) and roll them around until they were chewed and slobbery. Then she’d spit them out. 

This is not normal. Lucy loves her food.  A lot. She is what you might call 'big boned.' Like me; she’s never intentionally missed a meal. When Lucy doesn't eat, it's big.

The first vet went for the simplest excuse and checked her teeth. Since horses’ teeth can become sharp and painful, this made a lot of sense.  Except, of course, they were fine. So was her temperature and blood work.  

The second vet delved a little deeper.  Literally.  She strapped on a head lamp, drugged Lucy and shoved a medieval- looking brace in her mouth to keep it open. Then the doc stuck her head in. Way, way at the back, far from any teeth was a giant, nasty ulcer.

Lucy lives in a field with a bunch of other broodmares and easily could have chomped on sometthing that cut her mouth.  A burr might have even been buried in her hay. 

The confounding thing was that Lucy had little sensitivity around the sore. But with no other leads we focused on the ulcer as the source of the problem. 

Because she still wasn't eating, Lucy was locked in a stall for the first time in three years. That should have sent her in a dither. When she couldn't work for a day she used to stand her stall and buck. Now she just stood around and looked miserably at her hay.

She would eat soaked hay pellets. In fact ,she loved them and regularly dived head-first into her bucket emerging covered from nose to forehead in fast-drying goop. 

Meanwhile the mouth ulcer wasn’t shrinking at all. We put her on anti-inflammatories and  pain killers to see if would encourage her to eat. All that did was irritate her ulcers (did I mention that my girl is a delicate flower?).  The result was that she wasn't eating and had a belly ache. Not exactly progress.

By the third week, the vet had conferenced with colleagues at her clinic, the Davis Veterinary School and pretty much everyone she knew. No one had any ideas.

Nothing was changing for the better. The ulcer was still huge, Lucy still wouldn't eat hay and the muscles on the left side of her jaw were atrophying.  It was time to do a biopsy. Horses don’t often get mouth cancer , but it’s not unheard of, especially given Lucy’s age: 17.

Naturally, getting a tissue sample was problematic.  The ulcer was so far in the back of Lucy’s mouth that the vet was practically doing headstands while trying to get a suitable sample. Even with two of us holding up Lucy’s drugged and braced head, it took three tries. Eventually she got something and shipped it off to the state vet for examination.

As time went on I convinced myself that Lucy was going to die. Lucy never has small things go wrong. Her problems were always huge. She never was lame; she tore two suspensories. She never colicked; she had a impaction and surgery. She couldn’t possibly have a cut mouth it had to be cancer.

When I drove out to visit her a few days after the biopsy I was bracing for the worst. When I'd last seen Lucy she looked awful; she was skinny, her coat was bad and her eyes were dull.

But as I stepped out of my car Lucy and started to holler for me. (She is named after the Peanut’s character Lucy Van Pelt, because when she first arrived she never stopped talking.) Then she demanded some soft peppermints and ate them with ease without spilling a drop.

By Saturday she was chomping down two flakes of hay a day.  Sunday she went to a small turn-out where she bucked and played and otherwise made a fool of herself. Like normal.

The biopsy was negative so we still have absolutely no idea what was wrong.

My theory is that she thought I was spending too much time with her baby and ignoring her, and decided to shake me up a bit. If that was the case, it worked.

I’ve been eyeing her ulcer medication with curiosity. It might just make my now-chronic stomach ache go away, right?