What a way to throw you into it!

My first day of work at the American Fondouk was a long and tiresome day. We started morning treatments and rounding at 7:00am. The doors opened at 8:00am and the morning started off slowly with only two patients. It wasn’t long before the entire yard inside the hospital was filled with donkeys, mules, and horses. In addition to our dozen horses that had been hospitalized over the weekend, we admitted 5 more. One of the rectal prolapses went home while the other just laid down and died. He was very weak all weekend and was not recovering well. Even with the 2 stalls freed, we had to double up some donkeys and mules, two per stall. The hospital was over flowing with patients!

The large wooden entry doors to the American Fondouk. The hospital is just inside these door.

Early in the morning I took radiographs of an Arabian-barb stallion presenting for acute laminitis. About midday, I was assigned to a colicing horse that the owner said had not been urinating, eating or defecating normally for 7 days. I’m not sure if that was true or not but on rectal exam there was a very large impacted pelvic flexure. We placed her on IV fluids along with oral fluids consisting or paraffin (essentially mineral oil) and salt water given every hour. Her response to treatment went up and down with episodes of painful colic all day. Finally in the evening she began to bloat up like a tick. Dr. Gigi Kay performed a trocharization of the cecum and removed large amounts of air. This helped for a few hours before she again became very painful, recumbent, and another trocharization was performed. Finally she was placed on CRI to control her pain and at this point is standing quietly in her stall, but remains distended. I fear this mare has a poor prognosis but we will see what the night brings. Lucky me, I get to check on her every hour until midnight and then between Mehdi and I, once every 2 hours overnight. Unfortunately, the American Fondouk does not have the facilities or the expertise to perform colic surgeries. To me, this mare needed surgery if she had any chance or surviving.

The Arab-Barb stallion presenting for acute laminitis

My colic patient acting very depressed in her stall

Much of the day I spent listening to conversations in other languages. It was a little frustrating at times when the conversation would drag on for long periods of time without someone translating, but I was translated what was important at least and could pick up on some the the extras based on cognates and had gestures.  I found Dr. Gigi Kay to be very relaxed, even when my colic patient was crashing. She was a good teacher and in fact has turned the experience into one just like school in that I have been asked to present on two topics on Friday afternoon; fractures of the extensor process of P3 and equine arrhythmias. Hopefully I will have some time later in the week to work on this. It was a very long and exhausting day but I hope tomorrow will be less busy so I can perhaps take a nap and catch up on some of the sleep I will miss tonight. Bonne Nuit!