Monday, December 01, 2008

Tonka can be a horse again! I am soooo glad. He's been crying from his quarantine, weird noises that don't even sound like a horse.

The good news is that it's not strangles, the bad news is there is a type of fungi in there that is hard to get rid of. They're having me put him on antibiotics for a month. A MONTH! With my sister's recent kidney failure diagnosis in her horse, due to antibiotics, this scares me. Granted, these are not the heavy duty antibiotics, but he hasn't told me yet what kind we're going to use for the majority of the time, just to use what I have until we get results back on what will work best for this contaminant.

I'm elated and bummed at the same time. But it will be so great to see him back in with his buddies! I'm going to head out there right now to move him.

4 comments:

Kara said...

They put in on antibiotics and not an antifungal med? I thought antibiotics only work on bacteria, and not fungi.

Andrea -Mustang Saga said...

Kara,
Thanks for bringing that up. I hadn't thought of that. I looked up "actinomyces" which was a word I wrote down before fungi while I listened to my vet. Apparently it is a bacteria, and its colonies form "fungus-like branched networks of hyphae."

gtyyup said...

Good news that it's not strangles. Sure hope Tonka heals quickly for you.

Kara said...

Ah, that makes sense. So he must just have a little pocket of them that live in there and perhaps they abscess when he's under immune stress? That's why he had the abscess a couple years ago too? Good thing it's not strangles. Dr. didn't worry that it was something the others could get?