Post-Surgery

About a half an hour after I hung up the phone I started shaking.  What had I just done?  The prognosis if she made it out of surgery was a 50/50 chance of survival.  Thoughts such as these raced through my head, along with: I need to study!  Focus on Property!!

An hour came and passed.  With each minute over that hour time estimate the vet gave me, my anxiety increased about two-fold.  Worrying about the possibility of complications, how the heck I was going to pay for it all (at this point I didn't even have a summer job!) and how this would affect my finals grades had me on the verge of tears.  To add to everything, I was supposed to go to a friend's birthday dinner in a few hours. 

Finally, the vet called.  Everything went as he had planned.  He x-rayed post-surgery and believed he had got all of the infected bone out.  He removed about a 1/3 of the coffin bone and scraped almost the entire way up the hoof wall and removed a lot of the laminae.  Some of the laminae may grow back, but the bone was gone.  He also used a whirlpool boot to circulate CleanTrax through her hoof.

4/26/11 - post-surgery x-ray

The plan was set that he would allow the wound to clot and see her in two days to check on it and CleanTrax it with a whirlpool boot.  After that it would be multiple rounds of sterile maggots.  As planned, he showed up two days later and everything went as planned.  And the first round of maggots went in two days later.  George was on the road to recovery and becoming more of herself each day.  In the meantime I had two finals in between surgery and the first round of maggots.  I'm happy to report that a few weeks later I passed both with little problem.  As for the first round of maggots, the vet came back the next day to check that they took to the wound, otherwise he would inject the hoof with a powerful antibiotic so that at least something was directly attacking the infection in addition to the Baytril and penicillin she was currently on.  The good news was they took to the infection and tripled in size over night.