140. Under the weather

Even Gus never looked this miserable...

Gus is sick.  And he’d like you to know it.  Never a stoic, he now looks like Eeyore at his most dejected.  His walk is a slog, and his trot and canter are AWOL.  He doesn’t tug on his lead rope, or push his chest against the gate, or grab for handouts.  When I bring him into the arena, he crumples to the ground and starts a desultory roll.  Then he just lies there and naps.  I sit beside him for awhile, scritching his ears and whispering sweet nothings.  After 20 minutes, I try to get him back on his feet by luring him with treats and then brandishing a lunge whip, but all in vain.  So I call for Sandy.

She feels his joints and looks in his eyes, which all seem fine.  She takes his temperature, and even that anal insult arouses no indignation.  He has a moderate fever, a bit over 102 degrees.  We’ve seen this before:  the horse is looking great one day, and the next day it’s feverish and lethargic and off its feed.  It’s anaplasmosis, another tick-borne disease rather like Lyme.  Cool fall weather brings the ticks out in droves from the weedy thickets that edge the paddocks, and Sandy has dealt with vets and doxycycline for at least three horses in the past few months.  

Since her regular vet has essentially refused to examine or treat Gus, thanks to his near-death experience when he did try once, Sandy knows a vet visit would entail violent panic, a heavy tranquilizer administered at great risk, and all kinds of money and misery.  Instead she phones the vet, who provides good advice and an okay to use leftover doxycycline from her meds cabinet.

Sandy manages to squirt some bute — basically, horse aspirin — into Gus’s unwilling mouth, and his fever drops to normal within an hour.  I can tell his eye is brighter, and his energy is rebounding.  Then she starts him on the doxy (a powder stirred into his grain, which he eats up without demur), and within 48 hours he’s morphed into the spawn of Satan.  He now feels so much better that he’s utterly ungovernable.  Every day he yanks the lead rope out of her hands, gallops off with a snotty kick of his heels, and dodges away with a head toss when she approaches.  Sandy quips to me, behind her hand:  “I liked him better when he was a bit sick.”