Cuts and scrapes in the groin, oh joy..... update with pix

[HorsesinHaiti]

Horses love to damage themselves in all sorts of oddball places that can’t be bandaged, and the groin where the leg meets the sheath/udder is certainly one of those. Share your stories of ‘worst case’, plain old ‘she scraped herself and here’s the tale’, whatever suits.

Bonus points for tips on how you kept insects away from there, your preferred way of cleaning and checking w/o getting your head taken off, preferred cold hosing schedule, etc.

(and yes, the vet tech and I are dealing with a scrape Down There on a nursing mare. I’ll tell my story later, there fortunately isn’t much to it so far other than I have a matching case of very bad prickly heat!).

[Highflyer]

Can you get Aluspray or similar down there? It’s pretty safe, just let it dry for a minute before the foal nurses. http://www.allivet.com/p-855-aluspray-aerosol-bandage.aspx?gclid=CjwKEAjwtMqrBRDwtoehx72vm34SJACl_Un1l0WnXhikmHmFk2TqdCKFZY9aukcBruRoA42E2r96vBoC1Mbw_wcB

As far as checking it, you will probably need a twitch and (preferably) someone to hold the horse. If it’s just a scrape I probably wouldn’t worry too much about hosing it. If it’s swollen/ gross, I’d probably do it a couple of times a day, ideally 15-20 minutes (but the horse is probably not going to be very happy).

[HorsesinHaiti]

Somehow, the little bitty mare I am taking care of for awhile managed to scrape herself right in the groin, in the crease between rear leg and udder but running perpendicular to it. Total area maybe two square inches on either side of the crease. I had the vet tech out to check and it is just a scrape, no deep wound or penetrating body, probably did it about 4 days previous to his making it out to see it. We can’t figure out how she did that to herself since we’re pretty picky about not leaving sticks etc. lying in the pen with a foal around. Hey, she’s a horse, 'nuff said.

The scraped area is already granulated over, but the two sides do tend to rub each other so it’s still a little weepy, not really drying up the way I’d like. Nevertheless, it already has the white healing around the edges advancing on the wound and we don’t see sign of proud flesh or flystrike (the biggest danger around here).

I have New-Skin for me, no good way to get Aluspray in less than a couple weeks. The scrape is right across the crease of the groin, where the skin tends to rub itself so it is staying rather moist and might not hold a spray bandage anyway. We have to use the gentian violet- insecticide spray every couple days because there is screw-worm fly in this area, and make sure not to spray the udder and then to clean it well. She got a long-acting antibiotic shot plus antibiotic ointment last Tuesday, and I have neosporin if she needs it.

[HorsesinHaiti]

For this mare, she’s so tiny that my humane twitch is too big for her nose. the least stressful and safest way we’ve found is to take advantage of evenings when my horsekeeping help and one of the campus guards is around. I put a picket hobble around the rear pastern on the injured side. One of us holds her firmly by the halter, one draws the leg back just enough to stretch the skin and keep her from kicking forward and holds the leg there, and the third has to crouch down with a flashlight and gauze and deal with wound checking and cleaning.

Durn girl. I’ve been keeping her in the cleanest confined area I have thinking that too much movement would rub the two sides of the scrape together and delay healing. Today’s feedstuffs were pretty low quality so I took her to an enclosed half-acre yard to graze loose for a few hours. She promptly took off for 10 minutes of zoomies including bank-jumping some raised flower beds lining a gravel driveway so moist or not, movement can’t be hurting it all that much!

[Highflyer]

It sounds like you have it under control. Just as an fyi, you can make a workable twitch with baling twine and a double end snap. (Twist the twine around the lip and snap to the halter ring.) Not nice but effective in an emergency.

[HorsesinHaiti]

Sunday afternoon when we checked her over and cleaned her, it surely looked like the ‘scrape’ has healed enough to finally show an entry hole from a penetrating wound :no:. Which looked open as I tried to clean the area and what drainage I saw came from there, with enough granulation tissue around the opening to make two other people and I worry. I called the vet tech, who said he had the drugs and training to knock her out Monday and get in there to clean out the suspected foreign body and deal with the overgrowth. I figured if he couldn’t or if there wasn’t quick improvement, the one full DVM we can getaccess to is currently on a weeklong work trip down the southern peninsula but could be here on Friday.

So today the local vet tech comes and when we start lifting her leg, there is something that looks like a hole same as I saw before:

right below the tech’s middle finger, in the middle of what looks like, well, certain human female anatomy in the groin area.

But he has us stretch her hind leg a little differently and we see:

the granulation tissue has reduced and there’s no hole, just a gap between the ‘marbles’ (and a mad mare now convinced this human is loosing hers!)

Another pix - all these are taken by sticking a cheap digital under the mare, clicking with the flash on, and hoping I aimed right.

You had me going, mare! I went over her pen and there was nothing in there that she could have landed on to injure herself. Either she got a fly bite and then rubbed it raw in the heat. Or, more likely, my compost pile is next to the exit gate of the main pen where I let her and the foal get some exercise. When she’s impatient for dinner she likes to run the fence and stop by the exit gate via jumping on the compost pile, which was taller that she is. She may have slipped on the way up and wound up bodysurfing the pile to brake. Pile is now in the process of being removed just in case.

Good grief!