Hello, I am from Romania and I need your help to find a solution to save my stallion’s injured eye. It seems that a hard body penetrated the eye from front to back and the wound is deep. It may be affected and retained . In addition, in Romania there are few doctors for horses and only one hospital for horses. For this reason, the intervention was delayed. It happened on Sunday morning and it was only Wednesday at noon. Until Monday night I put Mibazon in his eye.
Now the infection is being treated at the hospital in Cluj but I was told that nothing can be done to partially restore his vision.
I know that in other countries corneal transplants are done but I do not know if the retina can be repaired. Can anyone help with information? Can you recommend a doctor or a clinic in Europe where I can get the horse?
Thank you in advance. My email address is doru.nicolae61@gmail.com or phone 0040722241345
Regards,
Doru Nicolae
I’m sorry about your horse’s injuries. Eyes can often present difficult problems and the key most often is prompt treatment. I’m not sure how successful a corneal transplant would be since he suffered what sounds like a puncture wound - which would affect behind the eye, not just the cornea. Most likely he will lose part or all of his vision. However, take solace in knowing that horses can adapt to vision loss pretty well - many can compete with one-eye.
Honestly I think you’d be out of luck where I live - within reach of two large animal hospitals. Eyes injuries are so tough to deal with. The cornea is simply a lens while the retina is the piece that sends all the visual information to the brain.
My first horse had one retina detach and fall to the bottom of his eye. He had already gone blind in that eye by that point.
It would be far kinder to have the eye removed immediately. Since it’s from an injury, it will not matter for his breeding
It does sound like this horse is going to lose this eye, unfortunately. Severe eye injuries must be treated promptly, and correctly to have much of a chance for recovery, and skilled veterinary care is often necessary for success. So your horse has a number of strikes against him already in the goal of saving his eye. Since the horse is now under the veterinary care available in your area, you must take their advice about treatment, and whether or not they think any treatment they can render may be helpful, or not. Anything someone on the internet can tell you, without seeing first hand the issues your horse is dealing with is limited in it’s value. And if you are limited in the availability of the drugs that are available here, or the veterinary care that is available here, we are limited in what aide we can give you.
But, with eye injuries like this, with a tear in the outer surface of the eye, battling infection inside the eye is the key. Antibiotics. Injected IM, and antibiotic ophthalmic creams or drips (if at a veterinary clinic). And anti inflammatory drugs, to keep swelling and pain down- bute. And keeping the eye covered and protected from light, or the horse rubbing it, (a full cup blinker works well, like a racehorse wears, with tape to cover the open part in front, only the injured eye covered so he can still see where he is going with his good eye.) If the infection can be successfully treated, the cornea CAN heal. It may be scarred and partially cloudy as a result of the healed injury, vision may not be full, if you are successful. If the eye “liquifies”, you are “done” trying to save the eye, and it should be surgically removed if this happens.
As others have said, one eyed horses do tend to get along quite well through life, and can still be ridden and competitive in may different disciplines. I know it is hard to accept, but this may be what you are looking at with your horse. Your eyes have to look after his blind side. Good luck!
Always hard to say anything for sure based on an internet post, but from what you are describing I doubt vision is salvageable, and may not have been even if the injury had occurred on the front steps of the best veterinary ophthalmologist in the world. The globe/eyeball may or may not be salvageable depending on how well the infection can be controlled, and may or may not be sufficiently normal-looking enough to bother with trying to save it. There are treatments to help retinal tears and detachments, but they need to be done basically immediately, and generally don’t work well if the area affected is large. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess they are also less successful in patients that have retinal damage from direct traumatic injury rather the other possible causes.
