Poor poor Traveller

So after spending seven days at the vets it was time for Traveller to come home.


He seemed to be handling the loss of sight quite well. So far so good.

We now had a decision to make. There was no hope of him ever regaining sight in his right eye, there was far too much damage. This left us with two options:

1) Leave the eye in, mostly for cosmetic reasons, and hopefully control infection and such while it healed

2) Have the eye enucleated (taken out)

For the time being, we decided to leave the eye in as we wanted him to have the most ‘normal’ appearance possible—not that he cared, it was definitely for our sake. It was then important to administer oral antibiotics, eye-drops, and bute to manage the pain.

Looking back, I wish I had taken pictures of all of this, but it just didn’t seem appropriate at the time..

Anyways, he loaded okay into the trailer, and back home we went. Thankfully, there is a separate fenced corral with a shelter where he could be close to the other horses but not have to deal with them while he adjusted to his new life. Surprisingly, for the most part he seemed okay. He was definitely head shy and did not want anything or anyone around his head and especially that eye. He was also quite spooky to noises and movement to the right- something that I found quite reasonable. Of course, this was something that I would have to work on, but for the time being he just needed to be left alone and re-figure out life for himself.

He ‘took’ the oral antibiotics and bute very well, but the eye-drops were always a fight. As anyone who has ever even had a slight eye injury knows, they hurt! So we devised a new method, bute first, eye-drops half an hour later. He still wasn’t happy, but allowed us to get most of the dose in.

The eye itself had shrunk down to about 2/3 its original size and had taken on a cloudy blue colour with the ‘plug’ (scab of what was left of his cornea) still in place.

My poor pony was not a happy boy.