Best Laid Plans

It's been over a month since I posted.  I didn't even remember posting about my horse colicking, but evidently I did.  And - silly, naïve me - I thought it was all almost over, and my life was going to get back to normal.

Ha.

Instead, Panama ended up back in the ICU, less than a week after he'd come home.  That time he didn't have a stomach impaction (yet - he had far more food in his stomach than he should have, eight hours after dinner had been put out), but we had them do a chronic colic workup.  We knew from his first stay in the ICU that he had ulcers, but the chronic colic workup showed that more importantly, his stomach was emptying too slowly.

He came home for the second time on the last day of April, and it quickly became obvious that he was still not okay, even with the feeding plan worked up for him by the hospital.  So I went rogue, figuring out my own feeding plan and giving him some pain management against doctor's orders until I was able to get him through the worst of it.  We switched vets too, as I ended up feeling like I wasn't getting enough support from the ICU clinic's vets.  No matter how good their diagnostics were, they were unable or unwilling to see that their feeding plan wasn't working, and that we needed to try something else.

But here we are a month later, and he's doing so much better.  Unfortunately, it's taken me being at the barn nearly around the clock to get him here.  He's needed small mashes fed to him six times a day, as well as meds given to him six times a day.  Plus he has had some setbacks over the past month, and each one means more time spent at the barn and more anxiety.

As a result, I've had pretty much no time for dolls over the past seven weeks, which is the main reason for the lack of any kind of updates.  I have bought a few things, but that's about all I've been able to make time for.  I hadn't even taken any photos until this past weekend.

Fortunately, Panama seems to have turned a corner in the last week or so.  I'll still have to keep giving feed and meds six times a day for at least a couple more weeks, but he's suddenly gotten hungrier, more energetic, and has been able to tolerate bigger meals without any signs of discomfort.  I'm hoping the improvements will enable me to reclaim at least a little more of my life, because even if I still have to be out there a lot to feed him, at least I don't have to worry about setbacks quite so much.

With any luck, there will be more doll posts to come very soon!