SAFE has received the following donations earmarked for the care of Whisper:
$100 from Dana Lim of Marysville WA
$200 from Dede Renne of Kirkland WA
$50 from Drue and William Coats of Bothell WA
$400.00 from Djer Embacher of Marysville WA!!!!!
THANK YOU to all of you for reaching out to help this filly!!
Whisper gave me a big scare this morning. She was down when I went out to feed this morning and appeared to have been down for a while. Her temp was 97.2. I tried to get her up but she wouldn’t budge, her gum color was poor, and she appeared to be checked out…dying. I started making phone calls — Hannah and Brad were snowed in and trying to dig their car out of their mile-long driveway (literally). Lisa was able to dig up Valerie, and Daphne and her friend Jesse, and Kier and Kendra who work at Dr Brad Evergreen’s clinic to come out and help. I called Pilchuck and they sent Dr. Miller out, and also the animal control officer from the city of Snohomish that was involved in Whisper’s case came out with another officer. With all of us, plus a reporter from the Everett Herald who happened to come out this morning to do a story on Whisper that then stayed and helped, we literally lifted Whisper to her feet and held her up until she decided to stand on her own. By this time her temp had dropped to a very alarming 95.5. But once she was up, she immediately perked up again. She wanted food and Valerie got her a hot grain mash which she started eating voraciously. Within minutes her temp was reading at 97.7 and rising. and the rest of her vitals were good.
For now, she is ok, but we are very, very worried about keeping her warm with the coming storm. My stalls are not wind-proof, unfortunately, and they are expecting up to 90 mph wind and where I am at is notorious for very very strong winds. We nailed some pieces of plywood to the front of her stall. What we really need is a place for her in a heated, enclosed barn. I don’t know if any even exist around here, but if we could find one, that would help. We are also on the hunt for a bucket heater or two — every place in Monroe is sold out of them. If anyone has an extra they are willing to lend, and can get it here, please let me know.
In the meantime, please continue to jingle for Whisper. She’s really struggling.
*****
Thanks everyone for the thoughts on Whisper. Hannah finally made it out today after digging herself out of her driveway and checked her out, she is back to having a low-grade fever at 101.4. I actually would rather have her too hot than too cold…but she’s taking blood tomorrow to see if she has something viral or bacterial. We also talked about how when Whisper was down her eyes were doing this weird flickering back and forth thing while they were open — I forget what Hannah said the technical name for that it is — but it is an indicator that she was very near death, its a sign of late-stage hypothermia. Thank goodness we got her up when we did, and its amazing how fast she recovered once she was up.
She’s not supposed to be on any concentrates yet, as remember we are still treating her like a starved horse. However she’s close enough to the two week mark that we are going to start making her small mashes with senior feed and not just alfalfa pellets (which she has been getting several times a day in addition to grass hay). While its hard not to want to throw a lot of high carb/protein feed at her, we do still have to be careful not to shock her system.
The fleece shipping boots would probably be overkill over the standing bandages and we don’t want to make it harder on her to get herself back up if she does go down. We tried putting a hood on her as I had a few of those but they just didn’t fit right and when she put her head down would fall down on her face so she couldn’t see (she didn’t like that at all), so we had to give up on that idea. We did board up the front of the stall and we have some other ideas for keeping the stall warm when the storm hits tomorrow. One thing I am hoping is that she does seem to know that she can’t get herself up when she lays down so she avoids it — so I am hoping that she will be up for at least a few days and through the storm this weekend. I think she stays up as long as she can until she just gets too tired.
I’ll look into the Thermacare wraps as well, good idea if they are safe we might try them.
