Tongue-Tied

Imagine going through your normal checks with your horses and you find your young filly drooling and having difficulty eating and drinking. What would you do?

The owners of a stock horse filly contacted their local veterinarians when they noticed that she was drooling and having difficulty in eating and drinking. Their local vets examined her on a couple of occasions and established that the filly’s tongue was very swollen and infected. They commenced treatment with antibiotics but she did not improve, indeed overtime it became impossible for her to eat or drink at all. The filly’s tongue became very swollen with a thick woody appearance. There was still room in the oral cavity for her to get food and water into her mouth but due to the complete loss of function of the tongue it was impossible for her to move liquids or feed back in the mouth to enable swallowing.

The fillies tongue was very swollen and woody in appearance.

When she was referred to Warwick Equine Vets she was considerably dehydrated and tucked up from having minimal feed and water for some days. Their first concern was to ensure they addressed this by giving a gruel of water, electrolytes and ground up feed via a stomach tube. If the gastrointestinal tract is working normally, as it was in this case, the best way of hydrating and maintaining adequate fluid and nutrition intake is via the intestines.  In this case the filly was a very compliant patient and she let the team tube her at least 3 times per day for nearly 2 weeks without trouble. What a champ!

To address the cause of the problem we needed to resort to imaging. Although we could not palpate any foreign body in the tongue this was the top of our suspicions. Over the years Warwick Equine Vets has seen several similar cases and mostly it has been wire working its way into the tongue.

An x-ray soon revealed the problem, a piece of wire was deep in the bottom part of her tongue. Although the piece of wire was relatively small, as long as it remained in the tongue ongoing infection and damage was likely. Luckily being wire it shows up well on x-rays. Ultrasound would be needed to show up wood foreign bodies for instance. Once the team felt they had improved the filly’s general condition sufficiently with the fluid and feed supplementation by stomach tube, she was anaesthetized. An ultrasound was used to determine exactly where the wire was in the tongue and removed.

X-ray reveals the problem.

The offending foreign body.

These can be very difficult to find in some cases but in this case the challenge was keeping fluids and feed going into her over nearly 2 weeks before she was able to start to swallow normally again.

It is amazing that something so small can create such a big issue.The filly continued to improve post surgery and was able to return home.