Recent surgeries

Large colon removal

This horse, a 5 year old racehorse, suffered from repeated bouts of colic over a period of several years. Sometimes he had not responded to the first and second visits from his home vet, and therefore had been sent to Cotts Equine Hospital for treatment. On these occasions we had been suspicious that the large colon had been located in the wrong place. The large colon is a 15’ long tube which is not attached to anything else for most of its length, allowing it to easily twist on itself, and around other parts of the abdominal cavity. Usually he got better with fluids and pain killers, but on one occasion he had needed surgery to untwist a 360 degree twist. We found that there was an unusual amount of laxity in the large colon attachments to the body wall, giving it a lot more freedom to get in the wrong place.

He recovered well and went back to racing. However, 9 months later he came back with very severe pain and what felt like another twist. We discussed options with the owner. Third surgery was simply not an option, so we offered removal of most of the large colon to stop it twisting. During the second surgery, the colon was untwisted, then removed. The two ends were sewn back together, as shown here.

Although the large colon is very important to digest the fibre in forage, with a modified diet to decrease fibre (in forage like hay and grass) and increase digestible nutrients, horses can cope very well without most of the large colon. This horse never really looked back after surgery and has re-entered training.

Remember that if your horse does not respond to a maximum of 2 visits from your home vet, it is usually significantly cheaper, quicker and more effective to hospitalise them at Cotts for medical treatment. That way you stop incurring expensive out of hours visit charges from your vet, and can treat the condition much more aggressively, for example by passing a stomach tube every hour to treat an impaction. If things take a turn for the worse and if surgery is an option, the horse is already in the right place. Lots of medical colic cases are treated like this at Cotts every year, fixing horses quicker and giving owners more sleep and less stress whilst it happens!