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MT, I feel as though I already know your beautiful boy from your posts about him here. Sending lots of love and light to you and to him. Hoping it was just the colick and that he'll be around for you many more years. 
and you.
The good news is the colic treatment, which included pumping in oil, water and her pulling piles of dried little manure turds out of his butt by hand, gave him immense relief. He made it through the sub-zero temps comfortably under 3 layers of blankets. By yesterday he was eating slowly and steadily without painkillers. Still pooping only 2 piles/day (normal would be 12-14), but today it looks like the pooping is picking up speed and volume too. And bright eyed and cheery for the first time in a couple weeks.
The bad news is the chemistry labs show decreased liver function. Not enough to call cirrhosis, but liver fibrosis. So it's looking like he'll be with us on the earth plane for a while longer. 
The annoying and frankly painful news is the bill. If the vet had just listened to me and done the colic treatment on Wednesday, it would have saved me several hundred dollars and him 2 more days of pain and weight loss.... Hopefully as she gets to know me better she'll trust me and listen more...
Perhaps she'll work with you regarding the bill, since she didn't follow your advice. She'll hopefully trust your intuition and wisdom from now on.
Thanks for the update.
I'm glad he's better.
YAY!!!!!
Yesterday was scary. The temps rose to ~40 in the morning, so I had them both stripped of blankets before leaving for the library. They were happily on the sunny, sheltered side of the barn eating hay and snow. A short time later, an icy blast started in from the west. I got home to find them both in the barn, not eating. I got them blanketed and back out in the sheltered sun with hay, so they did get some hay and snow in before nighttime. (For reasons I cannot fathom, Algiers seems to prefer eating snow to drinking from a bucket, which is always available! 
)
Last night it was down to about 0. He didn't eat as much hay as the night before, drink as much water, or poop as much. I'm chalking the poop to not eating as much.
These 0 to 40 to 0 days are terrifying weather -- colic season and very hard for them to adjust to. That is what triggered Algiers' colic to begin with. The difference being that I was exhausted and sleeping most days due to being forced to work 3 12-hour overnight shifts in a week. At least now I'm home since they've cut my hours way back, so can respond to the changes more quickly if not realtime.
Today the wind is gone, thank goodness, and they've both been eating hay and snow pretty steadily since the sun was fully out at 8:30am. He even walked around and then trotted for 3 strides for no good reason other than he felt like it! The most energy I've seen from him in weeks
OGR, not a chance. We have had serious equine vet issues in the area since before I came here. I spent much of last week practically begging the vet to come out. I had the feeling she was trying to protect herself in case anything went wrong by making it "my fault." Then when she finally did come, she refused to give him colic treatment on the first visit, even though his symptoms were *classic* colic. This was not just my intuition: not eating, not pooping, stretching and looking at his side, twisting his side and straining when he did poop, and diminished gut sounds all point directly to colic. Every equine vet I have *ever* worked with or observed with others' horses over the last 50+ years would have given him the full treatment on or before Wednesday when he hadn't recovered following the weekend banamine treatment.
Then I overheard her (not eavesdropping, she opened the car window so I could hear the blow by blow) on the phone with another client, who was freaking out over a payment. The client said she was mailing copies, front and back, of the cancelled check plus her bank statement, to prove she'd made the payment.
That night I called my horse friend, Don, about whom I wrote last year when he was accused of starving his horses. I hadn't spoken to him since his court case, and its resolution wasn't published. But I knew this vet was one of the two involved in the case. I described Algiers' symptoms and his first response was "colic." I asked a couple questions regarding his case and this vet. It turns out that, on the witness stand, she claimed they had not been in phone consultation (he has always maintained he was) and *she was reluctant to come out to treat his horses because she was concerned about his ability to pay.* He assured me he always paid her on the spot and never owed her one dime.
What I already knew was that when she first moved to the area, Don championed her, suggested she hold an "open house," invited all the horse people he knew (including local big-barn owners), and that he plowed for her (sometimes in the middle of the night to make sure she was able to get out for emergencies) and did other work for her.
This vet is technically a good vet...but clearly does not return favors, let alone offer any.
Between her delays and requiring me to use her dentist (who cost double what my regular dentist would be) before she would initiate colic treatment, she doubled the cost of Algiers' treatment while prolonging his suffering and seriously increasing his risk of an agonized death. Colic is the 2nd leading killer of horses. I'm still trying to decide what to do for the future. I need a vet who is willing to respond reasonably and not use my suffering horse to soak me...
she just wouldn't give colic treatment that he clearly required until after I had a dentist look at him to rule out teeth as the problem.
My dentist lives far away and travels the entire state. Everybody makes their appointments months in advance and she schedules all the horses in a given area and en route together, then splits the call fee among us.
We were heading into a snow/ice storm. Her dentist is about 15 miles away and was available next day, which meant I could get Aligers' colic treatment sooner by calling her dentist. His life literally was at stake.
Because of her behavior up to that point, I also had concerns that if I did use my regular dentist, she would then claim that Jana isn't "good enough" and would still refuse to treat him for colic.
So everything is covert, by manipulation.
I doubt they split the fee *but* her dentist offered me a choice between a paste tranquilizer that he could administer *or* having the vet out to sedate him. In fact, he tried to pressure me into the latter; he felt quite certain that Algiers would be "too hot" for him to work on. I have injectable tranq that I can administer -- that is a *lot* cheaper, but that wasn't good enough for him 
So she makes money off of him either way: a little with the very overpriced $35 prescription paste that she supplies, a lot if there is an additional call plus sedation. But neither is a classic "kick back." Just do it her way with your sick horse held hostage. I suspect that is exactly what Don found himself facing last year, and explains why he switched vets midstream. He couldn't afford her way and she wasn't repaying any of the favors he'd done for her.
