#oxytet

Fuck my life.

Anyway vet says we need to do five IV doses of Oxytetracycline 200LA which is gonna be super fun given that this baby horse has had so many needle sticks in the last month that she has decided, with good cause, that she doesn’t fucking want to be needle-stuck any goddamn more, thank you very much.  Not sure how that’s gonna go for five days and allegedly it should be diluted, as well.  Ugh.  Oxytet is the antibiotic of choice for Lepto pomona, though, so probably it’s the right drug.

Internet suggests that oxytetracycline should not be given to ponies with kidney problems.  Guess whose pony had kidney problems TWO WEEKS AGO?  Vet says this should not be a problem.  Hunh.  Okay.  He’s the vet.  I am not the vet.

However, I am a thousand dollars into the medical bill hole of woe for this fucking baby horse.  (Not counting blood work, which is another $300 or so.)  At this point I am not going to kill this damn baby horse from lack of attention to details.  I know it’s wrong and bad and not-trusting-the-vet but I am googling the shit out of things so that maybe I can prevent killing this fucking baby horse who is the last thing I have left out of my dead mare.

Vet says “5mg of drug for each 10lb of baby horse” which is good.  That’s roughly 5mg per Kg of baby horse.  10 lb is 4.5 kg of baby horse and this dosage rate appears to be within the dosage range for equines for IV oxytetLA200.  (I’m getting the upper dosage for equines from this site which suggests 10mg/kg of equine.)  Vet continued, saying give “9 or 10 cc of OxytetLA 200, once daily″ which doesn’t work out to me as meeting the 10mg/kg dosage guideline OR falling in line with the “5 mg of drug for each 10 lb of baby horse”.  It looks like a lot more than that.

Let me explain.

Oxytetracycline LA200, per the website here, says it contains “200 mg oxytetracycline per ml” and I recall from high school chemistry that a mL and a cc are the fucking same thing.  So this stuff is 200 mg per 1 cc.  It’s got 200 mg of active ingredient per 1 cc of injectable fluid.  That’s right there on the lable.

Referring to vet’s instructions, a 9 or 10 cc shot means, like, 9 x 200mg of actual ingredient.  9 x 200mg is 1800 mg of Oxytetracycline LA200′s active ingredient.  At 5 mg of actual medicine per 10 lb of baby horse, for a baby horse that weighs 200 lbs on a good day... we should be giving 100 mg of actual medicine, not 1800 mg.  1800 is way too much.

I mean, my math isn’t fucked up.  I am pretty sure my math isn’t fucked up.  

Vet said to give 5 mg per 10 lb of baby horse.   Baby horse weighs 200 lb approximately.  Divide by 10 and we get 20 for how many sets of 10 lbs are in a 200 lb baby.  So, multiply 20 by 5 and you get 100 mg of active ingredient dose, which (according to the 200mg/cc thing) is half a fucking cc of the stuff... not like nine or ten cc’s.

Maybe vet meant 5 mg per kg of baby horse.  Baby horse weighs about 90 kg.  So, 90 x 5 = 450 mg.  That’s two and a bit cc’s, not nine or ten.

The internet (people labeled DVM and sites like Merck Veterinary Manual and such because I am not a fucking idiot and I don’t care what ya’ll on the CotH website did) allows as how you could maybe do as high as 10mg per kg of baby horse.  That seems a bit high, but okay.  Baby horse weighs 90 kg, give or take, so that’s 900 mg, which works out to 4.5 cc of the stuff at a 200 mg/cc concentration... HALF AS MUCH as the vet is suggesting with the “9 or 10 cc’s” amount.