How Not To Take A Foal's Temperature
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This is one of my favourite radiographs. It's from a foal that was referred to the Ontario Veterinary College because of diarrhea. While we were taking the history, we learned that someone had tried to take the foal's temperature before it was referred, but the thermometer got "lost". They assumed that the thermometer had been dropped in the stall. A radiograph was taken when the foal got to the hospital, and as you can probably see, there was a glass/mercury thermometer right in the middle of the foal's abdomen. (The really white part is the mercury in the tipof the thermometer. You can see the rest of the thermometer as a more faint white line running diagonally from the bottom left to the top right). They had apparently inserted the thermometer into the foal's rectum and left it unattended. The thermometer then migrated in the into the foal, working it's way in through over one metre of intestine (but it did, thankfully, stay within the intestine and the thermometer did not break). We ended up having to surgically remove the thermometer.
Beyond the novelty factor of the radiograph, this case highlights a couple of important points:
- Never leave a thermometer unattended while taking a horse's temperature. Digital thermometers that are available these days don't take long at all to get a reading, so just hang on to them.
- Don't use old glass/mercury thermometers. They can (and do) break. This releases liquid mercury (which can be very toxic), and the broken glass can also cause problems. Digital thermometers are cheap, accurate and easy to find, so there's no excuse not to use them.
