Well, it's been an intense time hence no updates, we kept her going over 4 days of closures over new year with fluids, gut meds, pain meds and syringe feeds. She seemed to gradually improve, taking 260ml of feed 4 times a day and she was comfortably out of stasis, but her inclination to eat by herself deteriorated to nothing. The last 2 days before they reopened there was a distinct change in her, she starting getting really aggressive towards the syringe at the end of feeds wanting to bite at it and then spending hours vigourously overgrooming her bib. I offered her thick twigs after each meal and she destroyed with her incisors as if she were a beaver, but none of it stayed in her mouth. I thought maybe after 2 weeks of not chewing her teeth had grown too much and she was now struggling to eat as a result, hence wanting to chew but not being able to grind it.
Got her back in for a dental on Thursday, earliest they could do (they only opened on Wednesday and were inundated), and I fully expected her to just have her teeth ground, wake up, maybe syringe to get her going and she'd be good.
When they went in her teeth were fine, but she had new sores on the roof of her mouth and new abrasions on the other side of her tongue too, with her tongue still being very swollen. In cleaning the bits of food from her morning syringe feed from the back of her mouth, my vet went to move a small particle - and I mean tiny, as it looked like recovery food - but it didn't move. He switched to finer forceps and went again - only to pull out an INCH of very fine wire from inside her tongue!!
So the poor girl must have had it right inside her tongue the whole time, but it's slowly worked it's way out enough to be seen. Even if we'd x-rayed the first time it is unlikely to have shown up well enough, let alone had a chance of finding it right inside her tongue. It's very flexible but incredibly sharp, so there was just no way without slicing her tongue repeatedly to try and find it.
The wire had caused her tongue to swell, causing the laceration with normal teeth. As she improved with swallowing it must have just started pushing through, enough to then start irritating the roof of her mouth.
Since then, she had a rough night that night and was clearly in pain again, struggling to swallow the syringe feeds but then by midday the next day she just started eating, and hasn't looked back. It's slow progress - she's still got the abrasions to heal, and an infection in the tongue - but she is steadily nibbling away, initially soft leafy stuff but today she took a fibrestick and a loop treat, though they are still clearly quite uncomfortable to consume.
We're still giving some syringe feeds to keep her gut happy until her volume increases enough, and she's got over a kg of weight to gain back, but she's on the mend.
As to how the wire got there - who knows. It doesn't fit anything in her environment, but it could simply have been in their forage or hay. It's been damned bad luck, and damned good luck that it was found how it was.
