An Update on Cool

Cool's silhouette...such a pretty boy!

Cool's ankle (the right one) with it's swelling in comparison to the white leg (not swollen). Hopefully nothing is wrong with his suspensory...the swelling is in a spot that makes me nervous. After having yesterday off, N helped me flex test him today. I did distal (fetlock) flexion and carpal flexion and didn't get a real reaction in either. He actually seemed to be sound when N jogged him down the concrete barn aisle, so that was good. I'm still concerned with the filling in that right front ankle though. As far as I'm concerned, it shouldn't be there. I iced him for a little while today but it didn't seem to really help. Walking up and down the barn driveway did seem to help a little though. The above photo is from before his walk.

This photo if from after walking a little. I wish I had the other leg in it to compare. It's still a little puffy, but not quite as bad as the photo above. Hopefully it's just a tendon sheath maybe? I'm hoping that some long slow distance work (LSD work), maybe walking up and down the driveway, which has slight hills to rehab him. I think that for the rest of this week I will walk him in hand and after that maybe I will start walking him under saddle.

Out to graze while going for our walk.

Poor Coolio :(

I'm hoping to start Emmy back walking under saddle soon too. I started the LSD work up and down the driveway with her also today. She's seemed a little depressed lately :(

Peace.Love.Ponies.

Frustrated.

Yesterday started off as such a beautiful day at the barn. It was so nice and warm outside, Emmy and Cool both went out in the pasture with just their cotton sheets on and had a good canter around the field. It's so beautiful to watch them race each other down across the field and then loop back up and canter side-by-side back towards the gate. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the highlight and the entire day kind of went down hill from there :(

I set up and short low jumping course for Cool, consisting of a diagonal cross rail, a single vertical on the long side and a low 3 stride line down the other long side that was a cross-rail to a vertical. I let him finish his dinner and digest, then tacked him up and went to go school him around and see how he was. I figured that if we were going to head out to the horse show today, I had better jump him around a little bit to see what I had.

Friday he just gotten turned out because I wasn't feeling well, so I figured that he would be ready to rock and roll Saturday.

False.

I got on him and started trotting him. To the right he felt fine, but to the left he was head-bobbing. Not really lame per say, just head bobbing and moving funny up front. It was the strangest feeling ever, like if I let go of the reins and closed my eyes his body wouldn't have felt lame, but he was clearly bobbling his head up and down. At first, I tried to ride through it a little, thinking that maybe he was stiff or the footing was bad (the ring hasn't been dragged in a few days, so it really is starting to alternate between hard and deep spots). I kept him off the rail where the sand was softer and tried to just trot for a while, changing directions numerous times and really sending him forward, then bringing him back. When that didn't help, I let him canter a lap in each direction to swing his back. Once again, to the right he felt fine, but to the left (which is already his bad direction) his canter felt terrible. Very up and down and choppy as if her were locked in his shoulders and just stabbing his legs at the ground. After that, let him trot another lap and then got off. On the ground, I took his boots off and felt his legs. Of course, everything seemed a little warm from the boots but nothing stuck out as being a major problem area. His right front ankle (what is it with my horses and right front problems? I SWEAR I work them evenly on both sides!) seemed maybe a teensy bit fluidy. This is, of course, the leg that he was lame in so badly over the summer. What he did to it then, I will never know, but maybe it was the problem again? I undid his running martingale, ran up my stirrups and proceeded to jog him in hand around the ring. He really did look funny up front, like he wasn't wanting to actually reach forward and extend his leg, but still not really limping.

Deflated and disappointed, I took him to the wash stall, stripped his tack, and started cold hosing. I mainly did the right front, but I honestly hosed every leg for a little bit. His hind legs have been stocking up lately too if he doesn't get bandaged in his stall...something that he has NEVER done before, even while spending multiple days in his stall at home due to weather. I don't understand any of it...and I'm starting to just get frustrated with horses in general at this point. I know that I don't own super fancy, expensive horses. I know that their conformation is not perfect and that their "way of going" is often flawed to some degree, but I also know that I give them the best care possible, the most turnout that I can, basic supplements as needed to support their joints and health, bandages/boots as needed (see above comment about their "way of going") to protect their legs during work but naked freedom in turnout so as not to make them "soft." I take care of them when they are sick or hurt, I ride them on decent footing and I don't ever push them to do anything that might compromise their health or soundness...for goodness sake, I barely even work them. And what do I get for it? Nothing but a barn full of lame horses.

Maybe I should be like some of the other riders at my barn and like other people I know and only clean their stalls every few days when they feel like it...and only turn them out when its convenient for me, and then ride them hard and incorrectly with big bits and naked legs. Maybe I should just do that, because those freaking horses never have a thing wrong with them. Meanwhile, here I am walk/trot/cantering my gelding for maybe 30 minutes and he's unsound? Seriously? Emmy I can understand...she's 25 years old and she's been through a hell of a lot in her life, but Cool? He's 8 years old and spent from ages 8 months to 6 years living in a pasture doing nadda.

Could it be that he just bucked a little too hard in the field and maybe pulled something? Absolutely, and I really hope that's the case...either that or an abscess blowing out. I know that freak, unexplainable things happen; I know that a horse can simply take a bad step and bow a tendon at the walk. I have personally watched a (very expensive) horse with the absolute best care possible, trot across a diagonal on perfect footing and break a hind leg. I know that it doesn't take always take hard work and extremes to make a horse lame. I know that it can happen anytime...but still, it frustrates me none-the-less. Not even for missing the horse show, but just for the simple fact that another one of my horses is (at least kind of) lame.

Peace.Love.Ponies.

The Right-Front Plague

It seems to me that I am plagued by horses with right front leg problems.

After a few days off, a couple romps in the pasture and a gram of Bute, I groomed little Emmy up yesterday afternoon and took her for a trial ride...she was, of course, still lame and actually may have felt worse that she did before. Tracking to the right, she feels okay (not perfect, but acceptable for "cold weather Emmy") but to the left she feels terrible. It's not consistent at all, making the lameness hard to pin point. Down the long side (aka on a straight line) she feels fine for the most part. Not actually "lame" per say, but I do occasionally feel her want to bulge her left shoulder in. On a circle though or around a corner (to the left) on a loose rein she's pretty much dead lame. She's dropping her left shoulder terribly and trying to wheel herself around the turn. If I take up my rein contact and ask her to go round and actually lift her shoulder, she does feel better and no longer limps, but she still doesn't feel right...it's almost like she's not connecting through her body at all. If I could picture what she looks like, she would have an arched head and neck and a dropped spine still. Plus, she trots about 20 feet and then wants to walk...which is SO not like her. Emmy is an off the track Thoroughbred and she's always been HOT to ride...especially when she hasn't been in work lately. I know that she's an old lady now, but I also know her personality and she's just not been right lately.

Probably five years ago, Emmy started with a mysterious right front leg lameness. It happened the year before I left for college, back when I was at our old barn (where we met Johnny, although this was long before I ever decided to ride him) which had no arena of any sorts. I was riding Emmy out in the grass when it started to rain. Being big-bad-young-and-dumb me, I decided that we were going to tough it out and keep working on our striding over some poles. The grass got wet from us cantering over it and turned into mud. We finished our ride and I dried her off and put her away. The next day, she was dead lame in the right front. I can't remember if there was heat in her foot or not back then, but there was definitely no swelling anywhere. It took almost the entire winter to make her sound again (this was in the fall). The vet and farrier (without xrays) couldn't find anything wrong with her. The next year she was fine and went to school with me, where she was first half leased by E. However, the next late spring/early summer, it happened again. She was lame all summer and I started to ride Johnny instead (who also had a bad right front leg, go figure). Near the end of the summer, she just one day went sound. That fall, I left her home and took Johnny to school with me (E leased him) instead for the first semester, thinking that it was just time to retire Emmy. Come winter break, she was right as rain and my parents were tired of taking care of her...so she joined Johnny up at school. She was fine for the rest of that year and E eventually switched her lease back to Emmy for the rest of the school year. That next summer, Emmy fractured her hind splint bone (doing god knows what) and again, spent most of the summer sitting out. I focused my attention on Johnny and near the end of the summer (July-ish) Emmy was back in work and doing great. School came around again (Junior year) and I took both Emmy and Johnny back to school with me. E continued her lease on Emmy until, once again, Emmy went lame late in the winter. She bounced back fairly quickly this time though and everything was fine until E dropped her lease for good due to financial reasons and I was faced with finding Johnny a new home.  Emmy stayed sound for the rest of the school year and in April, with Johnny happy in his new home, the bf bought Cool. We finished out the spring at the boarding barn, renovated the barn at bf's house, put up fencing and brought the two horses home. Summer came and Emmy was lame again. This time, I called out our new vet to look at her. She found Emmy to have a mild loss of flexion in her right front ankle, but an actual flex test came back negative. Out of my own curiosity, I had the vet draw a lyme tester, wondering if perhaps Emmy's sporadic lameness was actually the symptom of illness. I was actually praying that it was going to be. It wasn't; the tester came back negative. By the end of the summer, she was sound again though. This time it lasted until the next spring, when after a day of light jumping, she was dead lame.

At that point, after years of dealing with this lameness issue, I was both fed up and heartbroken. Again, I consulted a veterinarian who offered four different options that we could take to try and resolve the issue once and for all. Option 1 was to take an xray, ideally of both the fetlock and the hoof and check for bony changes. Option 2 was to do nerve blocks to localize the area of pain, since we really didn't know if this was a deep hoof issue or a fetlock issue. Option 3 was to inject the fetlock and see if that helped. Option 4 was to do options 1-3 (although not necessarily in that order).

Obviously, if money were unlimited and not an issue, I would have taken the fourth option to do nerve blocks to localize an area, then xrays to check the bones and then inject as necessary. But, as for most of us horse owners, the budget is not unlimited and option 4 was off the table right away. My next thought was that just willy-nilly injecting the fetlock was probably not the best use of my limited money, so that option was off the table also. What if we injected the fetlock only to find out that the problem was actually in the foot? Xrays were kind of in the same boat for me. While the correct way to diagnose would be to take an xray, we still didn't know what area we were even supposed to be looking in, so the xrays for both the ankle and the fetlock would eat up my entire "Emmy Vet" budget, leaving nothing left for any type of treatment. In the end, after a lot of debating and calculating, I decided that blocking out her foot would be the best use of my money. It was the most cost effective method of actually finding which area we should even be treating. Two nerve blocks into her foot would render the entire region below her fetlock numb. If she went sound, we would know that the problem was in her foot. If she was still lame, we would know that the problem was in her fetlock. (I entertained the idea of xrays for a little while until I decided that I had nothing to compare them to...no previous xrays of either regions to even know if what we were looking at was something new. Who knows what that horses fetlock looks like? And whose to say that it hasn't always looked like that?) It took me about a week to decide all of this (meanwhile Emmy was on stall rest) and when I finally made up my mind and called the vet, Emmy miraculously decided to be sound.

Everyone knows that nerve blocks don't work on a sound horse.

So that was where it ended. Emmy was back in business again, I showed her twice and jumped her and she never took a lame step.

Until now.

And here we are, back to square one. Since I don't have ultra steady employment right now, the nerve blocks and injections are off the table for a while, and little Emmy and I are back to bute, bandages, ice and poultice. I still have no idea what I'm even trying to treat, but I am trying.

I'm wondering if she maybe has a floating bone chip in the fetlock that occasionally gets stuck? Or if there is a ligament in the foot or fetlock that she strained back in the mud those 5 years ago and just keeps re-injuring? The farrier took a look at her last time he was out and put money on a ligament strain in the fetlock from hyperflexion of the joint. I'm still not sure, but it's always a possibility.

Ugh.

Peace.Love.Ponies.