Our one and only foal was born with lax tendons, but not severe but moderate…my vet said no locking up, she wanted the mare and foal out on pasture during the day after the 3 day mark…she said exercise will strength the tendons…which is exactly what happened and after about 4 to 6 weeks she no longer had lax tendons.
Dalemma
[QUOTE=JackieBlue;7556716]
If the foal was given oxytetracycline (or anything in the tetracycline family, possibly), normal collagen organization could have been negatively impacted. Oxytetracycline is known to make the ligaments and tendons of foals more susceptible to elongation under weight bearing. That’s why it’s given to foals with the opposite abnormality - tendon and ligament contracture. IOW, Oxytet would more than likely exacerbate this filly’s condition.[/QUOTE]
Thank you for your precise explanation. I had a contracted foal that was treated with oxytet (successfully!) and wondered what impact it might have had in this case.
Well the filly is now 2 weeks old and no longer sick at all, but her tendons have not gotten better except only very, very marginally. She’s in trailer shoes and needs to have thick bandages on or she still flops over completely. She can walk with the bandages on and even tries to canter and buck a little bit when they hand-walk her. Witihout the bandages she is down on her fetlocks completely still. 
Vets are WILDLY pessimistic but at this point there is no reason not to give her all the time in the world as she is growing, feeding, and reasonably comfortable. Hoping to bring her home soon.
http://i.imgur.com/A0rninl.jpg
That is from last week when she still had her central line, etc. All of that is gone now and the trailer shoes are on but legs are virtually the same.
Poor baby. Sending massive jingles that she gets better.
Major jingles. I have cited this before…but I watched a documentary once on a herd of elephants that had a calf born with horrible limb deformities. Couldn’t really get up to nurse properly and could barely keep up with the herd. They felt for sure he would not make it as there was no intervention and it appeared that it would not fix naturally. Well, he did, and grew up to be a normal elephant. So things can work out even when there appears to be little hope.
Major, major jingles.
Jingles for your sweet baby… Thinking positive thoughts that her shoes will help her make progress.
Positive thoughts coming your way.
OP-
my 2012 colt was at least as lax behind, if not worse, than your filly here. We called him ‘elf feet’ at the time. Anyway, at 24 hours old he too got sick and was in isolation for 5 days at Morven Park. While they treated him for his infection, they instantly put on the heel extension plastic shoes. He kept ripping them off, and they would tape them back on…
After a week at the hospital he was sent home back to our repro vet’s farm, where she had her farrier come out and do glue ons of the heel extender shoe so he could not rip them off. We had the farrier come out to evaluate and replace every 2 weeks for the first 8 weeks of his life. At 9 weeks he was upright enough to show at Upperville in the foals class.
Now 2 years later, he is perfectly straight and correct and just won Best Young Horse at Lexington this past weekend.
It takes time and determination with those dang shoes. I would ask your vet if there is a slightly longer and wedged extender shoe-the ones in your photo don’t look quite as long in the heel as the ones we used. Eventually we were using metal glue on extensions by his 3rd pair. It also wouldn’t hurt to maybe get some imaging done of the fetlocks and make sure structurally all is there. But from everything I read and my vets told me, the best thing for this is exercise. So if you can help her get up with those shoes and make sure she is moving around, over time things should straighten up, tighten up and it will be as if nothing was ever ‘wrong’!!
good luck, OP and jingles for your baby
Oh, DW, she’s lovely. And she needs help or the vets’ prognostications just may win out. From the photo of her non weight bearing, it appears that she’s got some soft tissue contracture in both fetlocks, but more notably in the limb that’s closest to the person in the picture. I’d be willing to bet that if you grabbed that little leg, you wouldn’t be able to flex the fetlock much. This needs to be addressed and quickly. In the simplest terms, her body has decided that the current joint alignment will be the status quo, so it’s strengthening the tissues in that position. She can’t possibly “come up” if her own tissues are firmly holding her fetlocks in the hyperextended position. Her pasterns are likely a bit “frozen”, too. Add in the obvious inflammation in those little fetlocks and you’ve got a recipe for a lifetime (and not a long one) of bearing weight on the fetlocks.
The next things that stand out in the pictures are the shoes. They are way too short. Another poster mentioned wedged shoes. If she weren’t contracting into the hyperextended position I’d be all for that, but when the tissues are tight, you can get stretching at one joint, but not at the other related joints and end up with more problems (like stretching and weakness at the coffin joint with jamming forces from immobile joints above = bad). I’ve never been a fan of cup shoes for a number of reasons, but mostly because they don’t allow for much expansion of the hoof. Baby needs to be on those feet and her walls and heels need to be free to flex. But, they’re better than nothing.
I don’t know if anyone has the time, but manual stretching of the fetlocks and pasterns would be tops on my list of necessary therapy for these legs. A pair of dynamic splints would be ideal, because they could release the contractures and provide flexible support at the same time, but as I shared earlier, availability is an issue. Do you have any Back on Track wraps, DW? As I’m sure you know, heat is your friend when releasing soft tissue contracture. As is motion and reduction of inflammation.
While exercise IS great for both laxity and contracture, walking on the sesamoids isn’t good for anything. I believe she’s still hospitalized, so you have vets making her daily exercise calls and don’t need to worry about her daily management just yet.
If she were mine and I couldn’t get dynamic splints, I would work those tissues loose as soon as possible. In between massaging and stretching sessions, I would try applying a thick, wedge soled flip flop to each hind foot. I might leave the little cup shoe initially, as it could make taping the flip flop sole in place easier. Here’s a picture of the kind of flip flop I would start with:
http://i.imgur.com/tkNl4B5.png
And I would get it big enough to stick out behind the fetlock a little. Measuring from the baby’s toe, along her sole, up the back of the pastern and including the fetlock joint, I would get a feel for the length of shoe I need to start with.
In this case, I would be looking to physically “wedge up” her pasterns for a little while. I would cut off the thongs and then position the little foot near the toe so that the rest of the sole runs along the pastern. Before taping, I would employ gel padding of some sort - medical grade gel cushion, cut to fit gel saddle pad, bicycle seat gel pad…you get the idea - to build the wedge to the degree needed. Carefully applied gel helps build up the wedge toward the heel of the shoe, providing a near normal angle for the pastern and a soooooffft, squishy resting spot for the fetlock. Aaaaah, sweet relief for the poor little sesamoids.
Tape your gel in place and either cover tape with something nonsippery - Vetrap, drawer liner, sports grip tape - and/or wrap the baby’s leg and foot with a non slippery, i.e. Vetrap finished, bandage.
Once you’re happy with the degree of angle and padding, Elasticon and duct tape become your allies in securing the “device” to the little leg.
Sorry for the long post. I’ve seen so many of these that I can recognize, even in a photo, when they’re not progressing as they should be. I don’t mean to be too blunt, but more needs to be done for this baby ASAP and it bears repeating, loosening up the tissues is of utmost importance. They can’t possibly tighten up in the correct alignment if they’re already tight now.
She is darling. I hope this is all just a bad dream very soon.
DW, if at all possible fly Jackieblue out to see your filly.
Just to be clear, I’ve always splinted babies that are this severe. And they’ve always gotten better. And again, DW, if you’d like, I can try to get you a pair of splints and get them set up as much as possible before sending them on to you. But I want to reiterate that using these splints for severe laxity isn’t straight forward and easy, so even if you did opt to try splinting, it may just drive your vets nuts. And you’d be looking to spend in the low to very low 4 figures on the whole deal.
Really, if you can get her to loosen up enough to come up even the littlest bit, it will make a world of difference. If you can begin the trend, inertia comes into play and things tend to continue in the right direction. I’d try the flip flop thing before getting into splinting.
Or, if there’s a good blacksmith/farrier at the hospital, a custom heel extension with a “fetlock sling” on it is an option. Paul Goodness at Virginia Tech designed this one for a horse with a suspensory injury:
http://i.imgur.com/omMnuYN.jpg
It may involve a lot of counterforce that could be too much for a baby, but I’m sure Paul would be happy to consult.
Jingles for your filly, Deltawave! Come on tendons!
Jingles for your filly!
I was just going to say the same thing! :yes:
We are breeding for a foal next year (through a breeder in GA whose bred two of our ponies) and if anything like this happened, I’d have JackieBlue flown in instantly! That is, if she wouldn’t mind! 
[QUOTE=Laurierace;7563204]
DW, if at all possible fly Jackieblue out to see your filly.[/QUOTE]
I was just going to say the same thing! :yes:
We are breeding for a foal next year (through a breeder in GA whose bred two of our ponies) and if anything like this happened, I’d have JackieBlue flown in instantly! That is, if she wouldn’t mind!
What is the “flip flop thing” please?
She’s literally talking about a flip-flop, like you’d wear Only, in the newer wedge version
http://i.imgur.com/tkNl4B5.png
. He was/is an extremely flexible horse (which is why he has such awesome gaits, in part) and his ligaments just didn’t work like they were supposed to. He also turned his right hip out from the hip socket. Vet said it couldn’t be done, but after he x-rayed the whole right side of horse, he admitted, he was turning his leg out from the hip like a ballet dancer in 3rd position (only when he was standing, not moving). I had to be careful when I was picking his hooves to not let him jerk his hoof away from me and cause his fetlock to temporarily dislocate (he has really supple ligaments).
Anyway, his knees straightened up by about 3 months. He stopped standing around in 3rd position when we put on a shoe with a trailer on his RH for 2 months when he was about 10 months old.
He’s now turning 16, is super sound without supplements but has had his hocks injected twice, has won oodles of USDF HOY awards, is an approved stallion, evented successfully at Preliminary at Galway, etc. jumps 5 feet with ease and throws wonderful foals that inherit his flexibility, so I wouldn’t sweat it yet with your foal. Keep in touch with your vet and do some x-rays to see how the joints are holding up. Don’t make them exercise, but let him move around and strengthen the muscles and ligaments gradually.
Hopefully it will all work out!
[IMG]http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff171/teamgauguin/Gauguin_Champion-2-1-1.jpg)
Morgen (JackieBlue) is worth her weight in GOLD. Get her number. Fly her in. She can fix this!
If baby was to be moved to a certain barn for rehab :D, I am sure there would be more than a couple people at the barn that would be happy to learn the proper stretches and exercises from you DW and hopefully JackieBlue to make sure she is getting intensive rehab. I only have a couple weeks left but I’m happy to offer services. We are all pulling for Sabrina.
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