I’m dealing with one that is not progressing. The equine remains non weight bearing on the hind leg since it appeared on Thursday. I’m following my vets discharge orders but curious to learn your stories. And selfishly I hope that by posting this “grrrr” that when I walk into the barn tomorrow morning there will be improvement.
Let me read what you went through!
It wasn’t so much the abscess itself as it was the abscess in combination with a bunch of other things. August 2022 - barn manager texts me, lets me know she’s going to rotate my then 7yo TB and his buddy out into one of the rested pastures with better grass. Awesome, love that.
Follow up text comes an hour later - they ran like absolute fools. Buddy almost went through the fence and my horse had a Mario Kart banana-style wipeout onto his left side. He bounced right back up and walked around fine, so none of us thought much of it.
Get to the barn the next day and notice he looks super sore on the LH coming out of the stall. Pull fly sheet - lovely 2-3” gash across the point of his hip. Sucker is deep and can’t feel good. Fly sheet somehow wasn’t torn, so it wasn’t caught when he came in. Vet comes out to evaluate. He’s clearly off but between the fall and the obvious cut, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. Gave him 1 week of rest and re-evaluated. Hip cut is healing nicely but still NQR. Obviously sore SI on palpation. Ultrasound shows significant inflammation in the joint, vet chalks it up to consequence of pasture wipeout, advises to inject. Did that.
About a week later, he’s clearly feeling better. I went to put his fly boots back on and noticed a small crack at the coronary band on the LH. So we had a LH abscess, and a slice on the left hip/sore SI from the pasture accident. No wonder he seemed suddenly crippled. Horses, man. 
There have been very few but two memorable. On was in the 1970s when my horses crossed a cattle guard that was guaranteed livestock would not cross. One horse had obvious damage to his hooves and the other did not. The one with the obvious damage did great after some time off. The other one ended up with an abscess that would not drain correctly. She even had surgery. It ended up in the joint. She went septic. It was awful. She finally recovered but conversations were had about putting her down. She lived years longer into her late twenties and I was even able to take her with me when I was on active duty army.
The second incident was when a farrier cut my horse too short on all four and she abscessed on 3 out of 4. Then she developed white line because the exposed laminate died and bacteria got in. Then she was unbalanced after cutting out the white line. Finally, another farrier who was friend corrected her angles. Progress! Unfortunately, she was on stall rest so long she wigged out in the cross ties soon after he took over and back flipped in the cross ties wrenching her back. It took 2 years for her to recover from one trim. After all that, she lived into her 30s and was ridden into her late 20s. The farrier that cut my horse too short then cut another horse at that barn too short and she foundered.
Hang in there. It gets better.
We bought a horse from a feedlot cowboy that was changing jobs and leaving the area and dropped the horse at a friend’s barn for sale.
Friend said he seemed a nice horse we could use in our retraining program and super cheap.
The day after we bought him, still at friend’s barn, horse was sore, clearly from an abscess on his left front. Friend kept horse, treated him and when he was ok brought him to us.
A few days later, horse again had an abscess on that foot and off to the vet we went.
Vet x-rayed and horse had a crack on his coffin bone, why he was abscessing.
Vet said it was an older injury, surprised horse was off only when he abscessed.
Treatment was treat abscess and keep horse on a bar shoe and limited movement until it finished healing, which it did shortly.
Horse was lovely, a real pocket pony, cousin kept him for himself, build him a shed in his backyard and used him as his trail riding horse for many years, horse sound and abscess free all along.
is it definitively an abscess, or just behaving like one?
My last “abscess” turned out to be a 1.25" long, pinky width stick shoved horizontally into the back of the frog, which then closed up behind the entry point. Xrays about 5 days into no improvement didn’t show anything, so I continued to treat it as a nasty abscess. 14 days in, I saw something sticking out the back of the frog, and voila - stick
A fractured/broken coffin bone is another possibility.
Subsolar abscesses that are just quietly roaming around can take a lonnngggg time to resolve.
If I were you, with a non-weight bearing leg, I would spring for an xray or 2 sooner rather than later.
My TB was King of the Dry Abcess.
He’d be off, then 3-legged lame (always in front).
Vet would come, dig out The Place - we’d stand back, expecting a volcano of pus… & get, at most, a tiny amount of dark drainage, if that.
Then he’d be fine.
Until the next one.
Not that often, maybe annually.
FF to moving him home
& my Epic Abcess Experience of All Time:
About 3yrs in, he & his buddy are so bothered by late Summer B52 Bomber flies, they go running like crazy in the field.
Next day TB has a stone bruise, RF.
Which I keep an eye on, seems to be resolving…
Until the day I pick that hoof & it bleeds 
Abcess traveled from the sole to the coronet, where it erupted. Again, not much in the way of drainage.
But meantime horse sloughed half his sole 
My Vet:
“Looks like he did his own resection” 
I enter the Twilight Zone of Soak, Wrap, Unwrap, Soak, Rewrap.
Twice daily for 8mos.
Summer becomes Fall, becomes Winter & on to Spring.
Horse becomes so used to the routine I just pull him into the aisle, leave him haltered but loose, feed him his grain from a pan. He stands in place, all while I’m unwrapping, soaking, rewrapping, etc.
I’m thinking this is a career-ending injury, he’s 25 & welcome to be a pasture ornament.
We move on to 3 rounds of $$ glue-on shoes.
He recovers & is 100% sound.
The End
My horse once had a subsolar abscess on a hind leg that took 2 months to resolve. He was just NQR on that leg, sometimes gimpy, sometimes sound. Vet came out, couldn’t find anything obvious but thought it was a festering abscess. Yep, that’s what it was.
Another time I was off riding in the national forest about 4 miles from the house when my horse suddenly pulled up completely lame on his left front. I walked him through the woods to a county road where a neighbor picked us up with his trailer and took us home. It was an abscess that suddenly shifted to a place that hurt. My vet said he’d seen this before–horse seems sound until suddenly he’s not. This one drained within a few days.
Both abscesses happened in the first 2-3 years after I got my horse, and both seemed to originate at the toe. I shortened the interval between trims by a week and the horse hasn’t had any more abscesses.
I seem to have a knack for abscess prone horses. Essentially, I’ve been dealing with hoof abscesses since my earliest childhood horse memories.
But my most memorable:
It was my wedding. We got married out of town, so we left a few days in advance. My horses were boarded at the time at a not-so-great, high drama barn. Of course, the day I left town, I got a call that my horse was dead lame. From the description it sounded like an abscess; had a friend look at her and she agreed. But the barn owner wanted to have the vet out, which was totally fine by me.
Vet drained the abscess and billed me for one of those equine slippers (which I already had on hand, but whatever). Told the BO to keep her on stall rest with the slipper on.
A week later I got home to find my mare still lame, going bonkers in her stall, wearing the slipper packed with shavings and manure. And… a deep, quarter-sized hole in her sole also full of manure! What vet would put that big of a hole in a horse’s foot then not even instruct them to clean it?!? I was livid.
It was a miracle she didn’t get a more serious infection. I think I had her sound again in 24 hours, but that hole took forever to heal. I remember I moved barns just a few weeks later and she was still wrapped up wearing a boot to keep it clean.
The vet clinic worked me in the day I found her non weight bearing. They shot coffin bone series and a series with Play dough in sole and found no air pockets or fractures. Because the sole is thick Doc was able to use hoof knife and expose one track with black matter near the outside bar beside the frog & toe. Also, on hoof testers the sensitivity was in the heels & toe.
This morning nothing has changed, completely non weight bearing. I did warm salt water soak (again) and used a flashlight to look for issues at coronet band and sole and nothing jumped out at me. Bute provided zero relief so I switched to banamine which makes her good rear leg stop quivering.
I have a follow up appointment tomorrow. Doc did say if no improvement we should do a digital Palmer block to determine if it’s only the hoof.
You guys have had some absolutely crazy and wild abscess stories and I appreciate you sharing them here.
My first experience with an abscess: Horse three-legged lame, vet came, opened it up. It hissed, like opening a can of soda. And drained and drained. The horse has such a look of relief on his face. Healed well
For you to not end up with a story to share here!
My first horse had abscesses all the time. A combination of wet weather, shell rock roads, and thin soles. She was lame a lot. Like 3-4 months out of the year. We moved and that put an end to the issue. I think she had one more abscess after that in several years. I was taking her to my neighbors field for turnout and she stepped on a rock. Really she should have been in shoes with pads, but I was a horse poor kid.
Some horses get abscesses and don’t seem to get that lame. I’m guessing it’s proximity to the surface of the hoof and the deeper ones cause more pain? Because I had one draining tract in a different horse and she was never lame. It was found by the farrier.
The worst ones seem to be the ones that blow out by the coronary band. Those tend to take the longest and be the most miserable to resolve.
That has been my experience too.
Thank you!!
I once had a surprise abscess. Horse was not lame at all, farrier came out to do trim and stumbled into opening an abscess track. Horse was dead lame the next day, and wasn’t 100% sound for another 12 weeks. It was the longest winter/spring of my life. 
Oh damn, that’s crazy!
I’m monitoring the coronet band for a burst. And yes, those eruptions seem to take longer to open.
That was a disaster for you to deal with, maddening too. 
This … this is something new. Sweet Jesus.
Worst possible outcome for the gelding in my avatar, unfortunately. He was 25 and I’d had him since he was 3.
Three-legged lame, vet came out and cleaned up the sole, trying to find a spot that he could open to drain. Nothing obvious at that point.
Stayed three-legged lame for a couple of weeks so we tried an antibiotic limb perfusion. No improvement. Xrays and ultrasounds showed nothing but he was getting worse.
The infection opened up in the back of his pastern and drained from there. Antibiotics, another limb perfusion, and he seemed to get a little more sound.
Took him in to the vet and at that point, he was able to stand on a block for xrays so they were able to get a shot of his navicular bone.
A lot of the back of the navicular bone was just gone. Along with, apparently, the part of the DDFT that should have been attached. The earlier xrays hadn’t shown the damage because he wasn’t able to put his foot down at the correct angle to see it. Apparently, when his DDFT finally went, it was actually less painful and he was able to put weight on that foot.
But of course, at that point, there was nothing we could do so we had to put him down.
I think it was the result of a puncture of some sort. We never saw any sign of a puncture and my vet had cleaned up and inspected his sole pretty well as soon as he came up lame, but I think we must just have missed it.
Thank goodness the vast majority of abscesses do generally heal pretty uneventfully but I’ll never be complacent about one again.
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