So here we are a good 2 weeks after HITS started, and DMK is not at HITS… how did this happen? Well, it’s long, but I think it is interesting, hope you do too…
The last week in January, I drove down to Jax to school Robbie before HITS. While driving home on Sunday, I got a message telling me Raven (my old hunter) got kicked right on the point of shoulder, enough to lay open his shoulder and he was not weight bearing for about 15 minutes. But since it was in a good place for drainage, I opted for no stitches, left instructions to give him bute and banamine… I checked him Sunday PM when I got home, and he was reasonably comfortable, but the wound was still draining. I opted not to medicate him Monday AM so I could see how bad he was on Monday night. Pretty sore as it turns out, but weight bearing. And still draining… More bute and banamine…
Then comes Tuesday… Y’all may recall Tuesday… we were giving Jair LOTS of good advice on how to handle “life with 2 horses”. Then I read this post on that thread…
Beware of Murphy. Everyone assumes that, if you have two horses, when one of them is lame, you can ride the other. Unfortunately, it rarely happens like that. If something happens to one, almost inevitably something will happen to the other, and you will have two unridable horses.
Black cats go dancing underneath the ladder perched over my my grave whilst merrily breaking mirrors with abandon. My spine slithers off my back and crawls away to whimper in the corner. I, of course, am oblivious to all this. So off I head to the barn, unaware of this terrible curse laid down upon my life… (I bet Jeb, being the good N’awlins superstitious citizen that he is, would have been more perceptive!)
A mere 5 hours after that fateful post, I arrive at the barn. I go to Raven’s stall first - he is sore and the wound is still draining, but a lot of inflammation is gone. I’m not thrilled, but it WAS a bad kick. I go to pull Robbie out his stall and start grooming/tacking up… Well… no… we won’t be doing that… He is on 3 legs and LF ankle/cannon is blown up like a balloon!!! The power of The Curse is being experienced… I give him bute, poultice and wrap, and I come back out the next morning. No miracle cure has taken place (obviously, I was still in denial about the true powers of the curse - I’m over that now). He is weight bearing, but having NO part of flexing his ankle. Call vet, who comes out that afternoon. I start burning incense and chanting to the Horse Gods. Fellow BB friends all around the country add their powers…
We start with Raven, who is still draining. Put him on antibiotics, contemplate the possibility of a bursa joint being ruptured, but since there were witnesses to The Kick, it is unlikely (vet had concerns about a deep puncture wound). Next we do Robbie. His joint is extremely painful to palpation, and he has that characteristic “wing” of a horse avoiding flexion. We take X-rays, put him on antibiotics mostly to address a possible joint infection and he also this wee small ding about halfway up his cannon bone (inside), which we can’t even find a hole in (tried to flush it). Mostly it looks just like he snagged himself with a rough hoof nail (and he did play hard when he first went out Monday morning).
Thursday I learn that the X-rays are negative, which is a good thing, but he is not making huge progress, even though he is on 4 gr bute/day. Finally about 4 days after this started, the swelling reduces to mostly localized around the ankle, and I am gradually reducing bute. By Day 6, we are down to only 2 gr bute/day, and swelling is limited to a small localized swelling on the inside of the ankle - at the junction of the P1, cannon and splint bone (in short, not good real estate for a problem). On Day 7 the vet has the UGA “ultrasound vet” come out to look at Robbie. We also decide to do Raven because he is still very sore and draining. Again, helpful BB’ers light another round of candles and chant in anticipation of the visit.
After ultrasounding poor Raven, I learn he has bone chips migrating out of the open wound channel, a partially severed tendon and a possible contained fracture of the humerus. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the chips are small and headed in the right direction and the tendon is a minor tendon - neither should affect his soundness. UGA vet said she truly didn’t think he walked like a “fracture lame” horse, but to be on the safe side to keep him in the stall a few more weeks to monitor progress.
Robbie, however, was going for the “Stump the Vet” award though… I lunged him for the vets. To the left he was sound… to the right he was about 95%, which is exactly what I would expect to see after he had been in a stall for 7 days with no work or stretching. But we still have this troublesome soft lump… It feels like fluid under pressure, and he is still only comfortable with 80% flexion. So on to the high tech toys… First we use the thermographic camera. His entire leg lights up like a Christmas tree - everything from above the knee down to the coffin bone is RED. Needless to say, other leg is a nice pleasing blue color. So we have a long discussion about how much of this is caused by the fact that the leg has been under a bandage for 24/7, and there is much confusion all around. He was sound, after all…
Before starting the ultrasound, the UGA vet speculated about how there might be some condyler fracture activity (cannon bone type fracture that I am painfully familiar with from race horse days) that was “hidden” in the first x-ray, or the bump was ruptured joint fluid, or even a detached splint/suspensory that was not apparent on the x-rays, due to pressure from all the swelling… Yippee doo dah - which one of THESE could I possibly want to choose from? The Curse Lives…
We decide to ultrasound all tendon areas and the entire ankle, because the thermography shows so much heat everywhere. She starts with the middle back of tendon, and works her way down the tendon and around the entire ankle surface. Tendons look great, suspensory looks great, sesamoids look very good (he’s an ex-race horse, tough to expect “great”), splint bone looks great, cannon bone is great, P1 is fine, collateral ligament is great… do the outside of the ankle - - all looks great there too - this horse’s leg is just a “monument” to greatness… We are feeling somewhat stumped about now, but go back to the soft bump one more time to see if we can identify where the fluid is going. (lf pushed, does the fluid migrate to the joint capsule at the sesamoids/back of ankle?) Well, it appears to be a separate “pocket” from the joint capsule, but while she is pushing on it, we see this line appear on the screen, and travel through the fluid… It disappears… She moves around and pushes again… We see it and get a “lock” on it!! Robbie has a foreign body lodged in his leg!!! It is roughly about the size/shape of a 1" toothpick, and it is critically near every vital structure in the ankle, and possibly stabbing the collateral ligament (holds cannon to P1).
As to how it got there, who knows? My vet and I are going for the “Scotty Theory” also known as the “it was beamed in” theory… I mean he had this teensy weensy scrape a few inches above, but we couldn’t find a hole in it the day he first did this - and God knows we tried. But perhaps that was the point of entry, then it migrated down to the joint, where it started to irritate him and get infected. Funny - we mostly just put him on antibiotics just as a super-precaution. Out of all the things we did, that one may have been the “life saver.”
Clearly this needs to come out, and we are not going to perform surgery on and around the joint capsule and major tendons/ligaments in the barn aisle, so I get a referral for surgery at UGA. I carefully plan to NOT wear any of my University of Florida sweaters or other UF paraphernalia to Athens and call up UGA. Of course, they don’t do their surgical scheduling around my wants and desires (I want and desire this surgery to be done NOW!!) Surgery is scheduled in one week (the next Wednesday), with an evaluation appointment on Tuesday morning. I’m sure the wait will kill me. When stressed and unable to ride, I have this uncontrollable urge to garden. Of course, to me, “gardening” is ripping up huge amounts of lawn for new beds, planting LOTS of floral types of vegetation, and watching it die over the next 6 months. I warn my neighbors about the impending (temporary) floral deluge…
Over the weekend, both horses seem fine, Raven is progressing wonderfully, I am about 99.999% sure he doesn’t have a fracture, and the wound is only draining a little bit. I don’t feel comfortable enough to turn him out in a big pasture, but we have a small courtyard alongside the barn, two sides are fenced, and there is a lake/pond forming the 4th side. I figure I will turn Raven out for an hour or two with some hay while I am doing some spring cleaning. It’s a lovely day, about 45 degrees, and sunny. So lovely that Raven feels the need to cool off, I guess. I hear this pawing sound, and automatically yell at the only horse remaining in the barn (Robbie). Then it occurs to me that this pawing noise has an “aquatic” component to it… I go running out of the barn, to see my horse - in his turnout rug - in the lake, well past chest level, and heading out. My heart stops beating, and all my fears come back. I try to imagine how I will explain to the vets that my horse broke his leg because he was in the lake… But, before I dived in for a rescue, I tried some grain (Raven lives for the prospect of food). I grab some grain, stand at doorway into the courtyard and call his name and shake the bucket (actually, I am pretty sure I was shaking all over, but that did allow for some quality bucket-shaking). He wastes no time in executing a watery rollback and comes galloping up to me (sound) and happily proceeds to munch away. After I can start breathing again, and my heart slows down, I behave just like the relieved parent who’s kid has dodged death. I start yelling at him. Being Raven, he is singularly unimpressed.
On Tuesday I took Robbie to UGA, where he was re-ultrasounded. The FB (foreign body) is still there and appears to have more pus around it. They decide to operate on him first thing in the morning, and plan to do an ultrasound immediately prior to surgery in order to improve the chances of finding the FB. As the surgeon explained, it can be quite difficult to find these things if there is no drain track (and since this thing looks for all the world like it was beamed in, there is no drain track). He said that if he can’t find it rather quickly, he will not spend a lot of time looking around for it, because of the critical location. Great… I now have to worry about the risks of anesthesia, and now I can add the “what if they don’t find it” worry to my ever expanding ulcer…
The good news? At noon, the surgeon called - Robbie was up and back in his stall, they found the splinter, and the only issue is that they cleaned out quite a bit of pus, so they decided to leave it open for drainage, and let him stay up there until Saturday to monitor for a few days. I feel the ulcers receding…
Many thanks to all my BB friends who have been awfully supportive during this time… Louise, So Easy, Duffy, Hattie, AHC, VTrider, Becca, JEB, Havaklu, and everyone else… Invoking the Horse Gods worked!!!
