When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

Or so it feels like.


There's not too much I've had to say lately. What was a snowballingly good week ended with a crash a few days ago, as you know, and everything has been pretty crappy since then. Even the weather has tanked, and our beautiful sunny 70-degree weather has turned to a chilly, misty rain. My clients are all increasingly moody with the foul weather, the horses all seem to be popping up with huge and mysterious lamenesses/illnesses, and a dear friend of mine who is part of my little extended family at my old job is in the hospital and not doing well at all. I can't seem to get my head on straight this week either. I've been having a lot of fun with my new honey, that's for sure, but when she's not around there's not too much to be smiling about. Part of the reason I'm good at my job is that I have absolutely no ability to deal with unhappy clients, so I break my back every day to make sure every last need of theirs is met and then some. For the most part, I have exceptionally happy and complimentary clients, but I'm not Superwoman and I can't make everyone happy, and miscommunications do happen sometimes. Mentally I'm not good with dealing with that kind of stuff. I have a bunch of mystery lamenesses in the barn right now, none of which make sense or have an explanation, which is the main reason for everyone being so funked out and moody, myself included. I'm not a hero and I can't fix everything, and that kills me.

And Gogo. Honestly, at this point all I can do is fall back into a chair and stare at the situation blankly. It makes absolutely no sense at all and I don't know what it is. Last week, she was being exceptional. It really felt like we were getting somewhere. I was pushing her just a little bit harder, very midly increasing what I was asking of her, and on Sunday and Monday of last week had two of the best dressage rides I've ever had with her. Honestly, on Tuesday I felt mere movements away from Second Level. Quite clearly we couldn't do too much, and I know I sure as hell felt my abs the next day so I'm sure she did too, but she honestly offered up all on her own a new level of collection which she's never given me before, all on her own. She was light, responsive, and electric in a way I've never felt before. I felt like I could have asked anything of her and she would have done it, no matter what it was. It really did feel like Second Level was right there in our grasp, just a matter of strength and some more time before we really could do it. I got off feeling like I was on top of the world, ready to take on anything. It was amazing.

Tuesday, I hacked her up the road, up to 45 minutes of walking with a few minutes of trot on the flat parts. She, however, did not feel quite as even or good as she had been, so I ceased trotting and thought about it for a minute. I trotted again. There, just a little. Was I imagining it? I wasn't sure. Which leg? Couldn't tell. Was she tired from the day before, was it me? I sure as hell was achey. I stopped again, walked back to the barn, stripped her tack and had someone jog her for me. Nope, she looked just fine, beautifully sound, better than she's ever looked. I felt a little funny about it, but turned her out and let her do her thing. The legs were quiet and cool all day, and I wrapped them that evening, just in case.

Wednesday was my day off, but I just so happened to be at the barn anyway because as a barn manager, I never actually ever seem to have a day without calls, texts, e-mails and the like. We had another broken horse, so I was tending to him when the farrier showed up. I just so happened to ask him to help me work on Gogo's feet when I was done with the big red horse, so we pulled her out and started in. Every since the stifle injection, Gogo has been standing with her RH turned out just a hair when she's on crossties. I've not mentioned that before on the blog because honestly I didn't know what to think about it, and none of the vets seemed that concerned. I've not been convinced and have kept a wary eye on it, but so far it has been nothing. What the vets thought was that it was likely a strength issue that would correct itself with time and conditioning. I mentioned this to the farrier and we scoured her over, discussing what it might be, if anything. When we worked on her LH, she hopped around a little, as if she wasn't quite comfortable on her RH. That did not make me happy. I chose not to ride her that day, and instead turned her out and watched her cruise around the little paddock with a very attractive, albeit shortlived, sound-looking trot.

And then came Thursday. Wanting to see if I could replicate a little bit of the brilliance I had on Tuesday, I went out to ride with a purpose. She felt fabulous so I figured that on Tuesday she must have been just a little bit muscle tired, which was understandable. She moved off into her work well, with a little bit of fuss but not much, and gave me some fantastic work. And then I asked her to canter, going right. She immediately flung her head into the air, legs in all directions on all different leads, bolting off on the circle around the short end of the ring. I managed to bring her back to a walk, wondering what the heck that was all about, and asked her to trot. BAM! Three-legged, toe-dragging lame. Exactly the same as last time. And similar to the second incident as well. To have her do it a third time, in the same situation as always? There has to be more going on. This isn't right. The lameness has resolved itself again, and the legs have stayed cool and quiet. Which is leading me back up higher... way higher. That's right, that stupid stifle. We may have found inflammation via the bone scan and we may have injected the joint, but that does not seem to have done anything for her. If this were a ligament injury, I would have expected improvement with the rest. I would have expected improvement with the increase in hillwork and strength work we've done. I would not expect a grand crashing down of all our hard work every time we try to start cantering again.

I did have a reader mention locking stifles to me once, which is a possibility. I find it odd that it would only occur on one side? Honestly though, I'm out of ideas otherwise. She's going back up to Tufts as soon as I can get her there. I don't know when that is going to be. For now, she's just getting muddy and delightfully disgusting in our smallest turnout. I would love her to go in the bigger ones, but I can't chance it until I know what is going on. She is still treadmilling too on the lowest setting, since she is sound at the walk. I've also just been hopping on her bareback and walking around a little, just for fun. I'm trying to stay positive about all this.

Which is not easy.

But I am trying. That is for sure.




I've gotten a bunch of e-mails from you guys, I'm sorry I haven't written back yet. I will, I promise. Just give it a little more time.

Look at me Shrek! I'm TROT-TING!

YAAAAAAAY WE DID IT!
WE TROTTED!

Okay well, it wasn't quite what I had expected/planned. Gogo is set to start her 5 minutes of trot daily on Thursday, and she was being SO good and quite last night under tack that I thought I would trot a few steps in each direction to see how she felt, seeing as she'd have today off anyway and just in case we needed to change plans. She felt very weak - like she had no idea what had happened to her butt over the past 3 months - but otherwise very even and very, very well behaved. She lost her right stifle going right, and her left stifle going left, which to me is indicative of lost-butt-syndrome, and I would expect that with strengthness this will resolve itself. She was remarkably well-behaved, stretching down to my contact and everything, and she did feel quite good. And as for me, I just wanted to keep trotting all day!! I curbed it at about 15 seconds in either direction... no need to rush.

Boy did THAT ever feel good. Remember when you were a kid and you trotted for the first time and you just NEVER wanted to stop trotting EVER? Yea, that was me yesterday.

TROT WIN!



And Evil Gogo gets one more big FAIL: yesterday, she was out in her medical paddock per usual, and I of course being an idiot had unknowingly put the obnoxious grey gelding Query next to her. Gogo and Query do not have a good history together, because they are both hateful. It is an unfortunate juggling act with 31 horses and 7 turnout spaces in the wintertime, and I have to do some serious brainwork every night trying to figure out who is going to go where, and when so as not to conflict with their lessons, and who to NOT put next to who, and who does NOT do well in the AM/PM, and who is hateful towards chestnuts, and who is going to hump a mare over the fence. So anyway, Gogo and Query ended up next to each other, and in our four smallest turnouts, they all share a wooden fence. NOT good planning on my part. There is electric wire running around the tops of all the fences, and in the medical turnout, our maintenance guy recently put up a very low line of electric tape around the lowest boards. It was very ugly and my boss didn't want it there because it was not only an eyesore, but it was so low it would have been easy to catch a leg in. ENTER GOGO. Query had a haypile in his pen, as did Gogo, but did Query go over and eat his hay? Nope, Query had to stand next to Gogo the entire time and go, Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin? Until she finally went, I AM GOING TO KICK YOU IN THE FACE IF YOU DON'T LEAVE RIGHT NOW. Well of course, Query being Query, this made him very angry, so he started rearing and making horrible Jurrasic Park noises, which in turn set Gogo off, and she started firing double-barrel kicks at his face. Remember the line of electric tape? When she came down, she got both hind legs stuck in it. Bless her heart, even though it was shocking her to death, all she did was very casually jig away.... and pulled the entire thing down with her. Query is still making dinosaur noises, my boss is peeking her head out of the arena door while on a horse, and I am running mad as a hornet towards the fields, angry at Gogo for bouncing on her legs, angry at Query for being an insufferable asshole, and mad at myself for not separating the two of them earlier. Gogo is no worse for the wear but she did get cold-tubbed and some banamine because I take no chances. I got back at Query by deworming him yesterday. That'll teach him.



Evil, evil mares.

End of November Analysis

A few days late, but hey, better late than mever ;) I've not been keeping goals since this injury because quite frankly, I only have one goal: get Gogo sound. And I can do the very best that I can but sometimes it's just up to fate in the end. However, with things looking brighter, I am going to go ahead and do my December goals, and hope that all of them will come true:


December Goals:

1) Continue successful walk work under saddle, building to 30 minutes and working on very simple on the bit work
2) Take our first trot steps in 3 months and not be lame/freak out
3) Fully plan out rehab schedule for the next 3 months
4) Start looking ahead to next show season and make very tentative plans
5) Have Gogo chiropractically adjusted


Dr. A's wife literally just called me right now as I was typing out "get Gogo chiropractically adjusted" and we set a time for this Saturday at 10am. Thank GOD for that too because boy does she ever need it. Now that we have bone scan images that show definite asymmetry in her pelvis we need to really do something about it!!

I'm counting down the days not only until Christmas, but to when I get to start trotting again. 11 days!!!


Guess this is a short post. But that's all right because any news about Gogo is always good. ;)

Let's Talk Stifles

Gogo's bone scan results came back Thursday. I actually called Tufts midday in a total panic, very nearly cancelling it and making the other vet very angry, but we decided that since she was already there and already injected with the isotope that we would just go ahead with it. I felt much better after telling him exactly how I felt about it though. He called me back later in the day to confirm that the effusion in her right stifle was indeed showing up on the bone scan, and she also had left SI pain, which didn't surprise me given her chiropractic history. They found the two SIs to be asymmetrical, which Dr. A had mentioned when he looked at her last. They blocked the stifle yesterday and she jogged sound. It appears that along with the tendon hyperextension she also jammed her stifle while sliding. As the other stifle was sparkling clean, this appears to definitely be an acute injury versus long-term degeneration, so we opted to treat the stifle with Vetalog and Polyglycan to get any last inflammation taken care of. That's of course not ideal in my mind, but I want to take care of this right now - long-term inflammation CAN lead to joint degeneration and that's the last thing I want. By taking care of it now, we can prevent that from happening, and it's likely that we've had to do this joint (and only the right one, I might mention) and then never have to think about it again. All in all, I am glad we ended up doing the bone scan, as it gave me peace of mind, like a few of my readers said.

As for the SI asymmetry, I am calling up Dr. A right away to have her adjusted. I knew for a fact that she needed one (he put his hands on her and told me so), so we are opting to treat the SI issued chiropractically for now. If we need to address them again in the future with antiinflammatories we will, but I hope not to do that. Dr. A is nothing short of a miracle worker in my mind so I expect he will be able to help greatly.

(For those of you unfamilar with nuclear scintigraphy, here is a little write-up of what it is. Essentially, the theory is that when bone is injured it repairs itself by adding more bone to an area and increasing its activity, a term called remodeling. The isotope injected into the horse is radioactive, and accumulates where there is a high level of bone activity. Essentially they measure the radioactivity of areas of the horse - the areas that accumulates the isotope in high levels is essentially measuring inflammation. It's useful over radiographs for things like joint degeneration because a horse might have clean x-rays but still have joint pain, or often times vice-versa. However, it doesn't do more than tell you which areas of bone are inflamed - it's up to the doctor to determine what exactly is causing the pain and why.)

Of particular note is the fact that her hocks were, and I quote, "pristine." Either they were not the trouble I thought they were, or injections greatly helped. Which is very comforting to hear. We ran the ultrasound over the fat hock and found nothing of particular importance, and when it showed up clean on the scan, we can only deduce that for whatever reason, she developed some mild cellulitis (bug bite? trama?), which may or may not go away. Seems to not be a problem, so we'll just wait to see what it does.

One last thing to note is that we no longer suspect this is an issue of Lyme. The other vet said that something about Lyme shows up in a certain way on the bone scan, and they didn't see that (he explained it to be but I couldn't make heads or tails of it). So at least there is that. Now we know she's just a nutty event mare on stall rest in December. Not surprising!



Here are a few of the images from the bone scan:






It's always very interesting to see because I dunno, those stifles look the same to me!


And a quick ultrasound image:



Coming along very nicely. I guess there are still small margins of where the lesion was but they are so unremarkable that they weren't even pointed out to me on ultrasound.



Gogo's rehab program continues as thus:

Dec 5: Strict stall rest (and grooming), 2g bute
Dec 6-11: Treadmill 25 minutes once a day, 2g bute daily for 3 days then 1g bute for 4 days
Dec 12-18: Tackwalking 30 minutes, treadmill 25 minutes
Dec 19-Jan 1: Tackwalking 30 minutes, trotting 5 minutes, treadmill 25 minutes
Jan 2-15: Tackwalking 30 minutes, trotting 10 minutes, treadmill 25 minutes
Jan 16-29: Tackwalking 30 minutes, trotting 15 minutes, treadmill 25 minutes
Jan 30-Feb 13: Tackwalking 30 minutes, trotting 20 minutes, treadmill 25 minutes
And then we can begin canterwork, if all is going well. We'll talk to Dr. Chope in 6 weeks to see about another ultrasound if we need it, but I'll probably just have Dr. C do it here.


Hooray!