Goodbye, Summer

You haven't even gotten here yet, but I'm already saying adios.

I haven't been writing much because there is much to write, and there will continue to be little to write for the next, oh, 5 months or so.

Yes, the news was not good at the most recent vet visit. Over the last few weeks Stella had been on some intense antibiotics that kill everything imaginable and we were still not seeing a decrease in swelling. She wasn't lame, she was certainly stiff but didn't appear immensely uncomfortable. The heat was gone, and the fluid-fill was firm and cool, not warm and squishy as before.

Several vet visits, diagnostics and tests later (including a full set of hock x-rays and an ultrasound, a series of flexion tests, a week of a heavy-duty antibiotic given rectally 3x/day, continued dosing of SMZ's 2x/day, cold hosing and wrapping of the distal leg) we finally arrived at a diagnosis. Stella had indeed had a very badly infected wound, but the antibiotics had taken care of that. The swelling from the infection, however, had covered up the more serious issue: damage to the collateral ligaments of her right hock. That's why she stopped responding to antibiotics, and why her leg remained filled. Ultrasound confirmed some sort of damage, although there are apparently 18-20 collateral ligaments in the hock joint, so there's no certainty as to which ones.

The good news, if there is a silver lining to all this, is that she is completely weight-bearing, not off at the walk, and only very, very slightly off at the trot. She only exhibits discomfort when the leg is forcefully flexed (as a vet would do to test a joint during a pre-purchase exam) and when turned very sharply. Her x-rays were clean, so there's no bone involvement. As the vet put it, the bar that is used to measure the severity of joint/ligament/tendon injuries is if the horse will willingly bear weight. If you didn't know what had happened and didn't look and compare both her hocks, you would never know she had this injury when she moves.

So the prognosis is very good, albeit a bit of a setback. At the end of May, we will re-evaluate where she's at and determine a more specific protocol for her care. The expectation is the ability to return to work (whatever the means, since she wasn't really in work to begin with) within 3-5 months.

As of right now, she's been taken off the antibiotics entirely and shown no sides of lingering infection. The wounds are completely closed, but swelling remains in the hock joint and, if left unwrapped, it sinks down into the lower leg. She's getting Surpass, a topical steroid cream, on the hock daily, wrapped at night. Cold hosing is the only other thing I can do besides limit her movement. She's been cordoned off from the boys and has been pretty good about tempering how much she exerts herself. With the heat wave we've gotten the last week, she's been perfectly happy to sit around and nap, and didn't seem terribly bothered when the boys got to go out to pasture for the first time this week. I've been hand grazing her as much as I can, and I'm going to be creating a make-shift "pasture" for her to have an hour or so a day. Other than this, it's just a waiting game.

In addition to all of this, the vet had expressed concern over her body condition. She's got no topline, I'll give her that, but the vet suggested a fecal and a vitamin E/selenium test be done. I figured, "Why not, I'm already going to be up to my eyeballs in vet bills, what's one more?" Her fecal egg count was 0, which I expected, but her vitamin E levels were way lower than is normal. The remedy was a very expensive bottle of concentrated vitamin E in oil form, 10ml a day for a month, and then on a vitamin E powder supplement permanently.

I'll try and post pictures every once in a while. Between working two jobs, finishing up massage school and taking care of Stella multiple times a day, it's been hard to even have a life, but for the next few months it's a matter of riding out the storm. I try and tell myself that everything happens for a reason, that maybe this is OK, because it forces me to just hang out with her, be present and relax. Maybe it'll be the chance I need to stop being so ambitious about my plans for us and just be with her.