Butthurt

Monday night when TC decided to get all butthurt... literally... I didn't know what was going to happen this week. Except that I'd be calling him butthurt a lot.

Sometimes he's totally fine the next day, but since we didn't really work him out of it, I figured he'd still be sore. So I decided to see what he was like on Tuesday night and then go from there. Tuesday night he was better, but still a bit sore. I tried to think nothing of it, but it was hard.

Hacking around on Thursday morning, he is
probably just faking it to get more hacks!

Predictably, I was up at 5am on Wednesday morning looking up what to do about it. If he's going to have some issues with soreness at this level, I want to get hold of it now before something like this derails a show.

There were a lot of ideas:

Massage Therapy: I grabbed the number of a massage person from Peony and also ordered a book on massage.

Massage Blanket: These things are so expensive!

Back on Track Blanket: Maybe he wants expensive clothes...

Magnetic Blanket: Do those even work?

Magnesium: I went to the store and got him some MagRestore, my mom says she isn't feeding Magnesium 5,000 anymore so I could have the rest of it. Not sure if this will be permanent since I'm pretty sure he's getting enough... but we'll see.

Cold Laser: Maybe it'd be good to cold laser his butt every day.

Liniment: I have some at the barn but keep forgetting to put it all over his butt.

We did a lot of walking in the water on Thursday,
I'm thinking it's good for him to pick up his legs
a bit higher and also it's fun!

At this point, TC is definitely feeling way way better. I longed him Wednesday night and when he started trotting, he was kinda funky on it, but definitely worked way out of it. Then Thursday morning he felt almost normal when I rode him. We mostly walked and then did about 8 minutes of trotting in two 4 minute sets. The second set I probably would have thought he was normal if I wasn't trying to feel something wrong with him.

But it's not worth pushing him until he feels completely back to normal, so we are going to just keep doing stretchy stuff until he feels 110%. I kind of expect him to be back to normal this weekend, but I'm being cautious.

And so I don't think I'm going to take my lesson on Monday even though I want to. Better to save the money to buy him a bunch of expensive shit he doesn't need and just postpone to November! I just really want to make sure he's okay.

Clearly feeling good enough to bite my foot

Going through a hopefully very mild lameness again made me think about his previous lamenesses. He came up lame with his suspensory injury, he came up lame with his stifle growing pains... and every time I had to call the vet and spend money on him I felt like I was taking this huge chance on him. Like bro you better be worth all the money I'm pumping into you.

This time I was just like "okay what's it going to take?" without having any of those feelings. He's totally worth all the butt massages he wants!