Starting Trot Sets

Yesterday it rained! This was totally unexpected (well, it would have been expected if I'd looked at my weather app) but it gave me the opportunity to get TC started on his trot rehab because the footing was so good and, more importantly, he was actually asking to work for the first time in a long time! Thank you rain! 

It was a beautiful day at the ranch

I've been going down a rabbit hole with my footing this fall since it hasn't really been worked with since I was riding Rico regularly. Like it's fine - over the years I've added sand to it to keep it deep enough and somewhat level, but now that I know TC's feet are sensitive, I wanted to make sure that the footing is really good. 

This may entail me redoing my arena, I'm going to get a quote for a variety of things I may want to do soon. This could be anything from just leveling the base and getting new footing to expanding the current arena or I've even thrown around the idea of putting in a second (much larger) arena out in the pasture. I'll see if I can make a post about that since I'd love to get some advice on what to do.

Anyway, after a week or two of messing with my sprinklers, it rained and that reminded me how good my footing is when it's properly saturated! So that made me feel better about the feeling that I want to stick with my concrete sand. And TC felt similarly (also it was much cooler out). 

Morning chores include dragging the
arena (sometimes while listening to
a meeting for work lol)

I've started to longe him for his rehab in order to get him walking more - I'm not supposed to ride him until after his first shoe cycle on October 7th. But I'm a little unsure of doing much riding even when I'm "allowed" to because his lower back is still a little bit tight and he just doesn't have much topline. 

I don't want him to struggle to support me and then use the wrong muscles to do so. So my idea is to get him fitter on the longe line and watch his back. If it gets worse, then I can at least know that it's due to the work and not due to me. Vs if I got on him right away, I wouldn't know whether I had just gotten on too early or whether it's something that is going to be a problem no matter what. I'm definitely going to be getting a bodyworker involved, that'll happen in early October too. 

Anyway, I wanted to get him moving more without me having to lead him all over the place, so I've been putting him on the longe line each day. My goal is to have him walk about 30 minutes and he thinks that is VERY boring, but he hasn't offered much outside of just asking to go to the gate. 

He's a big fan of himself at least

Yesterday though, we saw a 20 degree drop in temperature (mid 90s to mid 70s) and it rained all morning. I took TC out midday when the rain had stopped and I could tell he was feeling very silly about the rain. He and Rico had already been funny about it, wandering out to their pastures nipping at each other. So as we were walking, he tried to play a little bit, picking up the trot and at one point even cantering off randomly. I can't remember the last time he willingly did anything like that. 

So I set up the interval timer on my phone and decided to start his rehab a bit early. We did four 30 second trot sets with 30 seconds of walk in between in each direction. So four minutes of trot total. Although for one of those trot sets, he cantered the entire time. I wasn't going to stop him! He doesn't have a tendon injury, I just want him to slowly build up to full work since he's historically gotten sore if he does too much (I mean, same, literally typing this I am super sore from lunges the other day, if I were a horse I'd be seeing the vet lol). 

He had a great time trotting and even seemed to want to do more, so that was great to see. He hasn't wanted to do a single thing in months now. I've felt like I'm forcing him to work and that's why we took a break from it. But I think he's actually feeling a little better - his feet are definitely looking better and his back is as loose and relaxed as it's been in a long time (still a little tight though!). So it gave me a little hope. 

Oh and he also VERY quickly figured out the interval timer, he'd hear it go off and would immediately change gaits. So I might need my headphones eventually!

I'm still riding at least, pony and I go
out on the tracks a few days a week

We are still waiting to hear from the vet about his metabolic panel. But I'm 99% sure that he's about to be diagnosed with Insulin Resistance, whether caused by an early onset of Cushings or the more probable general EMS diagnosis, I'm not sure. But he shows all the signs and it would make absolute sense that he has it. 

Rico the Escape Artist

Rico is 29 this year, almost 30 (in February) and is doing pretty well! This year is the first one where he's shown a little weight loss, so we're dealing with that. And because of his cushings, he's SUPER hairy and I'm having to give him a trace clip all the time. But outside of that, for a 29 year old horse, he's great!

Look at those dapples!!

Happy boy on a walk down the road
this spring

I did get on him this spring, he was 
totally happy about it and felt pretty
stable, but I cried the entire time and
on and off for the rest of the day lol
so I think it's best if we don't

The funniest thing he does on a regular basis is escape his stall. Now, TC has escaped his stall twice during his time at the ranch, and I regularly leave it open while I'm cleaning his paddock. Once, TC got out overnight when no one was around and he just ate his breakfast hay and then walked to his paddock gate (on the side of the barn) and stood there all night waiting to be let back in. Like, there were bales and bales of alfalfa on the other side of the barn but he ignored them. He could have also gone and ate the lawn, but no, he wanted back in (his stall door was wide open?). 

The other time he got loose was while we were feeding, he walked out into the aisle and then just froze and looked over at where we were working on the hay/grain and just waited patiently for me to come get him and put him back. TC is too pure and too sweet for this world (and okay I'll admit it, too dumb). 

He's hard to get pictures of because
he wants to be in my face all the time

Like he follows me around like this
when I try to step back to get a picture,
it's so sweet!

Rico on the other hand, is totally rude about escaping. But at this age, I kind of secretly let him escape. He likes to sneak out and eat some of the hay on the barn, but once he reaches a certain threshold, he zips out of the barn and out to the front of the barn to eat weeds. However, if you start to follow him, he trots off down to the lawn where he snatches at grass until you catch up to him, then he trots off again toward the gate. 

I think if the gate were open, either the gate to the tracks or the gate out the front of the property, he'd be long gone! 

He likes to stare at himself in the
sliding glass door

So feral

When I take him for walks down the road, he's equally as feral. He likes to go first... like in front of me. Which is fine I guess? And all he wants to do is trot down the road to the neighbor's pastures and stare at the horses and cows there. Then he wants to trot all the way back, diving aggressively for the weeds on the side of the road. This is maybe why he wants to go first because he has leverage against me. 

Oh and he (playfully) nips at me if I try to dissuade him from doing this. So obnoxious! He also likes to lick the dog and bother her too. 

Literally WHY Rico

Being so silly

She actually comes over and asks for
this attention

Anyway, he is completely feral, I'm not sure how much more feral he can get but I don't want him to think that's a challenge. 

Dynamic Duo

Yesterday was the appointment I'd been looking forward to, where my farrier and my vet got to have a forced hangout session. If you remember, my farrier had already come out to bring his toes back and things had been seeming a little better. 

Enjoy this weirdly cropped photos of TC and the
two sprinklers I got for him

He's like... are you serious?

The vet arrived first and the first thing I had her do was pull blood for a metabolic panel. He's gained a lot of weight on not a lot of food in the past year, so I want to make sure that we catch anything we need to catch. 

Then, we took x-rays of his feet, this time she also did views from the front to check his balance. When my farrier arrived, we had just been talking about how the balance looked much better in his feet than the previous x-rays. We spent time comparing each one to the previous x-rays and noted that his left front was worse than his right, but that both left and right were better now after he got re-shod. 

We then discussed next steps for his feet - TC didn't have quite enough foot to take any more off and one recommendation that my vet brought up was putting frog support pads on him. This would allow his heels to grow, which is what we need to encourage for his angles to get even better. My farrier had an example pad of a 3D printed pad she's wanting to use for these cases. It has a hole in the pad right behind the toe, meaning that the horse's hoof can dry out a bit easier.

This one he started out skeptical of as well

Considering it might be okay

My farrier said that basically TC's pasture is the worst possible scenario for his feet. The soil is clay out there, so in the winter its squelchy mud that balls up in their feet and then dries, putting a ton of pressure on the sole. If we don't pick all the horses' feet out all the time, we risk their feet basically caving in on themselves. Then in the summer, because in California we have an insane dry season where it doesn't rain from April through November, the ground hardens up to the point where large cracks form. 

AND, to add insult to injury, TC loves water so so much, that if it's hot, he will play in his water bucket. To the point where I had to move one bucket away from the barn because he'd flood his shavings (we call this his chaos bucket) AND I got him a big bucket that I fill up from time to time out in his pasture so he can waste well water (we call this his XL chaos bucket). But because he has pads on (necessary to keep his feet comfortable on the hard ground), it means that his feet get wet 2-3x per week and then don't necessarily dry out enough. 

So we think that these frog support pads will help with that. And I might need to take away at least his XL chaos bucket, maybe even find a way to keep him from playing in his other bucket. I feel bad considering that though, he loves it so much. 

Then it ended up being his favorite

Just a happy boy and his flower sprinkler

In addition to the feet, I figured I had a vet and an x-ray machine on the property, so I had her x-ray his hocks as well. The other vet thought he had good range of motion and didn't think that the hocks were involved at all. But he's 14 years old and I just figured that we should take a look. 

I'm glad we did, because his joints do seem pretty good for his age, but there was enough remodeling where she thought that injections would help him out. We also saw some mild remodeling in his coffin joint and pastern joints. I asked her, if money were no object and we wanted to give him the best chance to come back, what would she inject? 

She said that she'd inject all three of those joints with a biologic (she quoted me Alpha2P?), that this could give him a boost through rehab. I agreed, but she wanted to wait until she got back his metabolic panel, plus I don't think she had all her stuff there. So I asked her to give me a quote for it, which she sent last night. 

He was surprisingly gentle with it

He just wanted to hold his nose on it

Oh no, man down!

I do feel better I think. We are getting his new pads on in early October and sometime in October the vet is coming back out for all the horses' dentals, so I might consider doing the joint injections and maybe look at his front feet again then. Or I'm considering taking him offsite for the injections, my barn is clean but a clinic will likely be cleaner. Plus why not get a fifth vet involved?

My goal is to just throw everything at him for the next 12 months, whatever I think will bring this horse back, let's do it - special shoes? sure, injections? go for it, bodywork? absolutely. Because the alternative is full retirement soooo we may as well try everything one last time. Maybe this winter will be the first one I fall off of him because he feels so good! I'd be fine with that honestly. 

Sundance's Recent Outings

Little Sundance has had three outings the last three weekends in a row. I've been riding him 2-3x per week all summer to give myself something else to do than TC's rehab stuff. And so I decided to bother him with some travel. 

Who is that tiny pony in the warmblood
sized trailer??

Three weeks ago I took him over to our local trail facility, mostly because I hadn't hauled my rig in a long time and didn't want my first haul in all that time to be hauling the four hours to the vet and back in one day. 

Sundance LOVED it and actually tried to delay getting into the trailer to go home. He and I just did this paved bottom loop which, because he's barefoot, he got to walk in the middle of. He was passed by joggers, cyclists, and even some people walking (he is the slowest walker) and didn't mind. He even let me bring my binoculars and look at birds while we were out there. 

Happy pony!

The following weekend, I decided to bring him over to my niece's riding lesson since I knew my mom would be there and I could bully her into riding him. I participated in the lesson on him ("racing" my niece from one end of the arena to the other) and then shoved my mom on him. She walked all over the property and trotted in every arena! Pretty good for a woman who has declared several times that she is DONE with riding. 

It was super cute to see my mom and my nieces riding together (the little one got to have a pony ride). Maybe next year I'll bring both TC and the pony over and we can have three generations riding at once. 

No pictures from that, so here is one
from this last weekend

Then this last weekend, I decided to stuff the pony in the trailer again and take him over to the ranch competition. Now, TC has done this competition several times and performed very well. It got to the point where I'd just arrive after the practice commenced, walk the course on foot, and then go get TC, do the course cold, and still win. 

If there's two things TC likes, it's people and obstacles. And playing with obstacles in front of a crowd of people, all ooing and ahhing over how large and impressive and bombproof you are? His ego has never been bigger than when he has done these ranch competitions. 

Meanwhile this is what we do at home

Sundance on the other hand... is still bothered by normal things. Like he didn't like the pool noodles touching him. And the plastic bags flapping wasn't his favorite thing. And the fact that the bridge was up on a pole so it thunked down as he crossed it caused him to leap off of it. 

I felt bad comparing him to TC because he genuinely did SUCH a good job for a pony who was pretty skeptical of my antics when we met. He made it through the noodles, and he survived the plastic bags. He did walk over the bridge with some clicker training help. And outside of those, he backed through the Z of poles, he let me carry a flag all over, he actually walked through the plastic bottles, and he even let me drag a bag of cans from his back which I was not expecting he'd tolerate. 

And we did it all bareback! 

All the plastic bottles, and he walked
over them!

Buuuut I opted not to compete. First, I had already been on him for an hour when practice was closed and we had to leave. And then it was going to be a full hour before we even started competing. I had other things I had to do that day so decided to pack up and head out. Plus I will admit, TC has completely spoiled me. 

It was a great day though! This weekend I'm out of town, but once I'm back, I think I might keep up the weekly travel sessions with the pony. It's been good to remind myself of what I'm working toward with TC. And it's great for the pony to get some outings in, he does seem to enjoy them even if this one wasn't his favorite. 

Trudging Through Rehab

So the vet + farrier come out this Thursday and I'm getting eager to see how TC's feet look. As a reminder, we did a quick trim and reset on his front feet a little over a week ago so that we could start rehab. It seemed to go well, although to be honest, I haven't seen that much change since then. 

I'm going to assume that things are on track until proven otherwise though. And the feet were just the first step in a long rehab. Even if the feet were the root cause, there are a lot of other symptoms that cropped up that we need to address. 

he's a happy horse

Most of the rehab I'm doing right now is focused on 1) building strength in his thoracic sling and 2) unwinding his hind end. I think I mentioned what I was doing last post, but it's been more of the same with two additions. 

First, I've been doing some basic Masterson Method stuff to help draw more awareness to his hind end and the tension he's carrying in it. I figure that this is lower key work that will help him start to unlock his back/SI but that won't compromise him. I'm hyper aware that he is weak, and the tension in his hind end is there for a reason. Once I absolutely know his feet are on track and he's built some strength up in his thoracic sling, I'll be getting out a bodyworker to help out. 

The second thing I added was hill work. Just in hand and I've only done it about three times since we started rehab (since it's then a legitimate hike for me!). This spring we cut tracks into the property around the pastures and it's become my happy place, riding out there. I take Sundance out there 2-3x per week and TC and I have gone out quite a lot as well. The tracks have decent-ish footing (at least not hard footing) and are more like rolling hills than the steep trails we normally ride on, so I figure that's good for rehab. We mostly just walk on the hills, but I've also been asking him to rein back up the hills (just a bit) so that he can strengthen his stifles. 

The tracks in question + pony

I have noticed a few small things I'll desperately grasp at as evidence that this is the right path to go down. 

For example, he's done a LOT less of the lifting of the hind legs during grooming. Maybe once since he got his feet fixed (which was over a week ago), it used to be nearly a daily thing. He's also not twisted around to bite at his hind end, which he used to do mostly in conjunction or right before lifting his leg. He did it yesterday and it surprised me because I hadn't seen it since he got his shoes reset. 

I'm also keeping track of the tension in his lower back just by palpating. Normally I can feel hard bands running from his hip joint up into his long back muscle. And in the past when I'd put some pressure on those, he'd release, so I did that a few times a week to help him out. But now, without much work on them directly, they feel less fibrous and tight. The left one is probably still worse than the right, but they're much improved. So I'll take it! One small step at a time. 

Mad that I was hanging out with Rico

Lots of things haven't changed yet. Like how he pees - he still cocks his left hind to pee, which is something he's done all his life so maybe that isn't related. And he also still rests his hind legs a lot. He'll rest his left hind and then put his right front out a little bit, pointing it. But then he'll switch and rest the right hind and point the left front. I see him resting his left hind mayyybe a bit more than his right hind. But it's pretty even. 

He also seems pretty much the same in the arena. It's been pretty hot and he's fat + out of shape, so I don't blame him. But he isn't really particularly energetic. 

Honestly, I think a lot of the laziness in the arena is him being bored. Since he does have plenty of energy to try to bite me or stare at birds. I did order him a child's sprinkler to play in (spending my adult money in the best way!) so maybe that will cheer him up. 

Sundance went to TC's favorite day of
the year last weekend - the local ranch
competition, we didn't compete though

Fingers crossed for this vet x farrier visit on Thursday! And then I'll be able to do a lot more. We'll start the countdown to when I can ride again (after his second vet x farrier appointment) and he can probably start road walking again as long as the mechanical laminitis is gone. I may delay that until we're forced onto the roads this winter, that laminitis freaked me out. 

Mostly I just want him to start to have fun in his work again. Rico was such a trooper through all of his rehabs - I don't think he minded being bored (less work for him), and during TC's last long rehab he got to swim through most of the boring parts. This is TC's first time being SUPER bored and he is not handling it very well mentally. Hopefully the sprinkler helps!! I will absolutely share video on my IG and if I remember, I'll post about it here. 

Initial Trim & Starting Rehab

TC doesn't see my new forced dynamic duo farrier x vet until the 18th, but my farrier was kind enough to offer to come out on yesterday to at least trim and reset his front shoes further back to get him started/alleviate some of the discomfort. 

I don't go to a lot of TC's farrier appointments because he's a clown and thinks that I'm there to be his audience and he ignores his task (being good for the farrier) in order to focus on being entertaining to me (I am not entertained). He was super rude and she told me that he's normally very good for her. I apologized. 

But we did get the fronts done and while my farrier has some reservations about how drastic the vet wants his trim to be, I was super happy with the changes she made. It was a very good start and his feet look much more balanced! 

I know everyone is just here for the
feet pics

I don't have a before handy, but I'll
find one eventually, these are the afters

She did trim off a bit of his toe where the vet had said he had too much sole, then she set the shoes much further back, with the toe of the shoe back to his white line. She left the rolled toe rather than switching to a rocker toe, and she wanted to keep his pads on since she felt like he could use the extra support since we were taking off more sole. I'm honestly fine with him staying in pads, it's a lot easier to deal with over winter with our clay-like soil! 

TC seemed very happy with the changes, the moment the trim was done (before the shoes were put back on), he yawned three separate times. It's taken a long time for me to get TC to yawn in general, since his goal in life is to entertain people and not to focus on his own body. But now he's much happier expressing himself (after years of bodywork trying to fix his issues). Still, I think it's unusual during a farrier appointment to yawn. 

When she set the shoes back, he also yawned a few more times. I also obsessively watched the way he was standing and could absolutely convince myself he was standing better on his front feet. 

Again I don't have a before handy, but he used to
stand a lot more like an elephant on a ball

She headed out and I put TC back for a bit to eat lunch (Riot, my dad's now retired horse, needs antihistamines at lunch, so all the other horses get the tiniest bit of grain at lunch) and chill. I stared at him for about an hour just in his paddock while doing some barn chores. Again, I could convince myself he was standing better and that his shoulders were sitting better, but I'm really grasping at straws here. 

I got him out later and he was really good to groom. For years now, but especially in the last couple of years, TC has always twisted around and held his right hind leg (usually, sometimes also his left) up to try to get me to scratch his butt/leg/belly. I've never been able to quite get the spot he is asking for, and after doing a lot of reading, I had figured that he had sciatica or something similar. He shows some nerve stuff in both front (biting at his shoulders and legs) and hind (the aforementioned leg lifting). 

But he didn't give me any leg lifts! That's not *entirely* unusual, we do have good days where he doesn't do it, but it was a straw I was willing to snatch for my straw collection. 

He's such a ham

I took him out to the arena and he seemed fine walking on the hard ground, I couldn't remember exactly how he had walked the day before but I could convince myself it was better. In the arena we did our typical routine - I let him loose to roll, then I put the halter back on and we do his rehab. 

He yawned a bunch when he got up from rolling (unusual), then walked over to the longe whip and was wobbling his nose on it. Previously, his ground work included some liberty work, where I'd grab the whip and we'd do some basic exercises, mostly transitions but sometimes some of his tricks, which include a shockingly decent piaffe at liberty and his version of passage (which he only does in one direction and it's kinda bad, but I wouldn't tell him that). Anyway, it was cute that he went over to the longe whip, but we're doing the vet's boring rehab plan, sorry TC. 

The rehab is kind of a combination of some of the thoracic sling work that I'd done previously combined with the work I'd been doing all year. So we've been doing about 20 minutes in the arena (I'll work up to more now that his feet are a bit better) of just walking and some exercises:

- Figure-8 Bars (one of Jec's 55 corrective exercises)

- Straddle pole (another one of Jec's)

- Rein back over pole (Jec's)

- Reining back with neck down

- Walking with neck down

He wants us to also do some lateral work, but I'm uncertain I want to do that just yet, he has historically used the lateral work to get away from really moving through his back/body. It's just too easy for him to fold his noodly friesian neck in hand. Undersaddle I can at least keep him straighter. 

Endless rehab for this guy

Generally, I'm feeling WAY better. I'm a little concerned that my farrier has a little bit of a disagreement with the vet, but I'm also aware that they didn't speak, so there's a very good chance that what I relayed to her sounded much more drastic than it actually was. I figure that we'll see what my local vet thinks next Thursday, and then I'll send the final x-rays to my lameness vet and see what he thinks. I'm okay with it taking a little bit of time, especially with how TC responded to the trim yesterday. 

I don't think I'm going to be happy with getting him 80% of the way there by next year, but if we need to take things a tiny bit slower in the beginning to make sure that we aren't doing too much, I'm okay with that. I just want him to feel better!

TC's Muscle Wasting: A Possible Answer

Well it's been a minute. But rather than jump into too many updates (Rico is great, my job is great, my people are great, TC you will hear about shortly but he is also great), I wanted to share a critical update. 

He is the light of my life even if we've
just been hanging out mostly

Five years ago I started chasing down an issue that TC and I were having as we were showing at Third level. We were scoring as high as I'd ever scored at the level but he looked *terrible* and he felt even worse. I called it muscle wasting, he seemed to not be able to put a topline on despite being in full work. He also exhibited a lot of balking, refusing to go forward, always slamming on the brakes. 

I chased this down pretty aggressively for years, sliding into insanity as I would receive answers that didn't quite fix everything in addition to a lot of gaslighting. I had trainers telling me it was normal for horses at the mid levels to struggle so we just had to get through it. I had people tell me it was his breeding, or just to keep pushing through and trusting that dressage would put a topline back on him. 

But something felt wrong, and I ended up listening to my horse and quitting dressage, last year we did a little bit of jumping (which he enjoyed but then once again the balking started), then this year I quit riding him very much at all.

The ranch remains casually beautiful

It was weird though, every winter he seemed to get better, which sometimes coincided with something that made a lot of sense, so I'd run with it, but every spring/summer, things would get worse again. I'd try and try again, then would seem to figure out what it was over the next winter only to be disappointed again. 

This year, I decided that I wanted to give myself one last year to try to figure this out. If we couldn't do it, I planned to bite the bullet and fully retire him, let him live with other horses at a different facility, and move forward with buying a new horse (likely a little Irish horse since I've come to love them). I gave him from April until now mostly off, doing primarily a postural rehab plan that I came up with (it basically combined Jec's 55 corrective exercises with some very basic dressage and some basic bodywork stuff) and waiting until mid summer when things were at their worst to see a new vet. I had been worried that nothing would show up in the spring. 

Enter: a new vet (not pictured)

This vet came to me highly recommended for his fantastic approach with cases like these. Mysterious cases where the horse is totally sound and fine and just needs a good beating (aka something is wrong but the prey animal doesn't want to tell you because then he'd be even more prey-like). We had already seen three vets who said that he was sound and fine. But this vet was different and I'm so grateful we went! 

First, we started with the most comprehensive exam I've ever seen, he did a full lameness exam (shocker, TC is sound) and then full range of motion tests for each leg. 

We then went inside and took x-rays of all four feet and his entire spine. The vet did an ultrasound of his scapular cartilage, his bad stifle, and then he stuck an ultrasound wand up his butt and I was like..... alright. Sorry TC, I'll let anyone with a white coat do anything to you in the name of your soundness.

After his exam he was so happy to 
supervise the next exam

Finally we sat down and discussed what the findings were, he talked to me for 45 minutes! But right away he said "there is nothing clinically wrong with your horse" and I was ready to leave. In the moment before he continued I was like WELL OKAY THEN and had made plans to retire the horse fully and book a flight to Ireland. 

But he finished with "everything I'm seeing is man-made, and I think we can fix it." So I'm glad I didn't overreact (externally). 

He took me through all of his images -

1. TC has ECVM, equine cervical vertebrae malformation, essentially his C6 and C7 are swapped. However, TC is now fourteen years old (what! when?) and if this was going to be a problem it already would have. He has no clinical signs and this is not the issue. 

2. TC does not have kissing spine, his disc space is great and he shows no arthritis anywhere, his SI joint (rectal ultrasound) is normal as well

3. He has nothing wrong with his left stifle, which was his bad stifle for years

4. He has damage to his scapular cartilage caused by his saddle not fitting properly, although the vet thinks it's due to the postural collapse vs the saddle actually not fitting

So what is it?

Holy shit

It's his FUCKING FEET. Now, feel free to get all high and mighty (on your own, to your friends, not in the comments) but when I say no one ever really suspected his feet, I mean it. Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but there was no real reason to suspect that this would be his feet. 

So I never chased that down. My farrier is a Journeyman farrier, she's a great farrier, his feet look great. I mean they're huge and friesian-y, but they look great. 

I have lots of feelings and lots of "should have" statements and some anger that I'm sure will come out about this that I will keep to myself. The point is that we have something that could possibly be an answer and that is all that matters. There's something that we can do. 

Circled is mechanical laminitis by the way

It makes sense. The horse is unable to lift through his thoracic sling due to his feet being painful in addition to the possible C6/7 switch that makes it harder for him to build muscle at the base of his neck. He then drops his wither, which slides his saddle forward into his scapula and also causes his back to spasm. The psoas and other muscles in his low back get rigid, causing all sorts of nerve stuff to buzz him.

It explains why he's better in winter (softer footing in his pasture, he can alleviate his feet by standing in mud), it explains why all the work I did seemed to work at first (building the TS) and then stop working (when he had to sit back on his hind legs and his back was still dysfunctional), it explains why I haven't been able to get a topline on him. And worst of all, it explains why over the years, it's just gotten worse, his feet have gotten worse and worse since he can't balance himself. 

And it explains that bodyworkers were finding it in his back end and thoracic sling, that vets were saying that he just needed more topline and he'd be good, that the chiropractor literally said that the base of his neck was tricky and he's just going to struggle with lifting it... it was like when three people close their eyes and are asked to describe an elephant and all describe very different things. No one was wrong. Just n one was able to get to the root of it. 

Mostly though, I'm so glad that I listened to this horse and stopped working him, because it seems like I preserved the rest of his body by doing so. The vet said the magic words "once you fix his feet and get him going properly, there will be no limitations, this horse could do the Grand Prix" and I felt more hope than I've felt in five years. 

The vet had some dogs and TC was
obsessed with them

Now, I'm not entirely insane, I know that I have had these epiphanies before, where someone comes along, says the word "thoracic sling" or "postural dysfunction" or "rectal ultrasound" and I'm like YES THIS. So I let myself celebrate today, but only after I texted my local vet and my farrier, who I am going to smash together like a child making dolls kiss. My vet is going to come out and x-ray his feet as he gets trimmed so that we can get him back in balance. 

But I know this could just be one piece of the puzzle. And I also know that I may not actually know until April/May of next year since we are about to enter winter and things always get better in winter. While the vet doesn't see any damage done, there is the emotional/mental piece of this for a horse who has been in pain undersaddle for longer than he was out of pain. And there's my piece of it, making sure that I continue to advocate for this horse and believe him when he says no. 

But I'm genuinely so hopeful. Could this be the start of TC's return to dressage? After all, Rico did his first PSG at 17 years old and his first Grand Prix at 18. I'm giving myself small doses of believing that the sky is the limit for my sweet gray horse. 

TC says "uh if that rude bay horse can
do it, so can I, obviously" to that

Anyway, hello again, maybe this will spur a real return to blogging (maybe not, work is truly nuts right now, I apologize).