Mixed Signals

The past few days have been a little frustrating. Rush seems to have so much energy at the beginning of the ride that she's incapable of focusing on anything, and if I ask for anything she doesn't like, such as slowing down.. or looking less like a llama.. or traveling in a straight line.. shit blows up and she's throwing one of her hissy fits. Yesterday I worked through it, kinda, by cantering on a circle. Today.. yeah, not so much. I was so tired of dealing with this ridiculous behavior that I went to the zone of: I'm hot, sweaty, and tired. You're being a brat. If you want to trot like you're in a harness race, fine.

So then I bullied her around the ring, making her TROTFAST while keeping her head down, and if she wanted to canter? No beans, you'll just have to go in a tiny circle until you trot again. I'm not exactly proud of this method, but it worked. So there's that. After I deemed her tired, we had a walking break to separate that work out from the actual one, and then went on to have a lovely ride. We did more work on bending, then did some solid cantering that was pretty impressive. Her canter has been the best surprise of bringing her back into work so far. When I first started riding her, it was like a jackhammer. You could two point, lifting yourself as far out of the saddle as possible, and still have your butt smack the saddle every stride. Now? Her canter is wonderful and rolling and forward; she seems to have lost the up-down motion that was so horrific to ride.

We finished up the ride with some wonderful relaxed cantering in the jumping arena, which was awesome. I was worried she'd get fast because there was more space to accelerate in, but she stayed nice and relaxed and just rolled around the ring like a doll. So it was, all in all, actually a good ride- but the way it started out was godawful. And it seems to be a trend, so I need to find a solution, fast.

Splish Splash

In preparation for.. something, the water complex in the jumping ring was filled up this week. Given Rush's obsession with water, I had been praying that it would be filled at some point during our stay. I had actually come up pretty late to ride, due to extreme heat and social obligations, and was just doing a light 10 min walk/trot hack to let her stretch out but didn't really have time for anything more. And then I saw this. So that ride was mostly us tromping around in the water, nose to the ground, splashing water. I vowed to come up really early the next morning to let her play more, since I didn't know how fast the water would dissipate.

Bright and early, 7:00 the next morning we were tramping back down to the ring for more play time. I had suited up in some rain boots my sister left me, since my old ones are for 7 year olds and come up to my mid-calf. I led her into the water.. and water promplty seeped into my right boot. Eeps. I sucked it up and let her have her splishy splashy time, which she loved, and we wandered into the water during our ride as well. Whenever I rode on the buckle and let her decide where to go, we ended up back in the water.. Hmm..

Today there was still some water in there, so after our awful/wonderful ride we practiced walking, trotting, and cantering into the water. No hesitation. My pony is awesome. I think she liked cantering the best because it makes the biggest splashes..

Rambunctious in the Round Pen

Not actually from today. Details.

Today was Rush's big day.. CANTER TIME! We've been walk/trotting under saddle for two weeks now, and she's gotten a hecka ton better. At first we weren't so much for the trotting at a reasonable pace or bending or even going in a straight line, but those issues are smoothing out and she's gained back some muscle tone so we decided to start tackling the canter. It's gonna be a looooong haul.

I went in the evening today, since I had plans this morning and it's been so godawfully hot that it would have been unfair to ask her to do anything between the hours of 9-5. Tossed her in the round pen (the awesome round pen that gets dragged/raked every day and it has sprinklers what.) and we did walk/trot in each direction very belligerently, since apparently having a nekked face makes us very opinionated on what we should be doing. 

And then crazy whee! fun happened. Basically it was chaos happening and I couldn't really control much so I just tried to keep her from breaking when she was cantering properly and not cross-firing. I also worked on pushing her to the outside of the round pen, since she likes to cut in when she's being naughty. I let her stop in each direction after she had made it one time around without breaking/cross-firing.. honestly she barely cantered at all. And guess what? DRENCHED in sweat by the end. Sweat was literally dripping off her. I felt really bad so I sacrificed myself and hopped on bareback to walk her out, and we tooled around in the dressage ring (which is COVERED, did I mention that?). 

After she was reasonably cooled down, but not any drier than previously, I took her up and hosed all the sweat off of her. She managed to nick herself on her back right, just above the coronet band, but it's nothing serious. I just scrubbed it with Betadine and slathered some Corona on it, much to her dismay. She hates Corona for some reason. If you try to put it on her when she's in her stall, she literally runs to the opposite corner, naughty thing. So I sprayed her off, inventoried all one of her scrapes and took care of it, then gave her a Sore No More rinse and let her chill in a sun pen for an hour or so. Which she probably hated.

Tomorrow I'll probably stretchy walk/trot to see how she's feeling, if she isn't too sore/tired we'll work on flexion and bending in the dressage ring. If she's not feeling 100% she can have some time in the sun pen and get the rest of the day off, and we'll start work up the next day.

I'm thinking a 3-day cycling pattern in regards of her getting fit at the canter, since I don't want to overdo it or make her do the same thing every day.

Day 1: barebalk walk to warm-up, then round pen work on cantering

Day 2: walk/trot hack working on bending, keep it pretty brief

Day 3: walk/trot hack to warm up and then hill work at the walk

Rinse and repeat!

Life Goes On

Where did we leave of? With the mystery lameness, I think. A quick update, then, to get us all caught up. I had another vet out for a second opinion because I was seriously considering buying Rush. He basically did the same tests as the first- nerve block on the pastern, she trotted out sound, then x-rays. Except this time, the x-rays revealed something! She has a 'significant bone spur' in her coffin joint. The vet was confident it was treatable and that she had a very reasonable chance of being sound, so I went ahead.. and bought her! We injected the coffin joint, gave her two days of handwalking, and voila.. sound horsie. He also recommended 2º wedges on her front feet, which hasn't happened yet but I'm working on finding a farrier.

I moved barns in a very dramatic and traumatic situation, which I'll blog about some day when I can write about it without getting upset. As of August 1 we are now at a new place with state-of-the-art accommodations and basically everything you could ever want. It's a Dressage/Eventing barn, and whilst we are Hunters, right now we're just doing walk/trot flatwork building up conditioning again.

Rush is blossoming; she loves it at the new place. It's pretty low-key there, there are only 7 horses on the property right now and I am definitely the youngest person there. The horses there are all huge goofy warmblood geldings, so obviously Rush is the princess of the place and everyone loves her. There's so much to talk about that I couldn't possibly cover it in one post, so I'll leave you with a picture of her in her wonderful new stall :)

Vet Visit

Well, we have a not-so-definitive answer for the lameness. The vet came out on Monday (after lots of drama with the BO) to look at Rush and see if we could pin point her lameness.

Her awkward stance since going lame

He trotted her in our ring, then on harder ground to assess lameness and pinpointed it to right front. He nerve blocked the lower pastern and she trotted out completely sound (it was glorious), so we know it's something down low in the right front. Then came the x-rays and ultrasound (and the noise of my bank account shrinking). Nothing abnormal showed up on either, so the final verdict was that it's most likely soft tissue damage somewhere too low/deep for the ultrasound to read. Right now it's handwalking for 15 minutes and stall rest for several months.

Unfortunately, Not Better News

After the advice from the farrier last week, I talked to the BO about what to do with Rush. She's one of those ridiculously hard to talk to people and tramples all over whatever you try to say, insisting that her opinion is the only right one and that anything else is absolutely ridiculous. So instead of y'know, fixing the cause and changing Rush's feed, we put her on 2 scoops of bute for 5 days (because it's an anti-inflammatory). So she got 2 scoops for five days. I took her out on the third, I think, and had one of the minions trot her a couple steps, but she looked pretty uncomfortable so I put her home and didn't take her out again until today. Her 5 days ended on Monday, she didn't have bute Tues/Wed, and I started it up again today after re-evaluating on the lunge line.

As you can see, definitely not sound. In fact, I would say less sound than when she first started going off. There was a lot of rambunction in there due to the fact that she's been in prison for about three weeks now. After this rather disappointing but not surprising result of 5 days of bute, which is obviously not working (not that I expected it to) I left the BO a message telling her that I was not happy with the way things are going and that I want to be more proactive about fixing the problem. We tried her way, it didn't work, and I'm going to be more forceful about getting the feed changed. The BO's reasoning for not changing the feed was "she's been on cubes her whole life!" but, well, things change. She was a racehorse then a broodmare then a pasture puff, and now she's doing arena work. Those all demand very different diets.

Some Answers

 

One of the more experienced farriers that does horses at my barn came out this morning and I nabbed the chance to have him look at Rush. I had been hypothesizing that she was footsore because she seemed about 40% better after having her feet trimmed, and perhaps the workload was getting to the point where she needed shows put back on. He took one look at her front left, cut away a bit of the hoof to get a closer look, and then immediately concluded that her feed was too rich and her laminae was inflamed- he didn't say laminitis, but that's basically the diagnosis.

I was silly and didn't get pictures, so I'll take some tomorrow, but the clue was some black discoloration in her laminae- perpendicular lines that looked kind of like crosshatching (see random internet picture) . I had noticed them after she was trimmed but thought it was some weird pattern left behind by the rasp- now I know better! Now I just have to convince the BO that it is not her hock sore bothering her and she needs to be put on something other than alfalfa cubes.. sounds like a simple conversation ("Hey, BO, Rush needs to be put on Timothy for one feeding because the alfalfa cubes are too rich for her and she's getting laminitis. Thanks!") but it'll probably blow up into this huge thing and there's a 70% chance the BO will refuse to change her feed. So that'll be fun.

See the black lines at the top? Those.

I also had Experienced Farrier look at Willie's feet, since he's gone like.. 9 weeks without being trimmed and a big crack was forming. The crack was done away with, mostly, and he didn't seem too concerned about the big hole in Willie's RF from where an abscess blew, so I guess it just looks really scary but in actuality is nothing to worry about. He's been doing really well after those two months on abscessy fun, and even took care of a Little on Saturday. So proud. Although he was angry with me yesterday for leaving him in the turnout for hours and decided to forget what lead changes were...