Footgate 2018, Week Two

When last we left our intrepid asshole horse, he spent an afternoon with the vet getting poked, prodded, x-rayed, and prescribed several different medications. Then followed a week of every-other-day bandage changes and both topical and oral antibiotics, as well as sending off the x-rays to both the farrier and Tristan’s original surgeon.

Even before 30 SMZ pills a day, Tristan had decided that pills were poison, so getting all his meds into him has not been fun. For the first three days, I mixed everything together with applesauce and then syringed it down his throat. That sucked.

On day 4, I realized I could put at least the allergy pills inside peppermint lifesavers, so that meant I could get all the SMZ pills in one syringe. That worked through day 6, and then on the afternoon of day 6 I bought a bucket of Dimples Horse Treats at a local tack store and HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS. Overnight change – I got all his allergy pills in one of them, and his SMZs spread across three others. I still had to dissolve the SMZ pills, but having him look forward to seeing me instead of hiding in the back of his stall was amazing. Let me be clear: It’s not like I wasn’t trying everything else under the sun alongside the syringe. He was just having none of it. So, huge quality of life improvement there.

What about the actual foot? Well, the x-rays came in, and they still look pretty good. We’re waiting on the surgeon and farrier to weigh in, still, but when you put them side-by-side with his original surgery x-rays you can pretty clearly see the coffin bone looks better, at least.

left is immediately post-surgery, right is last week

So no real update other than what you can see in the x-rays, which is that the overall foot structure looks pretty darn good!

That heel grab, though…sigh.

Yeah. That is basically the picture next to the definition of proud flesh in the dictionary. Which is obviously not great news.

So, he gets daily bandage changes through Friday, and since the infection is gone, he switches over to a steroid cream to hopefully fight the proud flesh back. On Friday afternoon, we’ll re-assess, and if it continues the vet wants to come out next week and cut it back.

One. Stupid. Heel. Grab.