A New Era

Well, after waffling over it for literal years, I had Tristan’s hocks injected yesterday.

If you went back in this blog archive you’d probably find me mentioning doing his hocks over and over again, at least the last ten years. It hadn’t been the right choice before for a lot of reasons.

In recent weeks, he’s been having some persistent problems loading the hind end, or stepping it up quickly, or having it give out, that made me feel strongly that we had a clearly identified stiffness/soreness issue, rather than a training hole.

The vet concurred, and we ordered his ACTH test with a mind to checking on his Cushing’s progress. If his levels were not perfect, injecting him with steroids was a clear no-go. But! They were perfect. As in, the lameness vet said they were absurdly good. His exact words were “He just continues to defy expectations, doesn’t he?”

Oh, in so many ways…

I’ll put him back in light work on Monday, then full work on Thursday, and then we will see what we can see. I have the next two weeks off from work (uh, in theory, anyway; I have a few projects I will need to poke at) so I’ll be trying to take the opportunity to restart a few things in my life. Riding is one of them; CrossFit is another. I let a lot of things slide in the last 6-8 weeks of ramping up my work busy season, but now I get to transition back out of that with some thinking and planning time.