Tris walked out of his stall very lame on Monday morning. Monday afternoon, after turnout, still lame, heat in the hoof.

I talked to the vet this afternoon and suggested short laminitis episodes. She said nothing on the X-rays indicated that.

She’ll send the X-rays out to a radiologist tonight for an extra opinion, and she’s at the barn for another horse on Thursday. She wants to block him and do a full lameness exam on Thursday. I don’t think I can be there for it – I have so much going on at work this week.

We’ll see, I guess…

I arrived at the barn this morning around 10:30 to groom and play with Tristan before his scheduled massage at 11:00. Grooming was easy – he loves to roll and it’s always great when there’s snow on the ground, since he basically keeps himself clean.

I’ll be brief, because there isn’t a lot of hard, clear information and because speculation makes me nervous.

The farrier tried to pull Tristan’s shoes and begin to trim without sedation. No dice. Tris started flipping around as soon as the farrier picked up his foot. So he got tranq’d. I’m not sure how to solve this one now. He’s been good as gold for me, and I can’t in good conscience ask the farrier to expose himself to physical danger and take up large amounts of time working through this. He wasn’t being pushy, unusually quick, or really anything – steady, gentle, purposeful movement and Tris just did. not. want.

So farrier pulled the front shoes and did an initial trim, and then the vet shot x-rays of the RF. She did quite a few, including a navicular series, and determined two things based on x-rays. First, medial lateral balance was off, but not spectacularly so. Second, she did not like the look of the navicular bone. She thought she saw a loss of bone density and possibly some changes toward the back that were new bone growth in compensation for out of balance foot. She also thought she saw some deterioration of the bone in his toe – third phalanges – but couldn’t make a clear determination because the bad hoof from the abscess was so junky it was obscuring the x-ray. She’s going to keep looking at them with more leisure on a bigger screen, and in comparison with all the other previous x-rays, and possibly send them out to a specialist.

X-rays also showed that the LF is clean as a whistle, so any damage to the navicular in the RF is because of the poor balance there. That says to me at least – though vet was being admirably circumspect and cautious – that the damage was caused externally and is, while clearly not reversible, able to be stopped.

Joints continue to look good, and sole depth is remarkable, so those are two things not to worry about. The hoof growing down behind the abscess is straight and solid. With the x-rays the farrier and the vet both agreed he could take off much more toe than it looked like he could from an external view, so Tris’s foot got trimmed back again. The bottom holes are alllllmost to the ground now. He also set the hoof back fairly significantly to move the breakover back and ease pressure on the heel. With the vet’s input, we left shoes off his hind feet, so hooray for that.

When the farrier pulled the shoe from his RF, the abscess hole was clearly visible from the bottom, and HUGE. I am really regretting not taking a picture. I could easily have put my index finger into it up to the first knuckle. It was awful. Vet and farrier were duly impressed, and said they could smell not current infection but a sort of rank smell from old, dank infection. Ugh. I can’t wait until the whole thing is gone. At this rate, the upper hole will be probably another 3 trims away from the bottom, maybe 4.

So. Plan going forward. I’ll send all previous x-rays to the vet for comparison (she’s already got the fall’s, but I’ll send her the views from a few years ago). She’ll let me know if she wants to send them out. Tris has dramatically shortened feet but better balanced feet, and he’ll be on 2g of bute a day until Tuesday to help him adjust. Next Friday I’ll drag M. to the barn and jog him out and get a video to send to the vet.

I am still hopeful. Perhaps foolishly at this point. I’m not exactly cheerful – I’ve been close to tears basically since Tris started flailing at the farrier yesterday afternoon, and that doesn’t look like it will go away soon. But I have a sort of internal logic worked out in my head that says that if any damage to the navicular was caused by bad balance, we can correct the balance and compensate, and keep an eye on him. It may mean we don’t jump any more, it may mean I get picky about footing, it may mean he’s shod up front for the rest of his life. Whatever it takes to keep him comfortable and happy is what I’ll do. I just hope that happens to coincide with being able to ride him again.

You know what I suck at? Waiting. I’m great at planning, I’m great at figuring all the tiny little details out but then when I’m left waiting for everything to come together, for all the pieces I’ve put in play to line up, I start to fret and twitch and basically lose my mind bit by bit.

Which is my way of saying that last night I basically cycled between nightmares about a big program I have coming up at work and Tristan’s vet appointment tomorrow.

I would like to ride my horse again someday, universe. Even if all we ever do is trail riding, I would just like to sit on his back again. I’m trying not to get desperate, but it’s really hard to watch him limp around each time I go visit and still not quite know why. It’s hard to have all these hopes and plans for the way we’ll fix it but not have any level of confidence in whether they’ll work out.

(A friend’s horse just got over an abscess in a week and is sound again and I am so jealous and maybe a little bit bitter and a horrible person for being either, but I can’t figure out where I went wrong somewhere in this whole mess.)

Some planning progress, finally: farrier will be out early next week, probably Monday or Tuesday. I just chatted to the vet, and we’ll all meet at the barn to do a full workup.

Schedule will go something like this: pull shoes, do x-rays, have vet and farrier look at the x-rays together, tranq him to trim, possibly do another set of x-rays (I’m budgeting for it if they want, to check angles etc., if they’re all going to be there might as well do it 100%), then keep him tranq’d to put shoes back on.

My worst case right now is a mechanical founder with accompanying soft tissue tears. I think he’d be more lame than that, but the shape of the foot is so awful I am afraid of coffin bone movement, which almost certainly guarantees soft tissue strain or tear. If it’s severe enough, he goes into crisis management mode and we use a recommended local farrier for regular trims every 2 weeks or so to micro-adjust and try to compensate.

My best case scenario is simply major discomfort from underrun and long heels, combined with the flair and the missing hoof wall from the abscess, and the farrier is able to take significant foot off and relieve a great deal of that. My magical scenario is an instant cure but I think he’s been too sore for too long to expect that.

What will probably happen is some middle ground with waiting: x-rays show clean but there’s clearly soft tissue strain, and the foot can’t be entirely corrected with this shoeing, so he may be on a longer-term painkiller to keep him moving more easily until the next shoeing. I’m about 95% certain that the worst of the missing foot will be gone after the next trim, in another 6 weeks. I think it will be April or May before the top hole – at the coronet band originally – grows out. I think it will be another 6-9 months after that before the scar tissue from the coronet band stops growing out lumpy. (It’s easing up a bit already, thankfully.)

Someday I should write this all up clinically and submit it to a vet somewhere, because wtf, people. Worst. Abscess. Ever.

Heat is back in Tris’s heel, and he’s on bute until further notice to keep him more comfortable. At this point, we are in a waiting game: within the next 2 weeks the farrier will fly up (he winters in Florida) and when I know the date I will get it off from work and call the vet. We’ll have a big ol’ budget-busting day of x-rays with the vet and the farrier both there to make sure alignments are ok, then trim from the x-rays, etc. I continue to hope that he will come sound with a trim, as his heels are so long and underrun and awful, and in the next trim or two the lower of the two abscess holes will come to the toe and some of the pressure will ease. I could be fooling myself. In my uglier moments I think that this will be it, that we might get him sound at the walk but not for riding, and I’ll have to retire him. In my better moments, I feel confident that I’ll be riding again this spring or summer.

In the meantime, it’s been too blasted cold to visit. Tuesdays are stitch circle, so I don’t go anyway, then yesterday I lost all willpower when the thermometer did not rise above 0. We are projected for a high of 2 degrees today, which  means by the time I get to the barn it will be back below zero. He’s snug in his blanket, the barn staff has proven to be outstanding about communication and would let me know immediately if something were wrong, so I have elected to stay home and warm.

I’ve picked up a few books about horses from the library, and will be reading those and watching horse movies to review here in lieu of actual content while Tris’s soundness is still in a holding pattern.

For those curious what a nastily under run & long heel with deepening sulcus + frog cleft looks like…ugh.

But from the shape of it you will see why I am counting the days until the next farrier appointment.

My friend Judith came out to work on Tris yesterday. I was glad to have her experienced eye on him – she’s known him as long as I’ve had him, and she has an outstanding perspective and knowledge of equine body mechanics.

We walked him out a bit for her, and he’s quite ouchy at the walk and to her eye, compensating with a swing of his left hind. She also detected heat in the heels, coronet band, and a bit up into back of the pastern of that foot, and noticed something which I had seen in the past few days: the sulcus of his frog (the grooves beside and on top of the frog) has gotten incredibly deep.

He turned out to be tight in his left shoulder, though she approved of the work I’ve been doing on his right shoulder to loosen him up there, and a bit in his lower back.

Game plan: bute him until the farrier gets out to do his new shoes, in about 2-3 weeks. I checked in with the vet today and she agreed, and if 2 weeks or so after he gets his foot re-balanced he’s still just as off, we’ll start with another round of x-rays.

I also picked up some basic thrush stuff (Absorbine Hooflex) at Tractor Supply and I’ll be paying extra attention to his feet and dosing him from time to time with that just to make sure he doesn’t start an infection there, too.

Sigh.