Sit the Trot

My lovely boy is now home and settling back in after his operation. Luckily the operation went really well, and the surrounding tissue and bone looks better than expected. He has had screws inserted into the stifles and now it's just giving him plenty of time for bone to grow over the area and the . body to repair itself. After much research I have an extensive R&R program for him. It starts with stall rest only for a few weeks followed by a few months stall rest with in hand walking and some passive flexions. After that he will start getting turned out and just being a horse for a while to allow that bone and stifle to strengthen without a riders weight and I am planning to be back in the saddle in May! Axel is doing really well so far and has settled in well to stall rest. I think he likes the gorgeous warmblood mare Dolly who lives next to him, which helps... He is also right next to the hay stall and can manage to grab little extra nibbles of hay which makes him very hap...

My lovely boy is stable... get it haha! Today was a day of dosing up on flu medications (the joy) and waiting for vets to call me to update me on Axel. The first call I had was an update from one of the students to let me know that all was fine and that he was awake and bright eyed. It was such a relief, now I just had to wait and hear how the surgery had gone! Finally in the evening I got a call. The surgery had gone extremely well. The cyst on the left stifle was completely enclosed within the bone, the surrounding bone, tissues and ligaments actually looked better than expected and it was fairly easy for the surgeon to put a screw through the cyst which should help stabilize it and keep it from causing pain. There was a little wear to the surrounding cartilage but nothing too terrifying. So, tomorrow he should be able to head home with me to his cushy stall in our lovely barn. He prefers to live out but I am hoping that he settles ok in the stall and he has some stable toys ...

This post has been a long time coming. With Axel still being lame and just not right we have had multiple vet visits and an awful lot of claims on his insurance policy. Finally, insurance getting exhausted and poor Axel being fed up with it all, we decided to send him up to CSU (Colorado State University) for some further diagnostics. One of the first things to do by this point was a bone scan to highlight problematic areas. I was a little panicked when the vet let me know how much had lit up but she assured me that it was not anything abnormal. Next they worked Axel in hand, on the lunge and as per normal he wasn't showing overt signs of lameness. The vet even went as far as to hook him up the their electronic lameness assessment unit. This is a cool setup with sensors on on their head, legs etc which feeds back to a computer to measure asymmetric gait etc. So the vet goes to me, something happened which has never happened before. The computer fed back that this horse is tot...