everyone's favorite: scratches!!!

I've already briefly mentioned the wound on Isabel's RH from interfering in a lesson a couple weeks ago. The wound was busy minding its own business not bothering anybody for just over a week, until Izzy came in from the field for her chiro appt with a fat leg the day after our last xc schooling.

but izzy you're too pretty for fat legs!!

This naturally freaked me out bc why was the leg suddenly angry? Esp right after schooling? The mare was sound, the leg had localized warmth but wasn't really hot. Plus, the wound actually looked pretty great. And yet I could not for the life of me totally get rid of the fill.

We iced. Buted. Worked (with light intensity bc chiro...). Left in over night in standing wraps (much to princess's dismay). Slathered with all variations of tinctures and tonics (up to and including ivermectin at the recommendation of my chiro in the off chance that she might have pests in the wound preventing it from healing).

And there was much panicky texting (thanks Alli and Austen for tolerating the barrage!!).

We finally just sorta concluded that the mare was a delicate hothouse flower who would probably take a couple days for the swelling to go down while the wound finished healing.

left: angry raging scratches (and itty bitty wound). right: covered in magical healing desitin mixture

So imagine my surprise when, after her requisite two days off following the horse trial, I discovered that the entire area of her leg beneath the Alushield spray was lumpy bumpy scabby. Poor mare.

The wound was just a distraction - disguising the ugly truth. Mare was brewing up a raging case of scratches all along. Ugh.

makes her socks look bright white!! (whereas the mtg on the unaffected sock makes it look disgusting haha)

She had scratches pretty badly when I met her three years ago (right around this same time of year!), so it shouldn't really have come as such a surprise. I've actually been pretty diligent about proactively slathering her legs in MTG to keep the funk at bay... but I guess I've been slacking the past few weeks.

So now that we finally know the source of the mystery swelling, hopefully we'll get it under control in short order. Scratches is pretty common at our barn so the BM keeps a homemade desitin-based remedy on hand at all times. Izzy will get treated with that once a day on her affected leg, and meanwhile I'm hitting the so-far-scratches-free leg with MTG like it's going out of style.