the deal with doozy

In my experience, horse people are notoriously cagey and secretive when it comes to broadcasting specific details relating to unsoundness in horses. Probably for good reasons, if we’re being honest. But. Good choices aren’t always my specialty. SO. Let’s get into it lol.

obsessed with the greenery

The briefest history for those of you not following with bated breath on the edges of your seats…: Doozy came up a bit lame in January with suspected bruised feet from nasty ice balls packed into her shoes. That lameness abated, but she’s been intermittently on and off ever since. 

We’ve gone through a litany of theories on potential external causes — a deep slow-healing bruise! poor saddle fit! cracked heels!! — and an initial lameness work up a few weeks ago showed a basically sound horse who flexed negatively, kinda reinforcing our hypotheses about external factors.

omfg RUDE BISCUIT leave that poor pony alone >:(

I’m a firm believer that the simplest solution is often the correct one. Occam’s Razor etc. And I appreciate that my vet has a well established methodology for measured, conservative and incremental interventions. Sometimes “wait and see” is the correct first choice. 

But we’ve waited, and we’ve seen, and now we have the information that the intermittent nature of this NQR-ness persists even with (some) rest. So the next step was to find a way to get the vet and Doozy into the same space at the same time the mare was presenting with lameness, which we accomplished last week.  

Sass Level 5000

Quick note here, guys: While I am committed to documentation and don’t mind transparency, please don’t confuse that with an invitation to provide unpaid / unsolicited counsel. Unless I’ve remitted payment to you for services provided in the last 12 months, I am not your client. 

Plenty of folks had plenty to say about their internet diagnoses for Charlie, as well as my and my vet’s presumed failings at addressing those diagnoses. You were basically all wrong, and all assholes. Those comments did nothing to benefit Charlie, and presumably the satisfaction for telling me that I suck as a horse owner was short lived anyway. So let’s just like. Not, yes? 

Maximum Pest

Ahem. Anyway. Back to the appointment. 

The main benefit of getting the horse and vet in a room together when the horse is actively presenting as lame is that we can do nerve blocks, which basically allow you to isolate areas of the limb incrementally to see at what point the horse goes from jogging lame to jogging sound. Starting from the bottom up, it’s a neat way to zero in on pain sources.

Doozy, naturally, was not the most compliant critter for this. It was hard to tell when the block took effect bc she reacts to being poked on sight. As in, I actually had to cover her literal eyeballs with my hands while my vet crouched on the wrong side, reaching under the mare’s belly to poke the blocked foot to confirm numbness. Ridiculous sensitive creature!

patiently eagerly chaotically awaiting the farrier

Our hope was that the mare would jog sound after blocking the foot. Which… she did not. Except about 10min later, after the block had likely diffused farther up the tissue planes of the leg — then the mare jogged sound. So. That is not explicitly conclusive, tho it tells us that probably our source is somewhere in the neighborhood of the fetlock and down.

From that information, we next moved to getting rads of the coffin and fetlock joints. I should also add — we did another set of lower limb flexions before the nerve block too, all of which were negative. As in, Doozy trotted away after each hyper-flexion the same as before.

incremental steps, y’all. we added hind shoes!

So I guess for those of you who, like myself, are wondering if this dilemma could have been avoided by a pre-purchase exam… I’m honestly not certain. The mare last year was sound. She still today flexes fine. And then we took rads and… Nothing super obvious there either. No chips or anything beyond the wear and tear that is common in racehorses. I doubt I’d have even done x-rays of the fetlocks based on how the horse flexed anyway. 

I bought Doozy for $1,500. This appointment with x-rays and an injection cost $1,200, and we only took pictures of one limb. PPE economics continue to be questionable for cheap horses.

stalkerish barn cats being stalkerish

Anyway, the fetlock had more signs of irregularity than the coffin, and since she still jogged lame after the initial nerve block and didn’t come sound until it had enough time to diffuse (presumably up the tissue planes to the fetlock), we decided to start there with a steroid injection. 

Yes. Injecting a not-quite-7yo horse’s fetlock feels… Not great to me. I don’t like it, not gonna lie. And I’m not totally sure it’s going to do the trick, either. Tho - if it does, and becomes a point of future management, my vet indicated it would be a good candidate for non-steroidal orthobiologics like IRAP. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, tho.

pls just be pretty sound

We also concluded from the rads that while Doozy’s feet look marvelous and the farrier is doing good things for her heels etc, we may have room to explore options with pads and/or wedges. And adding hind shoes — which was actually already in the plans — was confirmed as a good incremental step for continuing to work the margins. 

With a horse as sensitive as Doozy, she could be a marginal case anyway, ya know? It could be that a few little tweaks can make a big difference. Or at least. I am happy to hope. Regardless. Hind shoes are officially on. Fetlock injection will take time to settle in. So we’ll wait and see what impact these adjustments have, and assess from there.

she’s come so far in the last year and a half, it would be a fucking tragedy to pivot

It’s disheartening to be in this position, not gonna lie. Tho there’s a certain clarity that comes with hardship. Realizing that we may be dealing with something more serious got me thinking bigger picture about the horse, myself and the future. 

A clear next step was learning how/if Doozy could return to the adoption facility… An awareness that was **instantly** drowned by a gut-deep, visceral “But I Don’t Wanna!” 

Guys. I really like this horse. I straight up love the shit out of her. She is the full package. Challenging sure. But in all the right ways, and I can so clearly see a future for us. 

But. Obviously. She has to be sound. And if we can’t get her sound… Well. That doesn’t bode well, right? If we can get her sound, tho… Well, there are questions there too. Particularly around the long term sustainability of that soundness with respect to fairness to the animal. It’s on my mind, have no fear.

My deepest hope is that we are able to get the mare sound with a realistic management plan that feels acceptable. I don’t want to worry that running around novice level eventing would destroy my horse’s prospects for a comfortable life. And I also don’t want to worry about what happens to this silly sensitive creature if she goes back into the OTTB resale pipeline. 

So. We wait and see. And hope.