More Maintenance (where's that 50,000 mile warranty!??)

Prair is all settled back in at home.  She had a few light hacks last week to stretch her out and get moving, but nothing too crazy given the stress of the show and then the ride home.

Friday our favorite vet came out to give all the Thermal horses a once over and see how the handled the stress and workload.  N and I both expressed our concerns bout Prair's back or maybe hind end and how she was jumping fairly inverted at the start of our last week showing, but seemed to work out of it by the time I was riding on the weekend...

N pulled Prair out to show the vet her movement under saddle, show some changes of lead etc.

The first thing the vet said was "wow. She really is a nice mare."

(um, duh :) I love her).

It hadn't occurred to me that the vet has only seen Prairie jogged and lunged, but never worked under saddle - and I am the first to admit that she looks like a floppy llama on the lunge.  I mean, you can see she's a big mover, but she looks like Phoebe from friends jogging... under saddle she looks, well.  Better.

oimg I actually found a gif to use.

Anyway, bolstered by the compliment, I cautiously probed for her opinion on that right hind/what she was seeing.  Always good when the response is... well, RH looks fine, I think it's the left? (damn, owner fail).

Good news was that when we pulled tack, it seemed like Prair's back was *less sore* that normal.  (note, that means she's not sore when I poke her, but still responds to the vet-palpation-of-doom.  

Most of her soreness seemed to be stemming from that stupid fungus that took hold right where her saddle goes, so we're working hard to knock that out.

In terms of her hind end... we flexed everything and saw about a 1/5 on both legs evenly spread across her stifles/hocks/fetlocks.  The fact that each joint was a little sore, but nothing was really sore - led our vet to think that the problem was higher up, perhaps in her SI.  A strong poke there produced a pronounced "ouch" from the mare and we had our primary suspect.  

Vet thinks that her SI is likely sore since she's using it more (since her back is happier) and that soreness is in turn showing up in her legs as a compensating factor.  (so... she's sore from being sore, from being sore?)

The suggestion was to inject her SI (so many injections..) and see what happens.  She thought that would alleviate some of the stickiness in the lead changes and also make her stifles/hocks/fetlocks happier.

So inject we did (oh my god that's a huge needle they use..) and Prair got 5 days off.

I went down to see her today and caught her just at the end of her 30 minute Eurosizer walk (so cute, she stopped to look for treats and got smacked in the butt by the divider...lol).  

She looked great, though the fungus is not as healed as I would have liked - so ther eis more work to do there... 

Otherwise, tomorrow CWD comes out for (another) fitting.  and then I am officially d.o.n.e. riding Prair until this baby (It's a girl! can't remember if I said that..) hatches in July. 

whew.

That's the update.