Vet Visit and Morning Update

So, after a couple hours of not-that-productive work at the office I headed back to the show grounds to meet the vet and poke Prairie a little more.

When I arrived, it appeared that the mare was thoroughly enjoying her light duty day and thought that 8:15am was exactly the right time to be done with braids and showing for the day.

Snoozey Mare says she's taking a sabbatical 

When the vet got there, we threw her on the lunge and the slight head bob was about as apparent as it had been in her flat class (that is to say, noticeable, but not holy-shit-someone-call-a-doctor bad).  Prair then decided to be absolutely uncooperative and played her "lunge? how do you lunge?" game which involves her politely scooting her butt away every time you try to start her up.

Great yielding of the haunch, but totally terrible lunging manners.

What a brat.

We moved her onto the concrete to see a smaller circle on hard ground and her no-lungey antics got worse, to the point that I was thinking if something wasn't wrong before, something would be soon if all the scrambling and chasing on cement kept up...

Fortunately nothing bad happened, we finally got a couple trot circles out of the mare (yup, still lame) and then moved on.

Our vet didn't feel an elevated pulse, but she rechecked with hoof testers anyway and got the same result of nothing.  She also didn't see or feel any obvious injuries higher on the leg and Prair didn't react to any palpation.

Her first assumption is that we're dealing with a stone bruise, or a weird tweak.  Apparently a stone bruise (or bruise from overreaching) can sometimes not show up with hoof testers, but still be sore from the concussion of impact.  I've never heard that explanation, but it kinda made sense and I so desperately wanted to hear "stone bruise" and not "soft tissue" that I nodded enthusiastically and hoped that was the case.

Without any other sensitivities or symptoms, we moved on to blocking the foot in order to see if that erased our mystery lameness.

It did.

And I should have videoed the second lunge session because HOLY HUGE TROT, Prair got all excited about something and was floating around like a magician.  It took a minute for her adrenaline to wear off, but when she resumed a (more) normal trot, the head bob was gone and she seemed perfectly fine.

So, the vet left us with instructions to wrap the hoof overnight (why not) and see how she looked in the am.  Vet thought there was a 50% chance she'll turn up sound on her own in a day or two and a 50% chance this little lameness lingers, in which case we'll wait until next week for further diagnostics to try and pinpoint what's going on.

She was pretty adamant that given the schedule of events (crash friday, sound for long days sat and sun, day off monday, lame tues) that it's highly unlikely that Prair did something crazy during that stumble on Friday.

She thinks it's more likely she found the one rock in the warm up ring, or stepped on something during her hand walk monday, or just took a funny step.  I like when she says things like that, so I'm ignoring other, scarier possibilities until I can't....

SO, this morning - Prair was apparently sound on the lunge (!!!!!) which is great news. I'm scratching her from the remaining Pre Green classes, since she doesn't need to jump 3' and there's no reason to chase points or anything else.  The plan is to potentially add her into some 2'6"ish stuff this afternoon if she warms up 100%.  I don't want to work her super hard, but we do want to get her moving and see if it represents or not. If she's not off, she definitely needs to get out of that show-stall and move her tootsies around a little.

Obviously we'll be super conservative, the point is to have a long term sound horse, not collect a couple extra ribbons in an open 2'6" class.

So that's the gig.  Feeling cautiously optimistic that perhaps this was something simple and stupid, but only time will tell!