All the Toys Now...

Went down to assist in the Mare's spa day with the vet, which really only entailed me holding my checkbook firmly and watching the dolla dolla bills fly away home. 

Hairy. Eyeball.

Prair received her final shockwave session and a PRP injection into the medial branch of the suspensory.  Right now we are operating under the hypothesis that the Suspensory is the "primary" injury, and that the strain on the superficial and the DDFT are ancillary to that. 

It's never a good day at the vet when you see them unpack every single machine from their truck. 

ultrasound, check.

centrifuge, check.

shockwave, check.

I suppose we left the digital xray safely packed away, but still - I had to take a gulp as I watched all the Pelican boxes get stacked up and unpacked...

I had never watch PRP done before, so I was semi fascinated with the actual process of separating the blood sample (60cc of it.. holy smokes that's a big syringe) into red blood cells, platelet poor plasma (PPP) and Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP).  After processing, you come away with about 2cc of PRP, a lot of PPP and a lot of RBC.  Fascinating.

The horses were less fascinated and in fact were less than thrilled with something that smelled like blood and sounded like a spaceship. (I don't really blame them)

The PRP injection is guided by ultrasound, so we got a partial peek at what things look like, although since a different probe is used, it's not as useful (or comparable) an image relative to what we saw before.

It was pretty easy to see where the disruption of the suspensory is - in fact it shows up on the screen as a cloudy dark spot.  The sort of "void" that makes my stomach totally clench up and freak out - though my vet assured me the dark is an interruption but not a lack of tissue.  She still doesn't feel there is a full tear or even "lesion." So I tried to comfort myself with that interpretation.

Since we're only three weeks out from diagnosis we wouldn't expect to see much in the way of healing yet, but there was still a part of me that was hoping for some sort of miraculous progress.  Instead we'll wait 5 more weeks before we do a full comparison ultrasound.

As such, we're back to our regularly scheduled programming... turnout in the morning, wraps in the afternoon, stall and naked legs at night.

wash, rinse, repeat.