May Was Difficult

Everything was going great until May time. We had a big thunderstorm and I was watching the horses dashing about in the paddock, all excited about the rain and wind, with Lutine prancing about on the soft ground. The next morning my husband went out to check on the horses and when he came back inside, he said 'was Lutine's really lame yesterday evening?' 'No', I replied. Well, she is now....

Lutine was hopping lame on her off fore. I checked it over and couldn't find any obvious injuries and given the previous evening's high jinks, the likely candidates were a stone bruise or a tendon/soft tissue injury. It could even have been an abscess starting up because of the sudden wet weather. So, I isolated her from the other horses so they couldn't bully her while she was unable to move out of their way. I put her in our sand-based round pen with hay and water, then started cold hosing the leg in case it was a soft tissue injury plus gave her homeopathic Arnica. She was horrendously lame when doing turns and was very sore on a straight line plus she had digital pulses on both front feet. I actually started to think it was the dreaded laminitis come to visit...

She improved daily for a few days but I still called in the vet to ensure there wasn't a serious mechanical problem. The vet diagnosed a stone bruise, most probably got when she was hooning about during the storm, so I carried on with arnica. During the day, she would go out in her boots with pads in the bottom (field was dry and hard again by this time) and into the sand round pen on a soft surface overnight. The main thing was to prevent further traumatic damage and inflammation to her foot. Then, we went through 3 cycles of her coming sound over 3 to 4 days and then going hopping lame again for another 3 or 4 days, which is very indicative of a grumbling abscess. The vet had warned any haematoma might abscess so I wasn't entirely surprised. At the beginning of the 3rd cycle, I called Ainsworths homeopathic pharmacy in London who sent me an individualised remedy for the suspected abscess. After 3 doses, she went sound and stayed sound. In all that time, even though I'd done hot poulticing to try and draw any abscess that might have been forming, I'd not seen any pus drain out of the hoof. However, about 5 weeks later, I was trimming her hoof and lo and behold, a long, thin sub-solar cavity revealed itself as it shed itself out. The abscess had been near her toe in a long, thin cavity and had completely reabsorbed, as shown in the photo above.