Sad news is still sinking in…

This week I had been manically rushing about trying to organise the loan, purchase, and delivery of all the ‘must have’ showing items we needed for our ROR Championships on Sunday. I bought the last remaining parts for Soap’s showing bridle, and with my eBay headpiece and a set of reins it was looking really good. On a tip off by a friend for showing shirts I bought some cheap Tesco school uniform shirts and chucked them in the washing machine with some yellow dusters, they came out looking fab, new pale yellow show shirts, check!

Then when I went to the field to ride Soap he was lame!

Conscious that time was tight if this sudden lameness was going to get diagnosed and treated in time for Sunday I called the vet. During all the vet’s investigation we discovered that he had suffered an impact injury to his off hind, but once this was nerve blocked he still seemed 1/10 lame on his near fore. Confused and keen to know why the near fore was now also a point of lameness we x-rayed both his front feet. On the x-ray his off fore came up totally clean, but on his near fore, on one half of his navicular bone the vet could see ‘bony changes’.

This was such a shock, I had assumed that he had just knocked his back leg in the field, and now all of a sudden the word navicular was being banded about and x-rays were showing up damage that until this point had never even been on my radar. I’ve had Soap for over 5 years and he’s not had a day lame with anything more serious than an abscess.

Because of the hind leg clouding the front foot issue and the unfortunate timing of the 2 events happening together I’m finding it hard to really understand the possible prognosis, and where to go with him from here. The other issue causing confusion is that according to my vet it’s very rare and almost unheard of for one front foot to have navicular damage and not the other…

The next stage is to medicate both legs, and my vet thinks that the hind leg should be better within 4 weeks, but he really had no clue about the front foot, and couldn’t even give me a rough prognosis to go on, he just gave me a worst and best case scenario.

I keep swinging between feeling optimistic and pragmatic to basically just a crumpled heap of tears.

In an ideal world within a month with medication, and possibly changes to his shoes (although his foot balance is perfect) he will come sound, and be able to carry on life as a happy hacker, but who knows…I’ve never experienced this before so feel a bit lost…

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