Finally, some hope

It seems like this week has been about taking one step forward, only to end up taking two steps back. Sunday, I took Saga to the vet. We took new rads, on the suspicion that he HAD to have a fracture somewhere to be so incredibly lame. The rads were clean. We checked to make sure the infection wasn't back in his fetlock joint - and while the white blood cell count was a little high, the numbers were more in line with inflammation rather than infection, but we put some antibiotic in there just in case.

Monday and Tuesday Saga got about 20-30 minutes of hand grazing 10 feet from his stall, and both times, he was noticeably worse after. Since then, he has literally not been out of his stall... and he seems to be doing markedly better. He's standing solidly on his RF now, at least some of the time, and when he moves around the stall the limp is not as painfully evident as it was. He's not sweating constantly from the pain anymore either, so that's good. I'm re-wrapping the RF every other day with standing wraps, then putting the splint on over it, then duct-taping the whole mess together. It's ungainly but it seems to help him be more comfortable, and he's being a saint about the whole process, thank goodness.

 

The wrap, pre-splint (this is actually the gamgee wrap the vet put on, but at $50 per wrap, I'm now using plain standing wraps. DIY and all that!)

 

Here's the splint that hubby made (the vet was impressed... we could have a sideline business!) The bottom corners are cut out so that the PVC won't put pressure on his heel bulbs.

 

Here's how the splint fits on. It has to touch the ground at the bottom in order to provide support.

 

Saga models the finished duct-taped mass while Fuzzypony fills his water buckets. He has been getting immense amounts of joy out of messing with the hose while his buckets are being filled.

The plan right now is to keep him in the stall with the splint on for another week and a half or so, then take rads again. Assuming we see nothing, then we'll start trying to wean him off the splint, a few hours at a time. If that works, we'll see about some hand-grazing and then plan from there. Long-term, the goal is to get him to a pasture at one of two retirement facilities that I've found nearby - with Cash as his buddy. Of course, if we take him out of the splint and he gets worse again, or we start hand-grazing and he gets worse again, then the question becomes how long we want to keep trying to fix him when we really have no idea what we're up against.

The really strange thing is, even if he has a tiiiiny hairline fracture on a sesamoid bone (which often don't show up on rads for several weeks after they've happened) it should not be causing him this much pain. I'm more inclined to think that all this is caused by some combination of the lesion in the ligament that we DO know about, the infection in the fetlock (which seems to have cleared up, thank goodness), and probably something going on (DDFT or impar ligament) in the foot that we cannot see. But of course, this is all pure speculation. We really have very little to go off of, except how lame he is. Poor pony.