5/18/2023 0 Comments Week 12: RecoveryDuring the final week of my project I got to start working on rehabbing Marty! Which has already proven to be a hard task, it is very time consuming and also requires a lot of work. Marty has to walk for at least 30 minutes a day, and does his carrot stretches! Carrot stretches are stretches that make horses use muscles in the back and neck while using carrots to encourage them to hold the stretch. Carrots help motivate the horse to hold the stretches because it can be uncomfortable for them when the muscle is being stretched. He also gets to sit with a heating pad on his back for 20 minutes a day. The heating pad helps reduce pain, swelling, and tension in the muscles.
To help reduce Marty's pain levels he is also on multiple types of medication. Currently he is taking three different medications; he is taking bute, methocarbamol, and antibiotics which all have very important roles in Marty’s recovery. Bute is simply super strength horse pain medicine that helps reduce pain, swelling, and fever. Although Marty only got a certain dosage of bute, and it was slowly weaned off of it this week. Methocarbamol is simply a muscle relaxer that is used during therapy and to help prevent muscle spasms that could be caused during therapy or usage. While methocarbamol is very helpful it does have its side effects. It makes horses drowsy and they are not as aware of their surroundings like normal, which can cause them to spook and startle more than normal. Because of this I have to be very aware of what he is doing. The antibiotics are to help prevent infection. Even though Marty's recovery is on the right track we have to be very careful to follow the vet's instructions to make sure he heals properly, and will eventually be able to go back into work. There is no guarantee that he will be able to do everything he was before his surgery but we are hopeful that he will. After he gets his stitches taken out we will start working on building up muscle by using the Equiband lunging system, and then we will be able to start riding!
0 Comments
5/11/2023 0 Comments Week 11: SurgeryThis past week, Marty has had his kissing spine surgery. His surgery was on Tuesday and thankfully he got to come home only a day later on Wednesday. Doctor. Caster said it was a very smooth surgery and went exactly how he planned it to go, and he should be able to make a good recovery if we do everything properly. The hard part is doing the rehabilitation properly. Marty will have a long road to recovery, which includes lots of lunging, groundwork, and working with a launching system, called the Equiband. The Equiband was designed, especially for horses and can be used during lunging or riding to help a horse build muscle.
Another big part of Marty’s rehab is doing lots of stretches and walking, especially for the first three weeks before we can start lunging. He will also be in still rest for two or three weeks depending on when he gets his stitches taken out. Until we can start lunging Marty he has to be walked for at least thirty minutes a day to prevent colic, and also has to have a heating pad on his back for twenty minutes to help with the pain. He was also put on muscle relaxers, anti-swelling medication, and bute (but is like super stringy horse Advil). During the surgery, Doctor Castro only operated on one side of Marty’s spine. The ligaments that surround his four affected vertebrae were cut, which released all the tension between them. It is also possible that during this surgery some of his nerves were cut which will help manage the pain. Castro said that they don’t exactly know what the surgery does that helps, they just know it does. This week I have been preparing Marty for his kissing spine surgery, which will happen on May 9th. Marty's surgery will take place at Davie Large Animal Veterinary Office, which is right down the road from Davie High! Afterwards he will stay at the Veterinary Office for two days to make sure he is healing properly and there are no complications. The surgery will take around an hour and we will take him earlier that day so he can be prepared.
There isn't much we can do for Marty to help prepare him for the surgery, besides keeping him in shape. Because I can't ride this can be challenging but luckily there are other ways to keep a horse in shape. Lunging and groundwork are the most efficient ways to help a horse stay in shape while they are not being ridden. Although it is frustrating because Marty does not have much experience at all with lunging, we have done lots of groundwork though! Kissing spine doesn’t have to be treated by surgery depending on how bad the case is, only two out of a hundred horses actually have to have surgery. Only 32% of horses have kissing spine which is actually a high percentage but not all horses are affected. While there are cases of kissing spine that could be worse than Marty's, his case is pretty bad. Most horses only have kissing spine in two vertebrae but Marty has it in four. There can be cases that affect up to eight vertebrae. It is extremely worrisome though because he is so young and has more than likely had kissing spine for six months to a year because of all the bone damage. During the surgery Doctor Castro will take ligaments and put space between the vertebrae. The surgery however will not prevent kissing spine from occurring in other vertebrae. 4/29/2023 1 Comment Week 9: Going to the VetThis week we decided to take Marty to the vet because he still didn't seem quite like himself. Me, my mom, and my trainer Melody decided that Marty wasn’t progressing as well as we wanted to decide we needed to get him scoped and chiropractic. Thankfully there is a large animal veterinary office in Davie County, so we didn't have to trailer him far. Because I was in school when we took him to the vet (Tuesday) my dad helped Melody load Marty onto the trailer and take him. Marty wasn't behaving very well because he couldn't eat for a full 12 hours before he got scoped. This is simply so the vet can see everything in the horse's stomach clearly and doesn't miss anything! Doctor Castro saw Marty and was his chiropractor and scoped him, and he was ulcer free! Castro said it was possible Marty never even had ulcers. So if he didn’t have ulcers what was the problem? Two days later we took Marty to get x-rays of his back and he was diagnosed with severe kissing spine disease, which is known for mimicking the symptoms of ulcers. Kissing spine is when a horse's vertebrae shift to where they are touching which causes them to painfully rub and grind. The disease is typically diagnosed between the ages 5 and 10, but Castro said Marty has probably had it for at least a year and it had just been progressively getting worse without us knowing. Typically kissing spine only occurs in two vertebrae, but if affected four vertebrae in Marty’s back. This means he is going to have to go through a longer surgery than normal, but thankfully the surgery is minimally invasive, which means it will have very little muscle damage. To avoid muscle damage Doctor Castro will do multiple small incisions instead of one of two big ones. He will be operated on both sides. Marty’s surgery is May 9th. 4/22/2023 0 Comments Week 8: First Ride BackOn Sunday I got to ride Marty for the first time and he was wonderful! I took him down to a large, empty field near our barn. To be safe I made sure my grandmother came down with me, this was a safety precaution in case Marty did something and I got hurt. Thankfully he was super good and we got to walk, trot, and canter in the field. We didn’t canter for very long incase it was bothering him, and he really enjoyed himself!
Because he was so good we decided we were going to try another lesson and just see how it went. Unfortunately it didn't go as well as planned. To try to keep things stress free for Marty we took him out to a field, and he refused to move forward multiple times. Thankfully he didn’t buck and kick out like our last lesson around two or three weeks ago, but it was still extremely frustrating. Whenever I asked Marty to trot or canter he stopped and planted his feet in the ground and was even refusing to walk forward by the end of our lesson. While this is very frustrating because we have been treating Marty for his ulcers it is important to understand that he might not be totally better or something else might be wrong. To make sure we are doing everything possible to help him we are having the vet come out to our barn to get him scoped. Scoping a horse means a vet puts a small tube with a camera into the horse's stomach to see if the ulcers are completely gone. It is a totally safe procedure as long as the animal is sedated. To make sure Marty is getting all the help he could possibly need we are also having a chiropractor come out to adjust him if needed. While we are going to have a very expensive vet bill it will all be worth helping him get better! Sadly that does mean we more than likely will not be going to the district show. 4/13/2023 0 Comments Week 7: Ulcer TreatmentDuring the past week and over spring break we decided to give Marty some time off to help his ulcers heal. To help treat Marty’s ulcers we put him on GutX, Ulcergard, and Probios. GutX is a horse omeprazole that decreases the amount of acid in the stomach. Ulcergard is used to prevent and treat ulcers by adding a lining inside the stomach to keep acids from affecting the stomach lining. The Probios is a probiotic that helps heal the ulcers quicker. We also started giving him alfalfa hay, which helps prevent and heal ulcers.
Me and my mom decided to give Marty two weeks off because his Probios is a two week treatment, but the GutX is a 30 day treatment so he might need more time off. While I am not riding Marty there are still lots of other things I can work on with him. Because ulcers can be caused by stress we still are not sure if we will even take him to the district show because we will be gone from home for 3 to 4 days. If we do take Marty to the district show and he isn't ready to jump we will show in showmanship! Showmanship is doing simple patterns while walking and trotting on the ground. Once Marty is ulcer free we will slowly start working again. I don’t want to put him right back into work because there is a risk that the ulcers could come back. It also is not fair to him to ask him to jump and do hard work when he isn't fit to work. Depending on how Marty is doing at the end of his two week treatment (April 16) we will slowly ease him back into work, if not will will give him two more weeks off and reassess the situation. 4/2/2023 0 Comments Week 6: UlcersUnfortunately over the past week, we learned Marty has ulcers, not back problems like we originally thought. There are 3 major types of ulcers a horse can get gastric, hindgut, and upper gut ulcers. Gastric and upper gut ulcers are typically diagnosed by getting your horse scoped by a vet. Scoping is when you take a small video camera and put it down a horse's nose so you can see different parts of its stomach and intestines. It doesn’t hurt the horse and they are sedated so the vet and the horse aren't hurt. Hindgut ulcers cannot be seen when you scope a horse because of where they are located and can only be diagnosed based on symptoms, which is the type of ulcers Marty was diagnosed with. The most common signs of ulcers are changes in behavior, not wanting to eat or drink, and being very sensitive when you touch the horse's side. Marty had all of these signs besides not eating or drinking. Hindgut ulcers mostly affect a horse’s colon which sits on the right side of a horse's body and makes up a big part of their digestive tract. Which is unfortunately also right where I have put my leg to ask Marty to pick up his right lead canter.
I had been noticing that Marty hadn't been acting normal for the past 2-3 weeks on the ground, me and my trainers had thought that maybe it was the drastic weather changes. There were also lots of horses coming and going at our barn. Because Marty is such an easygoing horse we never expected him to have ulcers, horses with high-stress levels are usually the ones who get ulcers. During our last lesson we had lots of problems, Marty was refusing to move out and was bucking. After this happened we finally got him help and put him on multiple different medications. We put him on Gut X ulcer prevention, Ulcergard, and a probiotic that treats ulcers. We think part of the reason Marty is getting ulcers is that he does not get hay constantly throughout the day. This would cause ulcers because horses are grazing animals, and without constant hay or grass the acid builds up in their stomachs and causes ulcers. We decided to get Marty a slow feeder that helps slow down how fast he is eating hay when he is in his stall. To make sure Marty makes the quickest and most stress-free recovery possible we are not going to ride him for 2 weeks, and then we are going to reassess his condition and see if he is clear to go back to work. In the meantime, we are going to be doing lots of groundwork to keep him busy 3/23/2023 1 Comment Week 5: Dressage Lessons This weekend Marty and I go to do a dressage lesson with a retired professional dressage rider, named Nancy. Nancy is an older lady who almost got into the Olympics but unfortunately didn’t make it. She also broke her neck around two months ago but has been recovering. She is an extremely tough person, and she has very different teaching methods. This was my second dressage lesson with her and it went amazingly well. Lots of trainers have very different teaching methods and approaches to how you should ride a horse or teach them. It doesn’t mean either training style is wrong, different people just teach and learn differently. Unlike my trainers Nancy barely wanted me to use any leg pressure at all to get Marty to move forward and wanted me to try other methods to get him to move forward. Telling me that I shouldn’t be having to put all my effort into getting him to trot faster and he should do what I tell him to do until I tell him differently. Or in other words, Marty should go till I tell him not to and I shouldn’t have to ask him to keep going when we are doing something as simple as trotting.
During our lesson, Nancy gave me a dressage crop which is a very long floppy. Instead of asking him to move forward by applying leg pressure and would tap his hip with the crop until he understood what I was asking for. I honestly felt pretty bad for having to tap him so many times but I also understand why Nancy was having me do this. If I am having to put so much effort into getting Marty to keep trotting or cantering what am I going to do when I can’t get him fast enough to get over a jump? I won’t have any other way to get him to move faster. To help Marty out we also tried something Nancy called the “buddy system”. The buddy system is when you have another horse trot or canter about two feet away from you and then you match pace with the other horse. The idea is to either help your horse slow down or to help speed up. Because horses are herd animals they want to run together so it encourages them to match their pace with the other horse. Not only does it make it easier for me to get Marty going, but it also helps me work on adjusting his pace which is a super useful skill when jumping. I would not suggest trying the buddy system because like people, most horses like their personal space and might feel threatened if another horse that they don’t know is that close to them. We also worked on doing leg yields and jumped over a few jumps at the end of our lesson. 3/17/2023 1 Comment Week 4: Progress and Lessons This week I and Marty had one of our best lessons yet with one of our trainers, Melody. We worked on jumping gymnastics, which makes a horse use all of its muscles and also makes them think about what they are doing. Different gymnastics are set up in a specific way to help strengthen a horse's different muscles and can also help them become more flexible. We did lots of bending lines which helped him stretch out more and use different muscles. I was impressed with Marty during our lesson. Not only was he trying to figure out how to do the gymnastics, but he was also moving forward and we also had some very nice simple changes.
|