Still Disco-less (A Hoary Alyssum Story)

It's two weeks after my last post, and I'm still, rather unexpectedly, Disco-less.

I did see him though

To recap, I was driving up to Kate's to stay with her for a week and take lessons to learn how to ride my "new" horse before bringing him home that weekend. And I did get one incredible lesson on him. I don't know how much I processed the lesson itself vs just sitting there in awe of the way every little movement of my body said something to him and how easily I could access each body part. This was a horse that felt like riding a 2x4 in the spring. 

His balance is the most amazing part of it, for me. Connor never really achieved even the level of balance you see here.

 

The day after that lesson, we pulled him out for a lunch break trail ride. I should have guessed something was wrong when he took his saddle pad off and stomped on it while I was tacking him up, but I thought it was just normal Welsh cheekiness.

Might have been trying to tell me something, in retrospect

He took a couple of weird steps as we set off, but generally felt normal - until I asked him to trot, when it became clear something was very, very wrong.

I jumped off and checked for stones in his feet - nothing. I watched him like a hawk as the lameness would move from one hind foot to the other, with him yanking his foot off the ground in pain at times and at others the same foot would strike normally. "This isn't an abscess," I said pretty early, and Kate agreed with me.

His respiration rate stayed high that entire afternoon and he had a mild fever, and given the fact that it was Wednesday and I needed to bring him home Saturday, we decided this warranted a vet call. Kate's farm vet couldn't come out, but over the phone he immediately guessed Disco had eaten some Hoary Alyssum, a plant I hadn't heard of before because we thankfully don't have it in southern Indiana.

While we waited for a callback from her sporthorse medicine vet, I checked around his paddock, and did find a plant or two growing in a no-man's-land between paddocks, right next to some grazed down areas where Disco had stuck his head through the fence to get at.

With a potential suspect in our minds, we hauled him 45 minutes to Classic Equine, a brand new state-of-the-art veterinary hospital across the street from where GLEF, the big Traverse City horse show, is held. Our appointment started at 9pm and ended around midnight.

As we pulled him off the trailer, the vet asked "Mare or gelding?" I said, "Stallion," and he said oh, we've got a couple of other horses stalled around the exam area. "That shouldn't be a problem, he's an incredibly well-behaved stallion," I said, and I glared into the trailer, "Don't make me regret saying that." 

One of the vet's first questions when he saw me dressed like this and saw my hairy little pony was "Are you planning on doing Dressage with him?" and I still chuckle over that - what exactly about cowboy boots, a Breeder's Cup jacket, Carhartt chore leggings and a hairy little pony with a reining horse mane says Dressage? lol

 

I needn't have worried though - for three straight hours, Disco stood quietly and behaved like an old broke gelding. Never even called for the other horses, and the worst he did was get an emotional support erection when he was standing there bored. He made me proud.

Even with my horse's health hanging in the balance, I still found this vet appointment fascinating. It is absolutely insane to me that Kate has access to this level of emergency veterinary medicine without a referral.

It started out as a normal lameness exam, jogging in a straight line on concrete then lunging in a circle on sand. Then it moved to a computer-aided lameness exam and Disco got sensors on his head, right fore and top center of his hindquarters. I wish we'd gotten an image of the iPad they were using, but it tracked both the impact lameness and the push off lameness of each footfall. The vet (who was very experienced) watched the horse and the assistant watched the iPad.

 

 

It was obvious to see we were dealing with a hind end lameness, so next we moved to make sure it was the feet by blocking first the right hind and repeating the jogging and lunging, then the left hind.

"It's definitely both hind feet, worse in the right hind than the left," the vet said at one point. "What could cause a bilateral overnight lameness in BOTH hinds?" I said, "I just rode this horse yesterday, and he was sound." "Well, it's rare, very few things cause it, but we'll get to that," he said.

After some x-rays showed some mild stretching of the laminae, it was time to talk through it. The diagnosis was mild bilateral laminitis in both hinds. "So this is good because we can rule a bunch of things out that would be in play still if it was just one hind foot. We know it has to be something systemic."

"He's dry lotted and getting a handful of ration balancer morning and night. Another vet thought Hoary Alyssum, would that cause this?"

 

Bingo. The only symptom Disco didn't have that HA horses typically do was stocking up of the hinds, but everything else fit. 

 

"You need to check your hay carefully when you get home, it's very hard to spot when dried and it's unfortunately common up here. It's also not uncommon for 20 horses to be eating the same hay on one property and only one is affected. He'll make a full recovery in 2-4 weeks, but he CANNOT get any more HA right now." 

He sent us home wearing Cloud Boots and with strict instructions not to trailer him home that weekend to avoid stressing the stretched laminae any further. 

 

By headlamp that night, we did find some in the hay. Kate's hay guy was shocked when he heard, because he puts a lot of effort into making sure it doesn't make it into his hay, but anyone that has managed grazing pastures or hay pastures knows how freaking hard it can be to guarantee 100% eradication of something like that.

So it's possible he could have gotten it fresh by pushing his head through the fence, and it possible he could have gotten it in the hay. And I don't blame Kate for either one of those things. She's had him since March and given him nothing but the most amazing care and training. It was just rotten luck that it happened and that it happened now.

That Saturday, I went home without him, which sucked. Since then, he has been a little sounder every time Kate has tested him, and I'm hopeful that I can go get him sometime in November.

End of October, clearly feeling good

Ultimately, this was such an expensive and gut-wrenching thing to go through, especially since leaving him up there meant he couldn't show at what might be our last local Welsh show ever last weekend, but at the end of the day, I am so grateful that I'll be bringing him a fully recovered and healthy horse, even if it's just a few weeks later than I thought I would.

See you soonish

(By the way - this is the first time in 15 years of horse ownership that either of my horses have ever taken a lame step, and I know this, because I had to create a new "lameness" tag for the blog when I went to save this post. Which is pretty damn cool. Go Welsh!)