Well, the good news is that Lizzie's new x-rays indicate that while she does have a mild case of laminitis (some inflammation and increased pulses), she has NOT foundered. That is, there has been no movement whatsoever of the bones in her foot. The angles on her coffin bones fall between 47 and 50 degrees -- exactly the same as the baseline x-rays from last September. (Founder would give her angles of more than 55 degrees.)
Her soles are thin, though, and her toes need trimmed a bit despite having been done just two weeks ago, so Zoilo is coming tonight to do that for me. As soon as she gets a bit better and I'm positive that there are no abcesses trying to come out (none showed on the x-rays, but I want to be POSITIVE), I'm going to start treating the soles of her feet with Keratex to harden them up. Walking over all that gravel at Al's place with those thin soles can't be comfortable but I am NOT going to shoe her. Once she's better, I think I'll buy her some boots to wear when we go ride, but hardening up her feet can't hurt.
The bad news, however, is that she definately has arthritic changes in her hocks. There are no bone spurs or indications of changes as a result of injury like athletic/performance/race horses often have - just age. She IS 14 or 15 years old and has not been kept in shape over the last 5 years at least. (I can definately identify with that!) In addition to x-raying her hocks, the vet and her two vet students did those tests where they fold each of her back legs up high for a full minute, then let it down and immediately trot her off. When they did that, she was grade 4 lame on those back legs! Poor baby!
So . . . short term, we will be keeping her on daily Bute for the next few days, then going to every other day, and walking her for 15 or 20 minutes at least twice a day. Long term, I'm going to start her on a good joint supplement and look into all the current arthritis treatments (excluding, unfortunately, those mega-buck new procedures like stem cell injections) and try and decide what to do down the road if (when) she gets worse.
But through the whole two hours of testing, Dr. C kept saying over and over again how absolutely amazed she was at how cooperative Lizzie was despite her pain. The students took several sets of digital x-rays of all her feet and both her hocks, which required her to stand on 6"-high wooden blocks with either both front feet or both back feet on the blocks, and she never once tried to step back down or kick them out of the way. (The vet students were learning for the first time how to take the x-rays, how to run them through the computer afterward, how to read the x-rays and figure the result measurements, etc. So the whole procedure got repeated a number of times and it took a WHILE.) At one point, a student was leaning over directly behind Lizzie and holding the x-ray plate in place against her back leg. Dr. C told him that while it was perfectly fine to do it that way with Lizzie, MOST horses can't be trusted not to kick at him if he stands back there and pushes things against a painful leg! But even when Lizzie was in obvious pain after those awful physical tests, she never gave any of them any trouble whatsoever. Whatever they asked her to do, she did. That girl is definitely worth whatever it takes to make her feel better!
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