Not much to report!

I haven't blogged about Pangea in nearly a month. A MONTH! Mostly I've had little to write about, honestly - I've been working insanely long hours at my two full time jobs as well as trying desperately to keep up with full time school (yes, three full time things plus riding doesn't work out very well) - and I haven't been riding very much due to the heat and Pangea's inability to cope with it. She's been doing a lot better, thankfully, but she has struggled over the past few months to keep herself cool. Lots and lots of sweat and one sunbleached coat later, and we seem to be reaching the end of summer, sort of. As I write, it is currently overcast and 68 degrees. I know it will warm into the low 90's later today, but I'll take that as "cooling off." We're not supposed to reach into the 100's again in the foreseeable future, so I am hoping it won't happen again until next summer!

Most of what Pangea has done over the past month is nothing at all, save for going in the AquaTread once a week, a few dressage rides, and a few trail rides as well. She is still teetering on the edge of comfortable enough to be strongly rideable, and I have been debating whether or not to really pursue a foxhunting career with her. Is she going to stay comfortably sound enough to do it, or not? I figure I will keep trying to find her magic combination for the rest of the year, and then reevaluate. To be honest, if she isn't going to make a foxhunter, then she'll be semi-retired and become a happy trail pony and momma. I don't want to hear ONE NEGATIVE WORD from people about her being a momma. I've made the mistake of talking about breeding in the past, and I am not keen to get the same negative response. My horse, my money, my decision, end of story! ;)

Anyway, back to Pangea's comfort. As her issues have unfolded, I have realized they are far more complicated than I ever imagined. It isn't just that she had an old stifle injury that was unattended to, it was that her entire body has been compensating for years due to that and her feet. The soreness in her body made her stand in odd positions - camped under a lot in front, for instance - which in turn made her wear her sole thin at the toe and grow a long heel... which made her body sore. Her entire body developed a sway to the right, feet included. We have come a VERY long way in helping to improve her posture, but she is still very body sore and restricted. Two chiropractic adjustments have failed to help her, and dental work didn't improve anything either. (I thought the dentist was great but the chiro was not great... we'll be looking for a new one.) Regular trims and a balanced diet have done an awful lot of good for her feet, but she is going to need boots if we want to get any further on tougher terrain. Devil's Claw Plus and Cosequin ASU were very helpful, but not quite enough. She is currently going through a course of Acetyl-D, and if that isn't helpful enough, will do a course of Adequan as well. She had a massage yesterday for the first time, as I suspected it would do her a whole lot of good, and holy lord did she ever need it! She spent the entire time trying to bite me and kicking out violently at all the knots the massage therapist uncovered. As she's not a biter or a kicker, it speaks an awful lot about the level of pain she was feeling. (At least she wasn't trying to kick the massage therapist... she was just kicking out backwards to show how she really felt about the whole thing, instead of aiming for her!) She was stuck basically from head to tail, poor thing. It's all compensatory soreness... it's all just a big mess. She'll get another one next week, and we'll see how she feels then.

The saddest part about this whole ordeal is that had somebody bothered to properly treat her injury when it first happened, none of this would be happening now. Now, it is up to me to play clean-up crew, and it isn't pretty. Truthfully, she doesn't owe me anything, and if I can't get her to where she needs to be to be a consistent riding horse, then she'll be retired to broodie and trail duty. There isn't anything that she has to do for me in order to earn her keep. Just being who she is is enough for me.

A few of the things we've been up to this past month:











Also, systematically destroying flymasks. She is very good at that.

A few shreds at first...




... to the full Phantom of the Opera.




No more nice Cashel masks for you mare... this is the fourth one you have destroyed this summer!! She wore the one Gogo had for FIVE YEARS for three days and completely ruined it. She also blew through a Quiet Ride mask and now TWO more regular Cashel masks, one with ears and one without... fail! I hear Horseman's has super cheap masks with durable mesh... gonna have to check them out for sure.

We'll see how the massage worked!

Fixer-Upper

Phew... it feels good to have things that desperately needed to be addressed actually get addressed, doesn't it? After waiting on the dentist's backed up new client list for over three weeks, Pangea was finally able to be seen and worked on. It was worth the wait... and worth the mucho $$$$$$$ that it cost!

As a horse owner and professional, I would say I know a fair bit more than your average horse owner about dentistry. With a brief refresher, I could name every tooth in a horse's mouth by number and quadrant. I can recognize pathologies visually from the outside as well as the inside of a horse's mouth, I can evaluate my dentist for exactly the things that I want to have worked on, and I can tell whether or not I've been duped by someone who is floating my horse's teeth. Everything my dentist had to say about my horse's mouth and issues aligned exactly with what I expected to hear, and the way she handled her speculum and tools made me very happy. She only opened the speculum for as long as she needed to to get in and out for each particular part of the adjustment, and then she shut it and let Pangea's TMJ relax. (If your dentist makes your horse sit with a fully opened speculum in her mouth for any lengthy period of time, run away and get a new dentist!!) She also worked for part of the time while kneeling, which was great for Pangea as she didn't have to crank her head up to the ceiling and stress out her already unhappy TMJ and atlas/axis. She did, unfortunately, have to be sedated THREE times during the procedure... she kept waking up! (Just like her daddy, that one... we had to cocktail the crap out of him repeatedly during every procedure we ever had to do with him. Gogo, on the other hand, was a classic lightweight and would be swaying on her feet with less than a quarter of the drugs needed to quiet horses twice her size. Cheap date.)

Pangea had some pretty obvious TMJ issues going on, which I suspected and discussed in my dental post a few weeks ago. Her left temporalis muscle - the big lumpy one - corresponded to the fact that she had actually been floated sometime in the recent past... but the whackadoo that did her left her entire right molar arcade completely out of occlusion save for one single molar in the back of her mouth that was eternally too high and damaging the opposing lower molar! She was working overtime to make the rest of those teeth touch, and she couldn't. The left side of her mouth had just enough occlusion and sharp points on the edges of her molars that pieces of her cheek were slipping inbetween them and getting torn up pretty badly. (Hmm, wonder why she was having trouble with left bend.) Her incisors, unlike her over-floated molars, were at far too steep of an angle and had been completely untouched by the previous dentist. When chewing, she had no free-floating motion of her mandible (which they need for oral health), so her incisors were receiving uneven wear and actually had something of a ventral smile to them. No bueno!



Drugged and standing quietly with a closed speculum.... no unnecessary cranking open here!



Molar adjustments. Taking away the sharp hooks and working out two molars that were totally missed by the last guy and were standing WAY too tall compared to all her other teeth!



Incisor adjustment.



She is chewing SO much better now!

Unfortunately, I have not been back on her to see how she feels under saddle. The weather has completely failed me in the fact that it suddenly out of nowhere became 100F every day with unusually blazing humidity, and Pangea is suffering for it. She is lathered in sweat every day when I go out to see her, and she is losing weight. We've also had several huge rainstorms offset by some desperately dry weather, and her feet are struggling to keep up with the changes. She is exceedingly footsore on any type of terrain that isn't her paddock (nice sandy loam), and it is to the point that it is negatively affecting her body. On top of all of that, she needs another chiro adjustment - due to the amount of dental work she needed, her entire body is back out of whack again. We're basically at a standstill until we get readjusted and help her feet out. I have a little something up my sleeve for her which I will wait to discuss until we get to try it out, but I'm hoping that with a little bit of time off and some general light maintenance and fixing-up, we can get over this little blip in the road and continue on. Everything had been pretty upwards until now, so I think it will only be a short matter of time until things are back to running smoothly again.

This heat sucks!!

Dressagin', and Dentals

How can you tell if your horse needs some dental work? Well, I can give you some good pointers:


1) You refer to her as Ol' Ironmouth when doing your dressage work (i.e. she hangs on the bridle, she has difficulty maintaining bend)

2) Giant asymmetrical temporalis muscles on her forehead, indicating that she tends to chew more up and down as opposed to properly chewing side to side:




3) Oh, and this:




Chalk that one up as a big DUH for me. I've peeked in there before, and I KNOW how important dental work is to the entire biomechanical machine that is the horse, but I also weighted the prepurchase vet's opinion on this ("no abnormal findings") as one of those "well, I should get that done soon" things, but not as one of paramount importance. Of course, it occurred to me that I should probably check again when going over my checklist of reasons-why-your-horse-might-be-hanging-on-you, and was relatively alarmed by what I found. Well of COURSE she's hanging on the bridle, wouldn't you too? To go along with those honking temporalis muscles and those daggers on her third incisors, her incisors don't quite line up evenly when you look at them from the front - which means we have a probable TMJ issue going on. They're actually pretty common, but they suck to correct. The dental specialist is already scheduled to come out the morning of the 29th, so hopefully we can get this straightened out, quite literally!



In other extremely related news, here's some video of Pangea and I schooling dressage yesterday!



Thank you Future Hubs for being nice enough to let me drag him out to the barn to take some video for me even though it was 90 degrees outside. Thankfully, Pangea is adjusting well to the increase in temperature, and is getting fitter and fitter as time goes on.

You can see what I mean about the hangy-ness. She's not always hanging, but she likes to break at the 3rd vertebrae and bear down on my hands, which effectively disengages her hind end and lets it trail out a mile behind her. Those are the moments when I feel that I don't have the left hind under my control anymore. I think it's a rather complicated number of small things adding up: hocks, teeth, front feet.

First problem: Her feet are still mid-transition, and while they are a WORLD better than they were, they are still far from perfect and not only are her soles still far too thin at the toe, but the back of her foot still has beefing up to do. That, of course, negatively effects her on anything but good soft footing. You know what that means.... it's time for some boots and pads!

Second problem: Teeth issues. We'll have a better idea of what exactly is going on when the dentist looks at her. When her teeth are uncomfortable, she bears down on the bit and hangs, which lets her hind end drag out behind her. Which leads us to...

Third problem: Hocks/stifles. This is where everything adds up to create the big picture. If her hocks and stifles, which have some arthritic issues, are bothering her in any way, then she naturally won't want to push from behind, and will hang in the bridle in an effort to disengage herself. If she is pounding away on her front end because her hind end hurts, then it will make her front feet increasingly sore. If her front feet bother her and she weights her back end in an effort to lighten the load up front, it can make her hocks and stifles sore.

All of these things need assessment. Her teeth will be checked by the specialist, boots and pads will be ordered, and we'll be discussing a plan for joint care with my vet. I decided to start conservatively with the joints, like I always do, and have had her on Cosequin ASU from the get-go. She of course needs Adequan additional to this, which is the next step from here on out, but I wanted to see how much the Cosequin would help her by itself (and it did, quite a bit). If all else fails and teeth/boots/chiro/bodywork/joint supplements still aren't giving her what she needs, we'll probably be looking at injections. Sure, she looks pretty ok in this dressage video, but she starts out feeling like garbage and with a total flat tire on the left hind. If you look for it, you can see it in the video too, although greatly diminished.


She is getting on in age, after all.... 16 years old, if you can believe that. (I would never call a 16 year old horse OLD, but she is aging, albeit rather gracefully!) I had to check her papers just now to see when her birthday was, and it was on May 15th... dangit I missed it! I'll have to make that one up to her!