Physical

So. A lot of things have changed in the past year. A year ago I was dealing with a degloving injury which pretty much sidelined us for the year.

 This was the picture texted to me by BO.

Thankfully it was just the skin. Still.

 Clipped, cleaned and ready for bandaging

Just as the injury was about healed, Ashke cast himself and kicked it open again. That happened in early August and Ashke has spent all of his time since then with that leg in a BOT quickwrap.

Happened overnight. Pretty sure he cast himself, based on the scraped skin on his face.

Clipped, cleaned and ready for bandaging.

Got some antibiotics from the vet, but otherwise treated it myself.

Back on track Quickwrap

The BOT quickwrap was a life saver. Or at least a leg saver. It reduced the swelling (the scar tissue is pretty thick) and kept him from scratching it open with his other hoof. Because yes, that is a thing. And yelling at him to knock it off doesn't work. Go figure.

After the body work with Tracy in March, his overall movement improved. He is so much more centered and focused through his body. And so much of the emotional turmoil was healed, which was strongly reflected in the how he was moving. I decided to try and ween him off the quickwrap because the additional sweat as we moved toward warmer days was not going to help the scratching thing. I don't want to keep him in them forever. At some point the training wheels have to come off.
For the record, I used both quickwraps on the one leg and they are both torn to shit. The padding is still in one piece, but the outside wrap has holes rubbed in it from him scratching with his other foot. At some point we needed to just pull the wrap (although neither myself or the BO really wanted to) and hope he wouldn't tear the skin open again.

It's been almost two weeks now and he seems to have gotten past the "scratch til the skin breaks open and bleeds" desire he was acting on the last time I tried to take the wrap off. There was a little blood one day when I was out, but it was lower on his pastern, away from the scar tissue, and I figured he did it on something else. Cuz horses. The leg swelled a bit when I first pulled the wrap, since the point of the quickwraps is to keep the blood circulating and to help with wind puffs or stocking up. The swelling went down with exercise and wasn't tender to the touch, so I figured the leg just needed to stop being lazy and make all of the blood circulate properly.

So the leg is better, but he is a bit tight through the right side of his body. I have an appointment in three weeks with Dr D and in the meantime, I just have to do plenty of lateral work to help loosen that side up. J is pretty sure that he needs some accupuncture to rebalance his energy, and I'm sure he needs to have the base of his neck adjusted again. I did some carrot stretches last night and he is very tight there. He will also have his teeth done and we will attempt to clean his sheath.