The saga of the crazy pinto filly began here.
File Part II under Anatomy. Mine, that is.
By the time I was 14, I'd done countless miles on the crazy pinto filly. After the ridiculous reach-for-the-sky calamity during the previous summer, I'd become familiar with her wild ways through spill after spill, wreck after wreck. It was always something, me coming off of her, but I was used to it and still just a rubber-bandy kid made invincible by my love for her and my certainty of her love for me. It was all hearts and flowers, always summertime - she could never really hurt me.
Or so I thought. I didn't realize that we humans have a role to play there.
Since the crazy pinto filly was all about flight for me, escape and freedom, I had a routine designed to speed me through grooming and up onto her back. The kid I was back then wanted to ride; I had no inkling that decades later, grooming would become so central and valuable a part of my exchange with horses.
I'd get to the farm where she lived, lead her out of the dusty lot and tie her to a hitching post beside the barn. (I don't know why they had one; she was the only horse there.) A quick skidding of the body brush over her back and flanks, a little comb-out of her mane and tail, and I was done. It rarely occurred to me to pick out her feet. Impatient though I might be, I could get crabby if her white parts were dirty. Groomer or not, I had to get them clean. Resentfully, I would rag-rub away grass stains and dirt, all the while chafing to get underway.
Looking back, of course, I see that grooming could have been a way to reach the filly and maybe help with some of the discontent she manifested by jigging, bolting, rearing, etc., but at the time, through my needy eyes, she could do no wrong, had never done wrong.
There I was one weekday afternoon, a perfect, dry summer day, working at a stubborn grass stain on the filly's left foreleg. As I rubbed at the stain, I planned our ride. We would follow a creek that flowed behind my parents' house, well behind it, and dawdle along the treeline until sunset.
The stain persisted. In a fit of pique, I dragged my rag through the water trough and dropped to my knees in front of the filly. She stepped forward. I felt an impact, knee to face, but what got my attention was the water flowing from my eyes. I couldn't see for the water. A few minutes passed as I waited for my eyes to clear. I remember touching my face here and there.
We didn't end up riding the treeline. I cut the ride short because I felt oddly tired. The walk home from the barn seemed long, and I was drowsy with sun when I walked in the door. My mother sat clicking away at her typewriter, composing her dog newsletter, but she glanced up when she heard the screen door snap shut.
"What have you done to your face?" she barked. "What the bloody hell have you done!" I had no clue. Not until I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw that my nose was canted to the left, laying just flat against my cheek.
That was one rare instance where ignorance was not bliss for me. You should never kneel in front of a horse's leg, rather always keep to the side. Oh, but I learned it that night, learned it forever. I will never forget the sound and the sensation when the E.R. doctor leveraged my nose somewhat back in place with a shiny metal rod that he pulled (rowing-like) with both hands. I will never forget the grinding crunch of his best effort, the one that brought my nose back to the neighborhood, if not back home. That sound outlived my raccoon eyes deep into the summer, and I can loop it over and over, even now.
A recent visitor asked me, after reading about Saxony's X-rays here, if I could put up some pictures of the bottoms of her feet. As it happens, I had snapped a couple of shots a few weeks ago because I was struck by the different colors of her soles. Black soles on the black legs, white soles on the legs with socks. So here you go, June.
These pictures were taken on December 29th and they were the only two that came out in focus.
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| Right Rear |
Conclusion No. 1: I think I may have spent more on her yesterday than I did the day I bought her. It underlined in stark terms how I feel about her. To invest in her is to invest in me, and that's what I'm going to do.
Conclusion No. 2: I should probably change her name to "Stax." Her front ankles look like Roman ruins, stones stacked unevenly, ancient mortar all but vanished.
We took a dozen X-rays, starting at the left front. They were good, clear images. I couldn't help but be startled once again by the delicate architecture with which these creatures are designed. We were looking at a thin tower built of just three bones; to me they seemed ill suited to support the 1,130 pounds standing patiently above them.
Saxony inherited some crookedness between the fetlock and coronet band. Her foreleg pasterns are uneven front to back, though normal in side views. She has really good joint spaces. We X-rayed the naviculars in two views, from above and below, and they're both normal. This is good news. Her right front shows more crookedness than her left, though only her left front shows an offset. Dr. B pondered that a bit.
By the time we had finished up with her front end, I knew it was worth it to me to keep going. I felt determined; I wanted to see all of her. There's no such thing as an imperfect horse, but how imperfect is mine? No, that wasn't the question at all, actually. The question was: what is her normal, and how do I maintain it, support it, help her thrive?
Images of her hind legs, both hooves and hocks, showed normal anatomy in her ankles -- no crookedness or offsets back there -- and two teeny tiny bone spurs in her right hock. Her left hind is the star, the exception that proves the rule, I suppose.
We moved her out before doing the X-rays. Dr. B pointed out a striking improvement in how Saxony goes. She attributed it to the Cosequin ASU.
What does all of this mean to me? We did not take any X-rays of Saxony's heart or mind; they were plain to see. She stood like a statue for all the pictures, let Dr. B place her feet, one by one, just so. Once, she gently lifted my braid between her teeth while I was kneeling beside her right knee, assisting Dr. B. Any of those German muffins around? Just wondering.
My vet, who I trust, has told me there's little I can't do with my mare. There are no arthritic changes other than those two bone spurs. She traced Saxony's right hind hitch (now almost gone) to bracing against the left front crookedness. She doesn't recommend taking her over four-foot jumps or into Grand Prix Dressage. She does recommend trying shoes up front, and she told me to think of them as orthotics. The anatomy in Saxony's ankles causes her to wear her hooves unevenly. Dr. B thinks shoes could help protect her joint spaces from compression and stave off arthritis. We agreed any experiment with shoeing should wait until the spring. My homework now is to think about that, and see if I can find a way to get around my bias against shoes.
I think my other homework is to figure out how I feel about the vulnerability built into my girl. Right now, I feel like it's just reality. I think I'm sobered, but I also think, so what? She's the one.
