Peace of mind

Although Vallu has improved dramatically when looking back and comparing to his initial lameness, there was a constant fear that something was still just not right and as we have given him and his shoulder so much time off that we came to the conclusion that we needed to have him checked over. So off we popped to Oakham Vet Hospital. 

Vallu was lunged on a hard surface, ridden in the arena, lunged in the arena, he had flexion tests done and then even more lunging on a hard surface to really see if we could get anything to react. And of course his shoulder was deemed to be fine by the vets, but his hind legs reacted a little bit. In the end, we decided to have all of his legs scanned and his hocks x-rayed to see what was going on. Even though it felt like it took forever for the vet to look at the scans and x-rays, the result was a lot more positive than I could have ever hoped for. There were some tiny changes that could be seen from the X-rays of the hocks which the vet said that they looked a lot better than he was expecting! And that these changes are more than normal for fourteen, going on fifteen year old advanced dressage horse. From the scans we could see some inflammation of the origin of the suspensory ligaments on the hind legs, which he got injections for.

I was more than pleasantly surprised to have the vet tell me "to be more positive about the outlook" and to "get the horse back in the work that it obviously wants to do"! Vallu was incredibly excited to be doing proper work, as when being ridden the vet wanted to see how he would react to more advance movements and more pressure. Thus Vallu decided to show every move under the sun - flying changes, piaffe as well as taking off with me down the long side! Cheeky pony! :D

We now have four easy days after which we have permission to go back into normal work! I'm so excited for this! It is such a relief to have a vet go 'there's nothing really wrong with this horse' and to carry on with proper work. Obviously the time off to heal his shoulder has worked (alongside the hard work done by my physio), and the only logical thing to do now is to see how it responds to more pressure and more work. Everyone keep their fingers crossed for us?