starting over (again)

I honestly don’t even know where to begin with this post, other than the beginning, so… let’s just rewind a month and a half and talk about everything that’s happened in the last five weeks (and before that, really).

It’s been just over seven months since we moved to my trainer’s barn—six months exactly was actually on my birthday, so that’s a convenient half-year marker—and the amount of progress that Cooper has made in that time is just… I wish I’d been better about keeping up with the regular posts in order to better capture it. He didn’t really know how to bend properly through his body when he moved, he still had a bit of a dysfunctional relationship with the bit, and we had to break everything down to square one and build it back up again, but it was working. We were jumping (occasionally), we went to a show and had a positive learning experience, and my trainer told me that he’s her first Advanced horse reincarnated and that she thinks he has at least Prelim potential.

(I’m not saying I knew it when I bought him, but… I knew it when I bought him. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but as we know, I had a feeling.)

Despite all of that, though, the canter just… wasn’t quite there. Some days we could hold both our leads, but I had to really work for it, and in June we decided that we needed to investigate further. The issue had been there since we moved, and during his initial performance exam, we (in conjunction with our vet) agreed that he needed ten to twelve weeks of proper work to get him stronger and see if it went away, because there really wasn’t anything visibly wrong with him other than that he was big and long-limbed and a bit floppy all around (at the time my trainer liked to describe his coordination as all of his legs coming out of the same hole).

We did our six weeks, and then our eight weeks, and the right lead canter was smooth and controllable and easy to ride, but we just couldn’t keep the left, so reevaluating it was. I jogged him for our vet, she flexed him, blocked him, jogged him again, and then the words that I don’t think any horse person wants to hear—suspensory ligament.

I spent lunchtime on the 4th of July in the barn holding him while he had an ultrasound done on both hind legs. There was some edema in both ligaments, with a small tear (2cm) at the top of the right ligament and compensatory strain in the left. There were already signs of it healing, but also signs that he’s had issues with it chronically, which is just an absolute gut punch (lol*) because I’ve never wanted to put him in this position but we seem to keep winding up here (this just goes to show that you can ride for almost two decades and lease and whatever else, but nothing will ever really prepare you for everything that can go wrong when you actually own a horse) (this is also probably the driver of the SI issues, so… good to finally know that, I guess). The small blessing was that there was no enlargement of the ligament—it may have torn, but it was firmly in the normal range of size, so we weren’t going to be waiting ages for the inflammation to go down.

Unsurprisingly, the result of this was the following: say farewell to the idea of any further competitive season this year (don’t care, I just want him to be better), put him on stall rest until our vet came back in six weeks (with the assistance of allllll the drugs), use a cold laser on his suspensories (and also his stifles and his back), and tack walk him up and down the driveway and the access roads (aka, on hard ground) for thirty minutes a day. The prognosis wasn’t defined at the time—our vet’s comment was “With chronic cases like this, I’ve seen one of two things—we rehab it once and it’s never a problem again, or we rehab it but the horse ends up never being quite right”—which is obviously not enjoyable, but I sat there and committed myself to the fact that I would not be the reason why his rehab wasn’t successful and I would be at the barn every day, and I was.

I was, for twenty-four days straight, and then I got kicked in the ribs on day twenty-five (two weeks ago yesterday) while walking him down to the outdoor to get on for our walk, and that was the end of that.

(*this is why I say lol to the gut punch. It’s not quite accurate, but close enough.)

He’d been an absolute angel the first week, and pretty good for the second, but week three started to get a little dicey. He was starting to throw tantrums under saddle (I know people don’t like that term for horses, but it’s the best way to describe it) and had kicked me in the thigh on two separate occasions while I was attempting to hand-graze him, so I upped the dosage of his sedatives since he’d been on the minimum, but… apparently that wasn’t enough. I’m still not sure what spooked him (I’m guessing a dirt bike or something else that I couldn’t hear), but he ripped the reins out of my hand til I only had them by the buckle, whirled himself around, and nailed me square in the side before he took off bucking across the outdoor.

I don’t even know how to describe what it felt like. I had the air knocked out of me and I knew it hurt, but I didn’t know if it was just because it was in the moment or if something serious had happened. I laid there on my side and told myself that if I couldn’t catch my breath and stand up, I was somehow going to pull my phone out of my back pocket and call my trainer to come down, because someone needed to catch my horse.

After a minute, though, I was able to roll myself onto my back, and then after a bit longer, push myself up to sit, and it hurt but it wasn’t excruciating, so I figured he’d probably cracked a rib, but the least I could do was catch him and walk him back up to the barn (don’t be like me, kids). He honestly made it fairly easy, because as soon as he got to the other end of the arena, he stopped and stared at me (he knows I’m not supposed to be on the ground like that), and then he moseyed his way back over to where I was by the time I was standing and let me grab him. I walked him back up, threw him in his stall, pulled all his tack off, and then walked myself into the indoor to let my trainer know what had happened, because there was no way I’d be able to do his rehab for at least a few days (again, lol).

She sent me off to go get checked out, so I drove myself to Urgent Care (again, kids, don’t be like me) and called my mom on the way to let her know where I was headed and that I probably wouldn’t be making it to my brother and his girlfriend’s housewarming party that evening. She asked if I wanted her and my dad to come meet me so that one of them could drive me, but I said I was fine and could handle it, so she let me go with the instructions to pull over and call them if I started feeling woozy or anything like that (don’t! be! like! me!).

Long story short, I went to Urgent Care, they didn’t see any breaks on the x-rays but the doctor had a bad feeling and sent me to the ER at the hospital branch across the street (my parents met me at this point), the ER let me sit in a room for four hours because my vitals were stable before they finally sent me in for a CT scan, I sat for another hour until the radiologist could look at the scan results, and then all hell broke loose.

It turns out that I drove myself forty-five minutes from the barn to Urgent Care with a displaced rib fracture and a grade 3 liver laceration, so, once again: do. not. be. like. me.

They transferred me down to a trauma unit at the main hospital in town and were very concerned that they would need to do laparoscopic surgery for the liver laceration, but in the end, they just kept me in for observation for two nights, did blood draws every six hours (I fucking hate needles and I cried when they put the IVs in), and sent me home when everything had consistently been tracking as it should (liver enzymes going down, hemoglobin staying stable, etc.). Everyone was very perplexed by the fact that I didn’t ask for any pain meds while I was there, but since the initial impact, I really haven’t been in that much pain. Sneezing and blowing my nose genuinely hurt for a little over a week but at this point my ribs only intermittently ache a bit and, more annoyingly, I’m tiring out so much faster than usual.

I was told four to six weeks of recovery while I was in the trauma unit, but I have my own follow-ups tomorrow and Tuesday so we’ll see what my PCP and the trauma clinic have to say about recovery timeline now that I’m a couple of weeks out. I’d really like to be able to carry things that weigh more than ten pounds again and to not be exhausted literally all the time, but I’m not in a huge hurry to get back on, mostly because I can’t (not for a bad reason, thankfully).

Cooper had his recheck today. Initially we were planning to ultrasound him again and also take films of his hind feet (I am fully convinced that all of this was caused by bad internal angles back there and wanted to get films just for peace of mind), but after he jogged in both the arena and the parking lot, our vet said she wanted him to start trotting the driveway for five minutes every day. My trainer asked if he could have turnout and initially our vet said no unless it was in the hospital pen (six gate panels, it’s basically a stall out in one of the paddocks), to which my trainer said absolutely not, because we both can see him putting a leg through it and none of us need that. She and I both wanted him outside for everybody’s sake, so our vet said that if I wanted to we could take a non-standard approach for sport horses, otherwise known as the racetrack approach: throw him out in a flat paddock for six weeks with no riding and then see what we’ve got.

That was what I opted for (I mean, he is an off-track Thoroughbred), and consequently, we didn’t scan him today. Instead he got some IM dorm, just to make sure that he wouldn’t be a total bronco when he went out, and he was put out in the smallest paddock, where he proceeded to stand very drunkenly at the water trough and stare at the field across the way. I’ll have to ask my trainer for an update tomorrow to see if he’s a little livelier with less drugs in his system (though he is still on reserpine, at least for now). Thankfully he truly does not care about being out by himself and, while I’m sure there will be some silliness, I genuinely feel that for his sake (and my trainer’s, and mine), this is going to be better for his recovery than being stuck in his stall for twenty-three hours a day.

We’ll most likely scan him again and get the films in six weeks when our vet is back, but for now he gets to spend some time with Dr. Green while I work my own way back to being able to do things. He needs stifle rehab as well, so that will come in with the next phase (he’s just so loose), but for now he gets to be out and move and hopefully return to being my overgrown golden retriever. Our vet did tell me that doing it this way will probably lengthen his rehab by a couple of months, but as I told her, I’d already accepted that we just weren’t going to be doing much of anything other than rehab work until the spring, so it makes no difference to me if he’s cleared to go back to full work in March as opposed to January (I’m making those months up, our timeline is fluid), especially since I’m down for the count one way or another.

This way, when he’s ready to be back under saddle, I’ll (hopefully) be ready to get back on him (although my trainer told me she’s doing the first few rides just to make sure he’ll behave for me), he’ll be happier, and I’ll be able to be 100% in on his rehab again. I’m hoping that this will just be a blip on the radar for us, but even if it isn’t, he’s stuck with me, so we’ll see how this all shakes out. I never really wanted to go above Training anyway (though I’ve always said I’ll go as far as he takes me and my brain will allow), so while I don’t want this to lessen his potential, it’s not like I was hoping to run Intermediate on him one day. I wasn’t sure if I was going to talk about any of this before we were months out and knew more solidly where he was going to end up recovery-wise, but this has been really difficult for me on a psychological level, and obviously for him as well, so here we are.

(I was laughing to myself when I first found out about the tear that it’s a good thing that I haven’t bought a house yet, because on the off chance that he ends up being a pasture pet (which currently seems very unlikely, at least at this stage in his life) I’m going to need to find property with land so he can live in my backyard. It’s probably not going to work out that way for at least another decade and a half, but he’s not going anywhere as long as he can be happy and comfortable stuffing his face. That was the commitment that I made when I bought him and I’m sticking with it.)

There likely won’t be much to update on until his next recheck (probably sometime around the end of September), but if there is, I’ll share it. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll feel comfortable getting on our treadmill to start walking for a couple more weeks and then running to get some fitness back before I try to get on any horse again, but I’ll let my body tell me what to do for this one. So much for me never having broken a bone.