The Thot Plickens

Eposide I: The Queen is Not Amused

After my initial meeting with Dr. Fischer (for which I paid $175 just for the pleasure of his company), I had lingering questions. Questions that burned in the back of my head and kept me from sleeping, mostly because I knew that attempting to call Dr. Fischer and ask these questions would be an exercise in frustration. I might as well save the call and bang my head against the wall instead - the results would be the same.

By Friday morning, Tina had the same questions as me, and recommended we get a second opinion. There is a vet down south, in Escondido who has done miraculous things with lameness in horses, so we set up an appointment with him for March 18. In the meantime, I called the equine hospital to get a copy of Snoopy's medical records. When the office found out I never got a copy of his discharge papers, they had the blonde intern email them to me. In her email, she said if I had any questions, to contact them. It was the typical "if there's anything else we can do" company line.

That's when I learned her name: Antje. I also learned her email address. This came in handy. On Sunday, I had an idea. I sent the following email:

"Dear Antje,
Thank you for the discharge papers. Yes, after mulling it all over, I have tons of questions.

1. We have been handwalking Snoopy since August. Another 60 days of "more of the same" does not sound like we will improve anything, does it?
2. Couldn't Snoopy's x-rays from the initial break, through the last series, be evaluated and compared to see how much (if any) the angle of the pastern has changed? If I could see that, for example, his pastern was lower and now it's getting higher, I'd have a lot more faith in the therapy, knowing that he's on the mend, but it will take a little longer.
3. Only walking was discussed as a cure for his problem. Is there no other physical therapy to be considered? Stretching exercises? Anti-inflammatories? Ice?

I'm frankly getting frustrated, not that it is any fault of the hospital. Dr. Fischer is a good surgeon and I am satisfied with Snoopy's surgery. However, I am having a hard time getting a local vet (apart from Dr. Murphy) to become engaged in Snoopy's recovery. After our appointment on Thursday, I had time to think and consider the questions above; however, my inability to access anyone with expertise to answer my questions frustrates me. My phone calls to Dr. Fischer go unreturned, so I clearly cannot seek out his advice.

I plan to be as pro-active for my horse's recovery as my wallet can afford. My next step will be to contact UC Davis' equine program to see if they can give me any other ideas.

Thanks again,..."

Antje replied, rather quickly, that she'd talk to the good doctor about my concerns on Monday.

Episode II, Where Gayle Gets a Rise Out of the Doctor

I expected a phone call, maybe on Monday, but maybe not for another week, since Dr. Fischer did not have a good track record with me and the telephone. Amazingly, I got another email later Sunday evening:

"Gayle,
Dr. Hinz forwarded me your email. I had assumed that the communications were being handled by the referring DVM's. They had sent us the films and we called them and I assumed that you were informed. Obviously, something broke down. The issue is not your horse's pastern angle but the fetlock.
Why don't you call my cell phone at <***> after 8:30 tomorrow if you have further questions and I can try to answer them. Alternatively, email works for me but it can be hard to make sure that everyone is understanding everything.
Ted Fischer"

Holy smokes, it's the great and powerful Oz himself!

I sent him the following reply: "Thanks. I'll call tomorrow. Pastern or fetlock, my questions are the same."

Episode III: Making the Call

I called around 8:45 on Monday and got the doctor on the phone. We talked for almost an hour. According to him: 1) he and Dr. Murphy did try to compare previous x-rays, but couldn't find one with a comparable angle; 2) there is no drug or treatment other than time to heal a suspensory ligament; 3) there was no earthly reason for us to have to sedate Snoopy in order to walk him, and 4) while very sorry about the breakdown in communication, there was no way it was his fault.

I couldn't argue with 1 & 2, but we had a rather lively discussion about 3, where I kept repeating, "He's five years old and he hasn't been able to run free for ten months," and he kept giving me examples of psycho race horses who didn't need sedation to be handwalked. I don't care what he says, either he hasn't truly seen a "psycho race horse" or he thinks it's normal for a horse being handwalked to need four people keeping it from floating away like one of those Macy's Day Parade balloons.

As to his 4th topic, I explained to him what it looked like on my end of our tin-cans-with-string: Dr. Pollard takes x-rays and says we'll know what our next step is when Dr. Fischer reviews the films. I wait a couple of days and call, but Dr. Fischer doesn't call me back. After another week and another call, I tearfully explain it all to Dr. Murphy, who drives to the hospital, x-rays in hand, and hunts the doctor down to get our next step. By then, our 60-day rehab has turned into 75.

He still wasn't willing to concede fault, but he said he was certain our communications problems were behind us. They should be. I have his email address and his cell phone.

Epilogue: What next?

Half of me wants to believe he is correct, that walking will put Snoopy back on track. Half of me still wants that second opinion. So today, I emailed Dr. John Snyder of the UC Davis Large Animal Hospital, Equine Department. I explained Snoopy's injury as briefly as possible and asked if he would be willing (for a fee, naturally) to examine Snoop's medical records and see if he concurs, or if he'd like to see my horse for more tests.

I'm sure I'll have to auction off my organs to pay for any tests/treatment from UC Davis, but if I can return my horse to good health, it will be worth it.

Stay tuned for The Return of the Frustrated, Bitchy, Yet Proactive Horse Owner.

The good, the bad and the ugly

First, the bad news: frustrated by Snoopy's inability to trot without a pronounced limp, we scheduled an appointment with the doctor to have him evaluated. Pam at the Chino Valley Equine Hospital could not be nicer to deal with and set us up with an appointment with Dr. Fischer right away.

I have a love-hate relationship with Dr. Fischer, although I'm certain he's unaware of it. Surgically, he did a wonderful job of repairing Snoop's broken sesamoid. As far as communications go, however, he is a black hole of response. I cannot get him to call me back, even when I leave the most dire of messages. Every time I need an answer, Dr. Murphy has to chase him down for me. Before yesterday, I had never even seen him "in de flesh".

After giving Snoop a significant dose of his favorite cocktail, Tina, Niki and I walked him down to the hospital (the ranch is located maybe two blocks away). We stuck Snoopy in an outside pen then went inside to wait for Dr. Fischer. True to form, he walked into the office without acknowledging us, then walked out, then walked in... you get the picture.

Suddenly, I look outside at the Snoop and see one of the interns (the young blonde girl with a German accent whose name I can never get right) go into the pen with him, so I went outside to join them. Good thing I was watching my horse!

"I haven't seen Snoopy in a long time," she said. "Why are we seeing him today?"

"It's been ten months and he's still not trotting," I told her.

She turned him around in the stall. "Well, he seems to be walking just fine."

At that moment, Niki walked up.

"Oh, he walks fine," I said. "But his trot is... no good."

It was not quite the precise and detailed explanation I had hoped Tina or Niki would give the doctor, but Niki laughed and told me it was exactly right. His trot is no good. Tina and Dr. Fischer appeared at that point, along with another intern. The doctors all took turns poking and prodding his back pasterns, then discussing what they felt. Then they took him onto the dirt and trotted him. Apart from failing the sobriety test (he couldn't trot in a straight line), he wouldn't reach underneath himself with that left foot, although he didn't mind putting weight on it.

Then came the x-rays, then more x-rays, then an ultrasound. It all took a long time, so Tina and Niki had to go back to the ranch to teach their lessons. The hospital staff wouldn't let me into the x-ray room, so all I could hear was some general stomping about. With all of the waiting, he had started to mouth Tony, the guy holding him, which was a sign that the tranquilizer was wearing off. By the time we got to ultrasound, Snoopy was awake.

I'd like you to take a look at the picture:

Tony is holding Snoopy. We are in the hallway between the offices and the examination rooms. I don't know why, but that's where the doctor wanted to do the ultrasound. Just beyond Snoopy's nose is a ficus tree. It was a general recipe for chaos.

Snoopy wanted to eat the ficus. Failing that, he wanted to chew on Tony. When Tony objected, he tried to play with the handle on the door. He certainly did not want to stand still and have a gooey object run up and down the back of his pastern. They picked up his front foot to keep his back foot down. There was more general wiggling, after which he yanked his foot away from the blonde intern, stretched out and peed in the doorway. That settled him down for about a minute.

"I will need to sedate him," the blonde told me, "if I ever want to get this done today."

They did 'get it done today'. There was more discussion between the doctors that I couldn't decipher - were they saying they knew what was wrong or were they clueless? At least, Brigid (Dr. Murphy) showed up. I knew she could translate for me, if need be. Finally, Dr. Fischer asked me to go wait in the office and he'd explain all.

He showed Brigid and me the x-rays, comparing both hind legs. There was a marked difference in the angles of both pasterns. According to Dr. Fischer, the reason for this is a stretched suspensory ligament - basically, it's tendonitis. He doesn't believe it happened during the injury, but most likely was the result of Snoopy straining to compensate while he moved about during his recuperation. I'm wondering if that little episode of getting his cast stuck in the stall door may have started the whole thing.

The good news is that it's still recoverable, although it may be a long road. Stretched suspensory ligaments typically take a good 6-8 months to heal, and we don't know how long this thing has been stretched out. We're supposed to give him 60 days of physical therapy and then go back for another ultrasound to see where we are on the healing curve. Dr. Fischer wouldn't, of course, guarantee that Snoopy will return to complete soundness, but I'm hoping he's young enough to bounce back. I'm also happy to report Dr. Fischer is a lot nicer in person. Apparently, he just doesn't like to talk on the phone.

The ugly news? Physical therapy for tendonitis is walking. More walking, 30-45 minutes a day. More of the boring sameness that we've been doing for the past 6 months. Tina could weep.

Oh, yeah, and the 'evaluation' cost me nearly $700.

Hope, we must have hope

Dr. Murphy still thinks that Snoopy is progressing, even if all we can do is walk him. She says (rightly so) that his left side had atrophied quite a bit. He needs to both rebuild the muscles and re-gain flexibility.

As Brigid says, "I'd like to see his butt cheeks look more even before we start trotting."

According to her, we're a long way from calling him permanently disabled. So we're walking him every day and having chiropractic adjustments and keeping our hopes high.

After all, what else is there for us to do at this point?

Slooowwww Progress

The arena is dry now, and we've gone back to walking Snoopy. Tina tried walking, then trotting, then walking Snoop, but he is sore after he trots, so Dr. Murphy has advised her to just walk him for a couple of weeks. We're also getting the chiropractor involved, but Tina is starting to sound discouraged and wondering if we should have some scans done of the entire hip/leg/foot. She thinks the break is healed, but perhaps his movement while he wore the cast, coupled with the months of inactivity, has tweaked some other piece of the puzzle.

In the meantime, they found a better tranquilizer to make Snoopy easier to walk. Can you blame him? He's five years old and hasn't been able to run and jump and buck since last May. I feel so sorry for him, having to be doped up just to walk around, but he's hard to control if you don't give him something. And Ace seems to make him less calm and more hyper.

I'd just like to have my horse back again. It's still impossible for me to think that he might not come back and I'll have a lawn ornament for the next 15-20 years.

We wish you a Merry Christmas - and Snoopy does, too!

I just wanted to write a quick note to let everyone know that Snoopy has been progressing well. Tina and Dr. Murphy have decided that perhaps Dr. Fischer is a rather secondary character in Snoopy's rehabilitation and shouldn't be constantly queried unless Snoop has an astounding setback. Something we'd all rather not have happen. Dr. Murphy believes, since the x-rays continue to look good, that Snoopy's left hind leg and hip muscles are simply atrophied from the months of non-use, and we must re-build them slowly.

Tina and Niki are trying a new exercise regime for him (with Dr. Murphy's blessing). They "pony" him with the golf cart. Every day, they put a flake of hay in the back and Tina sits, holding the lead rope, while Niki drives around the large arena. Snoopy follows behind, eating. They speed up slightly for brief moments of trotting, then walk. They had built up to 20 minutes a day before the rains hit.

If you don't live in southern California, that last statement means nothing to you, but we have had two days of continual rain, and by "continual" I mean I didn't know the sky could contain that much water. The arenas are now, of course, completely soggy and unable to be traversed by man or beast. The rain is now gone for awhile, but if we don't get sunny skies and either warm temperatures or brisk winds, the ground will not dry very soon. This puts a crimp into the Snoopy rehab schedule.

Once it dries out, I'll take some pictures and post them. In the meantime, check out our Christmas picture for the latest look at Snoopy. Believe it or not, he was the best behaved animal in the shot!

Six months, a year... it's all the same to the vet

So much has happened in two months, and yet so little...

After Snoopy's bout of colic, he went back to exercise, and promptly started limping. The doctor was again called out, more x-rays were taken and we all held our breaths. Dr. Pollard said the plate and screws looked good, but we'd have to wait for Dr. Fischer to make the final call.

(Insert sound of crickets chirping.)

Dr. Fischer is, I'm sure, a wonderful surgeon. Unfortunately, he has the manners of a monkey. He's spoken to me exactly once, when he referred to Snoopy as "it". Not a warm, fuzzy feeling. Mostly, our communication is via Bridget (Dr. Murphy), who chases him down, x-rays in hand, and hounds him until he looks at the pictures and gives her a diagnosis. Bridget found out that Dr. Fischer wanted Snoopy to walk, on flat surfaces only, for 45 days. Then more x-rays.

Great.

In the meantime, Tina thought it would be a good idea to wear Snoopy down a little before trying to put him on the hot walker by tying him out to our Patience Tree. It's a large tree by the roundpen, where we tie the horses to teach them to stand still. Snoopy had other plans. He found the only large bolt sticking out of the roundpen and rubbed his neck. By rubbed, I mean he scraped himself up and down until he wore a big gash in his neck. Tina tried to butterfly it together, but it needed stitches, so the doctor was called again. This time, Dr. Wasserman came out - she's the one who inseminated Frostie. I call her the Fertility Goddess, which she really gets a kick out of. Four or five stitches and another vet bill later, and Snoopy was still walking on the hot walker, although we had given up on the Patience Tree. I must point out that no other horse before or since has managed to find that bolt and injure themselves. Only Snoopy could do that!

Snoopy managed to walk on the walker pretty quietly, until one Wednesday, when he decided enough was enough. I was just about to give a lesson, when I saw him rip himself off the hot walker. Fortunately, my student hadn't mounted the horse yet, so we waited while Niki caught my big, black baby. First, he galloped straight up the hill toward the paddocks. The workers, Umberto and Raoul, tried to corner him, but he escaped and started to run down the hill. Then, he saw Niki coming up the hill with a lead rope in her hand. He stopped so hard, he sat down and slid, like a reiner. All I could do was watch and think, "Not the foot! Not the foot!"

Amazingly, he was no worse for wear. We decided not to try the hot walker anymore, so now Snoopy goes to the top of the hill everyday and wanders around in the large pipe stall. He likes it, so he walks up and back pretty quietly.

When Dr. Fisher looked at his x-rays, he told Bridget that he's known horses to take a year to come back from this kind of injury. Back in April, he told us it would be a six month recovery. I guess he can't tell time.

If it ain't one thing, it's another

Via the miracle of Ace and lip chains, Snoopy has been hand-walked every day since the end of August. Dr. Pollard came out the first week of October and took more x-rays. He was very happy with the pictures - the plate was still straight, the screws still unbroken.

The following Tuesday, Snoopy had his first workout on the longe line. Tina didn't tell me she was going to do this, which was just as well. I wouldn't have been able to breathe for an hour, whether I was there to witness it or not. She called and told me what had happened after the fact.

First, Tina gave him a big fat dose of Ace (5 times the normal dose), then put him on the line in the bullpen. He acted like a typical 4-year old who's been standing in a stall for five months - trying to buck and kick and run. Which is not what she wanted him to do, so she decided to make him too interested in his surroundings to try to act like a crazy horse. She took him to the trail course and had him (still on the line) walking, then jogging, then loping over poles. By the end of it all, he was loping the wheel, both directions, until he had worked up a sweat. He loves the poles, and seemed to enjoy going over them, head down, looking for the next one.

Today, Tina repeated the exercise, except without the Ace. Snoopy was so good, she thought that she might try riding him tomorrow...

Then the other shoe dropped, so to speak.

When I went in to the ranch, I made up Snoopy's bag of A&M and garlic and walked to his stall. He was lying down, but got up and nosed around his goodies. I got my lesson gear ready, then went back to see him. He was lying down again. I expressed my concerns to Tina, who felt like being optimistic.

"No, he's okay. See, he's coming over to the stall door."

"But he's not trying to eat you." This has become the barometer for how Snoopy is feeling. If he's trying to eat you, he's healthy.

After the third time he laid down, Tina admitted he was trying to colic. She called Brigid Murphy, who scampered right out to stick tubing down Snoop's nose and pump him full of oil. He rebounded almost immediately, and was back to trying to nibble on everyone within reach.

Forget the fruit basket - I owe that woman a kidney.