The past two weeks have been filled with travel and horses. We started out working in Michigan where we did another gastroscopy, and some more lameness exams. In the middle of the week we flew to Minnesota to work up horses there in preparation for a horse show. It was a nice change of pace and scenery. The farm we were working at was very nice and had some pretty scenery. We did a lot of shock wave treatments there, and there was one interesting case. We saw two horses with tendon tears that were around a week old. The one horse reacted painfully to palpation of the tendon, but the other did not react very painfully. The one that was not painful had been injured the week before and another vet came out to examine it. We later found out that the other vet had shock waved the tendon the previous day. We found it interesting that the shock wave treatment made such a distinct difference in the comfort of the horse. The horse reacted to palpation as if the injury was older than it was. The shock wave treatment greatly decreased the amount of pain the horse was in. That was the most interesting case we saw there. I then flew back to Michigan with our equipment, and we started work again Monday of last week. Again, we started the week in Michigan. We did some more lameness exams, and we did one neuro exam on a horse that someone suspected may have EPM. It was interesting to see a different kind of exam, as I am now used to Dr. Hill's lameness routine. We also saw a horse that had several bone chips in one of its hind fetlocks. One chip was within the joint space, and there were two outside of the joint. There were more interesting diagnostic cases later in the week. We went down to Ohio to work at one farm for two days. The first day we did flexion tests on all the horses, and watched them under saddle. Dr. Hill had me flex some of the horses, which made the day go by a bit faster and was a great work out. We treated a few horses that day, and treated the rest the following day. We had seen some of the horses the previous month, so Dr. Hill wanted to do more diagnostics on some based on their flexions. We had treated one and it flexed off on the limb we treated, so we took x-rays of it's fetlock. The x-rays showed some spurring in the joint, which explained its poor flexion. There was another horse that had been lame for some time, and they could not figure out why. Dr. Hill decided to take x-rays on that horse too. We started with it's foot where we found a fracture in its navicular bone. Another interesting case from Ohio was one with a stiff neck. Dr. Hill did some chiropractic work on it, and planned to later inject the horse's neck. Neck injections are ultrasound guided and Dr. Hill scans their necks first to determine where there is arthritis. When scanning this horses neck all the facets appeared to be normal, and because of this Dr. Hill chose not to inject the horse's neck. When he palpated the horse's neck again it was not reactive. The past two weeks were filled with diagnostically interesting cases, and now we are about to head to back to back horse shows. First we'll be in Ohio, then in Kentucky. I'm excited to hit the road for two weeks, and I'm sure we'll see some interesting cases I'll let you all know about!
A torn tendon on ultrasound. The black is the tear.
Bone chip inside the joint space.
The two bone chips outside of the joint.
One view of the fractured navicular bone,
D/P of the fractured navicular bone.
Skyline view of the fractured navicular bone.
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