Quality time

As frustrating as it is to be out of the saddle, my mare and I have had a lot of quality time over the last couple of days.  Since she got sick on a weekend (no surprise there), her blood work could not be started until Monday.  That means Wednesday is the earliest possible day for any results.  Despite the fact that she's bounced back and looks as good as ever, she's still on quarantine until we know exactly what happened.  This means a lot of time spent caring for her since it's easier to hold a quarantine when the person taking care of her doesn't touch any other horses.  That means someone that's not staff.  That means me waking up at six in the morning to go take care of her before work, and sometimes going in to take care of her after work.  Thank goodness her junior rider is picking up some of the shifts with her.

Our time starts with taking off her wraps.  Edema has been a major problem, between actually being sick and being on stall rest.  However, twice a day cold hosing and constant wrapping has resulted in some legs that look really good.

If her legs look poofy, she gets cold hosed for 20 minutes or so.  After her legs are deemed fit, we go for a walk.  Hand walking Fiona is quite an experience.  She's probably over fit for a novice horse, so imagine a horse that's fit enough to go around training happily suddenly having nothing to do all day.  Yes, that's my mare right now.  I'm so, so grateful for that first winter when I spent so much time doing ground work.  She has excellent manners so she's easy to handle even when she's on edge and just wants to go!  I'm also grateful that she's spent so much time with traffic.  When you have a mare that's not supposed to be around other horses and is starting to get a bit stall crazy, you find yourself power walking down a lot of roads.

I'm wheezing long before she is.  We go out for at least twenty minutes of power walking and she's getting walked twice a day.  But at least it's in Hollis, so we get a lot of lovely scenery.

Once we're back, it's a brief stint in turn out while I clean her stall.  Once her stall is clean, I refill the hay net, take care of her water, and then start prepping her meds.  She's getting bio sponge twice a day, doxy twice a day, and pro bios in the mornings to make sure her stomach doesn't get upset again.  The doxy and pro bios are easy, just toss them on her food.  The bio sponge has to be mixed with water and dosed with a syringe because it is nasty.  It smells terrible, even when I tried to hide it in apple sauce.  Fiona was having none of it.

Once she's done eating and everything else is taken care of, the wraps go back on.

It takes about an hour and a half, sometimes two hours to take care of everything.  Her legs have looked really good so she's only getting wraps at night now. We'll see how that goes. 

The princess is ready to get back to work in the worst possible way.  She doesn't understand why we're just walking around when she feels so good and she just wants to get out and do things.  Hopefully the blood work will be back tomorrow showing that she's not infectious and she can get back to her regular routine.  If nothing else, I'm going to be a lot more fit by the time this is over.