Don't Look, Mom

Dante has an abscess and needs treatment. Rachelle, I'm posting this in part for you because you're going to have to do this for the next three days. Good luck, girl!

Click on these pictures to enlarge them and get a closer view of the abscess. (If you want to... it's a bit icky.)

Okay, a bit about abscesses: they can be hard to spot. Look how Dante is standing--he might be relaxing if you didn't know that he was standing only this way for a few days. Usually they rest their feet one at a time. Which brings up an issue with lameness--the extra stress on the other legs from never getting a chance to rest. And abscesses are especially tricky, because you can have a horse limping around for weeks, even months, and not know that it's an abscess causing the problem. In this instance we were lucky: the abscess formed and drained within a very short time.

See that flap hanging off the right corner of his hoof? That's where the hoof is peeling away to let the abscess drain. Don't ask yourself how much it must have hurt before the hoof peeled and cracked (unless, indeed, it worked the other way: it peeled and cracked for some other reason and infection formed under it).

Same abscess, different angle. You can see the drainage under the hoof that's hanging off. Because the flap is so large, unless he gets very comfortable over the next few days on his own, we'll have to have the farrier come out and cut off this flap. It hurts him whenever it bumps against anything, kind of a like a hangnail, only multiply the discomfort by about a hundred thousand.

You can see that flap hanging off the side from above.

If you know more about abscesses than I do (likely) or more about their care and treatment, please leave me a comment. I love learning from people!