Friday, October 2, 2009

bad news from the vet today

The vet came out today and didn't have good news for me. Gypsy is in fact in pain, she has laminitis which is a problem with her hooves. http://www.laminitis.org/laminitis.html

i've been told to not ride her for at least a month or untill spring. She needs to be kept in her stall at night, which she hates and she can't be moving around much.



So this is where Gypsy will be spending a lot of her time.

The vet gave me a ton of meds to give her too. i think she is going to hate me by the end of this. i feel bad but i have to cram all sorts of yucky tasting meds into her. She gets 8 pills of one thing twice a day, 9 pills of something else twice a day and 2 little scoops of powder twice a day.



This is all the meds i got today. i'm a bit overwhelmed by it all. i never realized how hard it is to get a horse to take a pill. Since tonight was the first time i've ever given a horse meds like this i think i did ok. i crushed up all the pills and mixed them with apple sauce and used a syringe to get it all into her. She didn't like it. Then for the powder or Bute (which is a horsey pain med), i mixed that into what little feed she can eat. She didn't like that either. i now have to soak her hay for an hour, which is a huge pain in the ass. Tonight i soaked it in a rubber maid tub loose. i learned my lesson about that, it's very hard to get soaking wet hay moved to where i need it to get it. Next time, aka tomorrow morning, i'll be using a hay net to hold the hay in place and THEN soak it.



This is my new hay soaking bin. The round thing holding the hay under water is a press from an apple cider press that we never use and since i kept tripping over it today and found out how heavy it was, i knew it would be perfect for this. The hay needs to be soaked in order to get some of the sugars out of it since sugars can make her condition worse.


So i have a lot of work ahead of me for a while and Gypsy and i will not be happy with each other for a while.


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