Drama King

On Friday, my trainer was lunging Fawkes over some jumps, which included a small picket fence.  Apparently at one point in time, he stopped in front of it and then tried to step over and ended up banging his right hind leg on it pretty hard.

She checked him over and besides a couple scrapes he seemed fine, and he moved off sound.  I rode him that night and he was 100% fine, actually really good.

Care to guess where this is headed?

Saturday morning I was supposed to have a riding lesson so I arrived at the barn early, just as a small blizzard was starting to move in, and went to get Fawkes.  The 3 inches of snow that fell overnight were undisturbed in his run, showing he hadn't been out to get water in awhile, but that isn't overly surprising.

I put his halter on and tried to lead him from his run.  His response?  To throw his head up and refuse to move.  I clucked and he jumped out into the snow, dead lame.  Forget 3 legged lame.  He couldn't figure out which hind leg  to limp off of so he sort of hopped around in back and alternated which leg he held off the ground.  You would have thought he had two broken legs and several severed tendons.  I tried for 15 minutes to get him to walk and he would spin around on his hind legs but would not move forward.  He had some swelling on the right hind, but nothing awful looking.

Trainer R came out and had to resort to some serious tough love (including some snow puffs thrown by me) to get him into the barn.  By the time we got him inside, it was nearly an hour after I arrived, it was getting colder and snowing harder, and I was ready to trade my big baby of an equine in for the real thing.  Trainer R was very glad I had ridden him the night before because she said otherwise she would have been panicked that something was seriously wrong with him.

Don't pity this face

After dragging him around the arena a couple times, he was totally fine.  The swelling in the leg worked out and he was happily plodding around.  We gave him bute and antibiotics to play it safe, but this isn't my first experience where Fawkes determines his death is nigh and plays the fool, so I wasn't overly worried.

I haven't been able to ride since then through scheduling issues and continuing crap weather, but he is all healed.  Maybe I can squeeze  ride in tomorrow.

Also, I was calling him princess horse but my riding buddies determined that girls deal with pain much better than Fawkes does, so we shouldn't grace him with female pronouns.  So Drama King it is!