Sunday, February 6, 2011

32 days and $800 later...

Boomer is back out with his friends!  I am so happy that he is back to being a regular horse!  

He is still slightly off at the trot, especially on a circle or if he bucks or kicks out.  

The chiropractor adjusted him and spend about an hour and a half working with us.  She was really amazing and explained the process very thoroughly.  I have used a chiropractor for me, and I know that it works.  I am just so glad that we could offer that for Boomer!  

She made about 11 adjustments total.  Several of them were old, up in his neck.  We talked a lot about his history, the flipping over behavior.  We also talked about his left lead and left diagonal preference.  I also made sure to tell her that during dressage work, he tends to refuse to bend at the poll towards the right and I never could get him to foam on the right side of his mouth.  

One thing she found that was very interesting is that his last vertebrae in his neck was out to the right, which would cause his scapula to have a shorter range of motion.  Sure enough, when she picked up his front legs I could see a very big difference in the range of motion for forward and up.  

Of course, she also worked on his pelvis and gave me several stretches to do with him that will help him build strength in the back and flexibility in the front.  

He was not too thrilled with the process and made lots of mean, mad faces at her.  She just kept laughing at him and I was pleasantly surprised at how well she handled him.  He, of course, was feeling particularly like a fire-breathing dragon that day.  

We wanted to put him in a medical turnout paddock at first, but he was too worked up and was running the fence line.  We put him out with his buddies and they ran for a few minutes, Boomer trailing behind. After that, they ate and seem to have calmed down totally.  

So, I think that we did everything about as right as we could have.   In hindsight, I would have skipped the Adequan injection and gotten the chiro out a week earlier.  The chiro was delayed by the blizzards and we did the Adequan on day 2 when we still feared for his ligaments/tendons.  Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.  

I'm just going to let him play and build strength in the pasture for now.  Once the weather changes and snow melts, I will start lunging him again.  Though, we could have a baby by then... So, who knows what will happen next?!

I'm just so happy that Boomer is back out in the pasture.  What a relief!  We may do another chiro adjustment once we start riding again, based on how he feels.  Seriously, I can't believe how much we lucked out in this situation.  What a roller-coaster of a month!

1 comment:

Paint Girl said...

That is great to hear that Boomer is doing so well. We use chiro a lot on the horses at work. It does really seem to help. Of course I use chiro a lot on myself with my back issues.