After three and a half months on stall rest, some of you might be wondering: “How is Beau?”
When this ordeal began, I started chronicling his recovery in my Instagram story. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, or where it would end up, but it wound up being a fun way to keep myself sane during the incredibly frustrating and often demoralizing process of rehabbing a soft tissue injury with your one and only horse. It became a helpful outlet to vent my frustration about winter, to update friends on his progress, and give me a reason to find an amusing, interesting or just plain cute moment in the monotony of months spent hand walking.
(As you can imagine, half of the content is him eating something… there’s just not a lot going on when you can only walk and it’s winter).
But something really cool happened with those 101 stories, looking back on it now. When we’re focused on our horses as athletes, as teammates, those are the pieces we zero in on and that’s what matters. Nothing wrong with that, when you have competition goals and personal progress goals. But our relationships with our horses are so special because they’re not just our athletic partners, they’re also our friends. They become our family. And day after day what I was chronicling was not just his progress, but his personality. He is this incredibly smart, hilarious, annoying, gregarious, hungry and curious creature who I just love dearly and have spent a third of my life caring for.
Beau destroyed three slow feed hay nets in his first week inside. Beau turned the “licky things” into “chewing things.” Beau was tempted to climb out of his window, so it now it is boarded up. Beau made it a daily habit of turning into an equine kite on his way down the hill to the arena, so now he lives next to the arena. No more levitating, the vets said…
Beau happily made “dirt angels” rolling in the indoor on his nightly walks. Beau stood like a champ for the vets and his farrier and still snoozes during his massages and light therapy treatments. He was a saint the first time I sat on him for under saddle walks and most of the time, I don’t even bother with a saddle anymore.
So how is Beau? In summary, he’s an angel. And a hooligan. Some days he’s my unflappable Percheron and some days he’s a wild-eyed Thoroughbred. It just depends on the day and he can be as unpredictable as life with horses is, period. He has special shoes now, and special supplements, special feed, special wraps, and special treatment, the whole nine yards. And yet, I still can’t tell you how he is. I can tell you he still has the same beautiful swinging walk he’s always had, with two hoofprints of over stride and not a single misstep. He’s been that way since day 1, and he’s the same 101 days later…
Then finally, two weeks ago one other member of the unofficial Soft Tissue Injury Support Group joined me on a pilgrimage to Cleveland to finally get some answers to: “How is Beau doing?” I am happy to report that the vet was pleasantly surprised with how the ultrasound looked–the ligament is definitely healing. This is good news, but still doesn’t translate directly into whether he will ever get better. It just means that we’re on the right track. It means I have the green light to keep going with the rehab, however many more months that might take.
So really all I know is that I don’t know, and some way somehow, I have to be ok with that. My inner type-A dressage athlete who likes to plan and prepare and set goals has taken a backseat to being a one-track mind horse nurse who has learned to find joy in the little things. The side-splitting laughter when Beau carries the manure bucket in his mouth or the simple contentment of spending quality time with my sweet friend. I hope that the next update will come sooner than this one did, but in the meantime I will keep walking him, laughing at him, posting videos of him eating snacks, and taking the best care of him that I can–one day at a time, as long as it takes…