We are now officially 10 days into Presto’s summer vacation and yeehaw, things are starting to get… fun?

He’s getting wilder by the day, and bringing him up to the barn yesterday for a hose and a fly spray was an actual snortfest. He’s seeing sounds and hearing colors.

The original plan was two weeks completely off and then two weeks of hacking… assuming his wounds from the trailer incident are healed up enough to start hacking this weekend, we’ll stick with that plan. Naturally he popped the stitches out of both of them early last week so that’s just superb. Luckily I was able to get a Regenaflex-M patch from Hilltop Bio, so I put that on there last Thursday. Ideally they want it to stay on for 5-7 days… today would be day 5. At this point Presto has like an entire roll of Elastikon layered on his legs, getting it off is gonna be a real bitch, but I have be determined to keep it on there.

I haven’t used the Regenaflex patches before, but I’ve heard good things about them. My vet thought it was probably overkill considering the wounds aren’t that severe, but ya know… I like overkill sometimes, it makes me feel better about things. The Regenaflex-M patch is made from amniotic tissue, and it’s supposed to help it heal faster and reduce scar tissue and inflammation. It’s a very thin piece of sorta tissue-papery membrane that goes directly on the wound. It can even be stitched in, but in this case I just top dressed with it and then wrapped over top. We’ll see what the wounds look like when the wraps come off.

Presto also got a chiropractic visit, because I was certain he probably had to be all sorts of jacked up from getting high-centered on a chest bar and then falling sideways off the ramp of a trailer. But aside from some soreness around the middle of his back, she said he felt quite good actually.

I took a week off from riding too, because I figured it might be good to just have a bit of a break myself. I had lots of work to catch up on anyway, so having a little more time back wasn’t a bad thing. Since then I’ve been putting in some rides on Henry, mostly just playing around, letting him dolphin to his hearts content and hacking all over the farm.

It’s been quite hot here (not Texas hot, but very hot for us – low to mid 90’s) so I don’t want to do too much with Henry since he doesn’t sweat that great, but I think he’s enjoying getting more attention again.

Mostly things have just been chill around here. Feed horses, clean stalls, medicate horses, try to keep everyone cool and happy… that sort of stuff.

The only other fun thing that happened was that Presto’s FEI paperwork came back.

This is not the final complete version… we actually have to restart his influenza series because I don’t have suitable records to meet the FEI’s very particular criteria for that particular vaccine. Even though he just got that booster in March, I don’t have enough of a documented history to suit their requirements (like… I’d have to track all the way back to his original foal series). Anyway, luckily our chiro vet is also an FEI vet/steward so she knows all the ins and outs of this FEI crap. She looked over everything while she was here and we set up appointments to get his flu vax done (AGAIN) in a way that will satisfy the FEI’s timeline requirements. Once those are done, about a month from now, I can send everything back in to USEF for it’s final approval. What a fun process. Why did I want to do an FEI again?

Hope you guys are staying cool out there!