We are now 3 1/2 weeks post Presto-Trying-To-Jump-Out-Of-A-Parked-Trailer-At-Stable-View, so I figured I’d show you what his lacerations are looking like and how they’re healing. They aren’t bad wound pics by any means, but if you’re squeamish then maybe skip this one.

Some pre-context… The pics labeled week 1 were a week after the original incident. He popped the stitches out of both wounds within the first few days, so we were essentially starting from worse than scratch at that point.

First up, the knee, which was the more minor of the two:

From the week 1 photo to the week 2 photo he wore the Regenaflex-M patches under a wrap. I wish you could tell in the first photo just how deep that chunk of tissue was… had to be a good third of an inch. The hope was that we could get the flap to re-adhere itself, and it did. By the time the Regenaflex-M patch came off, the flap was back down and the tissue had all filled in all the way up to the surface.

And here’s the wound on the inside of his cannon, which was the nastier one:

I was very displeased when he managed to rip those stitches out (even through a wrap… it was impressive). I thought that one would be a real bitch to heal. In the week 2 pic when I took the Regenaflex off, I was shocked to see how much tissue had filled in, but as expected with a wound like that where there had been a big gap between the edges of the skin, you can see that it was really granular.

The day the patches came off was conveniently the day the vet was here to re-start Presto’s flu series for his FEI passport, so she looked at the wounds and recommended a “next step” plan. She was very pleased with how much they’d healed in a short period of time, and said that now we needed to 1) stop the granulation, 2) keep the flies off of them lest they become summer sores. So from the week 2 photo to the week 3 photo we did a few days of a mixed ointment (hydrocortisone and triple antibiotic, which is what she recommends as a basic/simple proud flesh ointment – the steroid will tell the tissue “ok you’ve done enough now” and stop the granulation) and then my trainer said she had some really excellent proud flesh ointment from Rood and Riddle (which was easier than me mixing ointments) so we switched to that. As you can see, it has indeed been excellent. The combination of the Regenaflex patches to fill in the tissue, and then the ointment to help complete the healing… it’s gone really well (knock on wood). It’s way further along at this point than I was expecting.

And here we are now, yesterday, which is 3 1/2 weeks. Day by day there’s noticeable improvement.

We did have to ditch the wraps around the 2 1/2 week mark because the skin on the back of his tendon was getting really irritated underneath (it’s been very warm and humid so I’m not surprised). The challenge was that I still need to keep them covered enough to keep the flies off to prevent summer sores, so I had to get creative. After some experimentation with 9000 different adhesive tapes (swear to god I spent like $70 on TAPES and none of them survived the combination of Presto and Florida) he’s now wearing a fly boot that is gorilla-taped on. He’s only managed to remove the tape once, and I think he’s largely given up now, so we’ll call it a success. Every day I put the ointment on, put the boot on, dump a bunch of medicated baby powder in there, and then tape it up. The knee gets ointment and silver spray, since it’s pretty much healed up aside from hair regrowth.

He looks utterly ridiculous sporting one fly boot everywhere we go (I keep it on when I’m riding to help protect that wound, since it’s on the inside of the leg… it’s still not quite flush enough to put a regular boot on) but I’m ok with that.

Fingers crossed it continues to heal well!

And yes, in that photo he’s got his forelock rolled up in a glove. Why, you may ask? I’ll show you tomorrow…