Status: No Change

So far so good. Scarlet is still up, eating and able to walk around. In fact, he was in better spirits this weekend than Thursday or Friday. Of course, this could be me wanting to see that but I also didn’t see any sort of decline in his physical abilities.

As I thought, I definitely roller coaster-ed through emotions over this. Thursday and Friday had me a weepy, distracted mess for most of the day. It was really easy to fall into that bad “what if spiral”. There wasn’t anything backing up the bad thoughts, just me panicking.

I’ve been going out to check on Scarlet morning and night. I’m very grateful that I’m only a few minutes away from the barn as it makes this easy. No two hours of extra driving for me. In order to keep myself from freaking out every time I saw him, I started taking a ridiculous amount of pictures and videos of us walking. I’m not as objective as I need to be with this.

Scarlet is still roughly the same. He can still walk and move around. I can even pick out his feet, though I do them very quickly and make sure to not ask him to lift when his legs aren’t in a position to support him. We’re doing a ten minute walk each morning. I’ve noticed that it is easier for him to walk on hard ground. The soft ground moves underneath him and he can’t really compensate for that shift. So we’ve been sticking to the hard ground around the barn.

Still able to get down and back up from rolling

I’ve been trying to make sure I do whatever I can to help him out while we wait for the results of the blood tests. I noticed that he was having issues walking out of the stall since the opening has a bar across it. So I dragged a stall mat over. It’s still a bit of step to get onto the stall mat but he seems much more comfortable with it.

He’s also getting a little spoiled. It’s only been a week but he’s already starting to expect treats all the time. He’s been nudging at my gloves the entire time we are walking. Little nudges with his lip like he’s looking for a treat. I stopped to talk to the lady I share a tack room with and update her about Scarlet. He stood for a little and then started shuffling around and pushing me with his head. I’m going to have to deal with such a spoiled boy soon. I’m not even giving him much more treats than he normally got. He just isn’t having to do anything to get them. Normally treats mostly come after steps in our riding process (tacking up, checking the saddle, finished riding, etc). Right now, there isn’t much I can reward him for as I’m not asking much from him.

As far as bad things go, spoiled isn’t really that big of a deal. I’ll work him out of that later. If that’s the later I have to deal with, I will be just fine with it. So we are mostly fine. Definitely still have balance issues. Definitely still need to figure out what to do. Definitely waiting on the edge of my seat for the blood results. But hanging in there.