Ridecamp: [RC] Spurring of the navicular- long, looking for solutions

I have a horse with the worst equine luck I've ever seen. My late husband
bought him for me to work for endurance just before he died and for the kind
of back of the pack, let's finish in one piece riding I like he was perfect.
He's a balady arab with probably something like Welsh Cob in the mix because
he's all of 14'2" but built the the proverbial brick #%*&house. He's
patient, smart, has a go-forever easy trot and the idiocy to try to out trot
a French trotting racer....so he's fun. He's also a horse you can ride on a
trail with a 50 foot wall up on one side and a 30 foot drop on the
other...in the dark, and he's never seen the trail before. His other skill
is finding mobile phones in the desert at night...somehow he's figured out
how to home in on the ring. So Bunduq is a gem.

But...after he'd been with me for three months he slipped on some wet
concrete and suffered a non-displaced fracture of the cannon bone. As the
only vet we have who could put some screws to hold it in place was in
Pennsylvania with a slipped disc, my advice was to put him in a box for
about 6 months and pray. So we did...and he recovered only to step on a 10
cm nail that had been missed in the cleaning of his bedding...same leg. This
time we had an abscess and some  osteomyolitis. Jack was better and in Cairo
and he did surgery to clean the coffin bone and Bunduq got more rest time.
Once he was over that he'd been off for a good year and I've been bringing
him back to work VERY slowly mostly on countryside walks so he doesn't deal
with the deep sand. But in the last few months after a walk, he would come
back lame. No heat, no swelling, no nothing but lame and then fine after 2
or 3 days. So we did a nerve block and an xray of the afflicted foot (all of
this is the left fore). The nerve block showed that the problem was in the
foot and the scanned xrays were sent to Pennsylvania. Diagnosis: navicular
spur growing. As I asked Jack, is this a management problem or something
that is best solved in some horribly expensive way? I'd love to hear from
anyone with experience. This guy is only about 10 and will be with me
forever. He's wonderful with kids, big men (like a Hummer he's short and
powerful), anything.

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani (Where should I hide my chequebook?)
Cairo, Egypt
maryanne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.ratbusters.net


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