Today, Dr. Bryant from Pilchuck Hospital came out and took follow-up xrays on Lucky’s injury to his left front fetlock.  When he took xrays last May, he was less concerned about the bone chips (he has several, but all could be easily removed) than he was about the fact that Lucky appeared to have had a fracture to the cannon bone that was still healing and there was significant remodeling going on in that area.  He cautioned that even if surgery was done to remove the bone chips, that he still may be very limited as far as riding potential because of the previous injury.  He recommended follow-up xrays in several months to see how the injury had healed before recommending surgery.

Today we went ahead and had the leg re-xrayed and Dr. Bryant was very pleased with the results.  The area of significant concern on his cannon bone has filled in and the bone has smoothed out as it healed, which is exactly what he wanted to see.  The chips are very visible and the surgery to remove them should be fairly straight-forward.  While he will never be a jumping prospect, with surgery he could easily do lower-level dressage or pleasure riding.  He said that he doesn’t have a lot of flexibility in his fetlock joint, so he may show some gait irregularity that could limit him in dressage, but I asked if it would be any different than he moves now and he said no — well I cannot see any different in his gait at all so I do not think this is anything that will limit him for dressage.

I also had him take a second look at his eyes, and he did recommend that an equine ophthalmologist take a look at him just to make sure it is not a degenerative condition.  His eyes look no worse than they did when he came in, with quite a bit of cloudiness in his left eye and just a slight amount in his right eye, but in speaking with one of his previous owners she did not recall any injury, just that the cloudiness appeared slowly over time, and when she owned him it did not exist in the right eye.  So we’ll probably schedule that for him at some point as well.

Here are the xrays, you can clearly see the chips (there are several, you see different ones depending on the angle of the xray).