Thursday afternoon, the podiatrist showed up in a good mood. His biggest concern was to make sure he cut the hole in the right spot and didn't get too close to the cornet band. His other concern was keeping her heel elevated since he had not let it touch the ground since the first surgery. After using elastikon to secure her shoe to her foot he began x-raying. First, to check the infection's spot, then with a marker on the outside of her hoof to make sure the area he was looking at was directly above the infection.
Then he took a sharpie to her hoof wall to draw out the area that he would remove to get access to the infected bone. I'm not a big fan of the smell of burning hoof, so when he took the saw to the hoof wall, I was starting to wonder if I could actually handle all of this. Thankfully, after a span of time that was probably much shorter than it felt like, he was done cutting and began pulling away the hoof wall. He also ordered surgery music to break up the silence while he worked. I remember country playing, but I'm glad I don't remember any of the songs because I'm not sure I'd ever be able to listen to them in the same way again.
He cleaned out the site, and then stuck a probe into the bone to see how deep the infection was. He felt it was just a surface thing, but told his two assistants to take an x-ray just for the heck of it. The x-ray showed the probe going all the way through her bone. He grumbled that they had messed up, and told them to do it again. Same result. Preparing to take over the x-ray machine himself, he had one of the assistants hold just the tip of the probe (it was sterile, he had no gloves on), and George moved her foot, dropping it to the ground. The vet said forget it, it didn't matter anyways, he needed to get to work and allow blood flow back to the foot.
He started scraping. A chunk of bone moved. He ended up pulling out another large piece of bone. He apologized for cussing his assistants in his head about not getting the x-ray right, we clearly knew now that the probe was indeed going that deep. Immediately after removing the bone out of the front of her hoof, he looked it over thoroughly. The only thing he could say positively about the whole situation was that there was no articular cartilage on the bone, which left a slim possibility that the infection was not in the joint. He then quickly went to work on bandaging her hoof up.
When he was done, he grimly looked at me and told me that it was getting to the point that there was little more he could do. I didn't need to be told. The bottom just about dropped out of my stomach when he pulled the chunk of bone out of her hoof. I honestly don't remember much of the conversation that took place between the chunk coming out of her hoof and that comment that we'd reached the end. I know he had some conversation with my vet student friend, but I have no recollection of what was being mentioned, all I could do was stare at my drunk pony and rub her ears.
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