Knowing there is something wrong with your horse.

So Spartan has, in fact recovered from his mysterious dead lameness, and I am grateful. He must've knocked and banged himself up somehow goofing off, as horses are like to do, and the paranoid owner of a ticking-time-bomb-horse part of me that is constantly braced for impact freaked.the.shit.out.

The thing, though, about knowing pretty much everything about your horse down to the most minute detail due to spending an entire year on the daily nursing them from one problem to the next, is that you just know when something is wrong. And you just have to trust your gut and call out the vet. Just do it. Because no one knows your horse like you do, and it's so worth the risk of looking like the crazy, overbearing horse-mother than regretting not diagnosing something early-on when you could've done something about it.

There is just something off about Spartan. Whether it's the lethargy, the constant slipping with this back feet, his hatred of going downhill, our failing battle with weight loss, the fact that he essentially looks like shit. Look at this comparison of him 3 months ago vs now.

These are videos of him when I cam back from India in March. He looked like shiiiiiiieeeeeetttttt. But  it only took me 10 DAYS of personalized attention to get him from looking like aforementioned shit to these videos:

Shortly after these, Spartan was put in Castro's pasture and the whole pasture/no eating/ulcers fiasco ensued. Spartan lost crazy weight and I'm sure re-inflammed his ulcers back to life, but okay it's been almost 3 months and I've literally made zero leeway with this weight. Here are some fairly recent pics of him and an accompanying video:

The lighting is hiding his ribs here, & this is after he GAINED weight.

Chirpy, but afflicted with Giant Moose Head Syndrome because of how slim his body is.

Okay, so where did all his weight and muscle tone go??? I get ulcers, but man, he looks pretty damn bad compared to before, when it only took me a week to get him to look good and now it's been almost 3 months. Is it all ulcers?

Also, keep in mind the March videos are after he came off of 3 months of strict stall-rest with no hand-walking whatsoever. Yes he spent a month or month and a half in a pasture where he ran around and was able to get some nice muscle tone back, but why in the world would he have worse muscle tone now when he's been ridden (albeit lightly) for 3 months, vs farting around a pasture with zero work for only 1-ish months? Yes he's in a stall now, but he still gets turnout 4x a week and ridden like 3-4x so...

What about it being just ulcers, you say? Okay, he's been on the real-deal meds for several days now, we'll see if there's improvement once it hits the 10 days mark, cool. But what if it doesn't really fix the issue? Worms? Would that cause muscle loss though? That is why the vet is coming out, goddamit, and listening to my paranoia rants and running an EPM test or whatever else needs to happen here folks. Because my spidey senses are way past tingling by now. He is standing weirdly in the back too a bit in all the versions I took of the pic above that shows his bad weight, but okay I think I'm just way reading into things now so I'll stop, lol. 

Why can't horses talk again?