Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

About a month ago Peebs decided that trotting for 10mins a day was too much work, and decided to injure himself again. I came out one day to a scraped and swollen left knee, aka his injured suspensory leg. He walked out of his stall sound so I hand walked him for 15ish minutes, cold hosed and cleaned the scrape, and gave him some bute. The next day the swelling was about 95% gone, just a little around the scrape, so I figured I'd hop on and see how he felt. He took maybe a couple of off steps at first, but didn't feel noticeably lame.  Till a few days later. Then he was definitely lame.

 I took him into the vet the next week and after seeing him trot my vet asked what I wanted to do. We could block, ultrasound the suspensory, x-ray the knee, or any combo of the above. She had lightly palpated the knee, but not a full flexion, and said it felt slightly arthritic, but considering his age, job, and lack of straight legs, nothing overly concerning. I did want to check the supsenory so we started there. The ultrasound showed some slight fluid build up, and some irritated fibers, but no new tears. 

My saddle is up with Cinder, so we're back to sans saddle rides

When we did his ProStride injection last fall, my vet had a vet tech student doing some of her clinical rounds with her that week. My vet knows Peebs is a Very Good Boy™ and asked if they could use him as the student's guinea pig. She had to do a few procedures, including helping with x-rays, and my vet said we could x-ray the knee he had fallen on when he tripped, aka his right knee, and she wouldn't charge me for them. I obviously said yes, because who's going to turn down free x-rays, and they showed some arthritis and irritation from the fall. We talked then about injecting the knee at a later point when he's closer to being back in full work, and now that we know there's some arthritis going on in the left knee as well, we'll just inject both sooner rather than later. 

As for his rehab, my vet said to play it by how he feels. We did a few weeks of just walking under saddle and I started trotting again this week. He felt a little stiff at first but not lame so we'll continue to slowly build up our trot work. If he still feels lame, we'll take him in and do a more thorough work up on the left knee. But fingers crossed that when he did whatever to his knee, he just bruised it and irritated the suspensory and nothing worse.