Shit Meets Fan

So over the weekend, as I was just starting to dig myself out of my mental rut, Foxie (my 21 year old first horse, for those of you who are newer to my blogging) apparently went through the fence.

The queen Fox

Foxie is a horse who tends to attract strife and bad luck; she has come back from two horrible, nearly life-ending injuries. The first, was a low DDF injury on her right front. She came back 110% from that, despite all of the vet's predictions, and we took up eventing. She was beasting around Training level XC a handful of years ago now and jumping better than she ever had, and then she shredded her right hind suspensory in 4 places (4 quarter sized tears). Her body basically freaked out and dropped all of the suspensories in all 4 legs, and for a while there, she was in so much pain that we heavily considered letting her go; the pain was too much to ask of her.

Birthday portrait from earlier this year

But the minute you say that, she comes back. It's been her way.

So she went through the fence. She also seems to have flipped - or sat down? - with the end result of mashing her whole back end into a traumatized, swollen mess.

Her tail bone is broken (muscles are still in tact, so she can swish... but it bends up. NOT NORMAL).
She fractured a splint bone (not a big deal)
She appears to have damaged the large artery running down the front of her already-damaged "suspensory" leg, with the result that the leg, which was already going to swell, is swelling in new and excitingly gross ways.
Her right leg is swollen from fetlock to butt cheek; I've nicnamed it the Dinosaur leg, because it's so swollen it appears to belong to an elephant, or a dinosaur, not a horse. The hock area is particularly traumatized and is so hot that she is regularly sweating through whatever bandage I put on her.

Her left leg is swelling, too. And the tendons that sit over the point of her hock are sliding to the side under the strain of her resting the more painful leg.
Her legs shake a lot of the time from the strain of supporting her body; she laid down before the vet came to take x-rays and fell trying to get up. My heart stopped in that moment.

Her body is horribly, horribly traumatized by whatever happened to her.

Now that we're managing her pain in a more effective way, she is no longer pawing and pawing and pawing in pain, nearly catatonic to everything else around her; she engages with me, and she's even gotten her personality back a little bit. She's still not eating or drinking well; she's been eating hay and grazing with the most enthusiasm, but she hardly touches her grain (and the stomach supplements and anti-inflammatories I'm trying to get into her). I tube her pain meds into her - she has never been willing to eat powdered bute, and she's not eating enough grain for me to chance putting the liquid banamine the vet gave me on grain.

She's still dehydrated, though she's drinking better. She's probably losing weight, though it's hard to tell when she's so sucked in on herself to begin with.

But at the same time, she's still here. She's still fighting.

She whinnies for her sisters, and though she is still limping horribly, she's moving a lot better. She's willing to move herself, especially when "cruising" around in the tall grass and clover I haven't had time to mow, grazing. She walked herself over to the gate to touch noses with Arya, and she tried to bite her. Her eyes are brighter, she looks up at me with her royal way when I come into the barn, saying "U SERVE ME NAO". So things are already improving from the horrible state they were...

But this sucks, guys.