Eight Months of Stall Rest

Flax endured his long confinement with daily grooming, hand walking and treats - always a bag of carrots outside his stall for passersby to acquiesce to his noisy begging (he scraped his teeth across the grate of his stall door). 

We changed vets. X-Rays showed no rotation from the laminitis. Our new vet gave him shockwave treatment to both fronts and the stifle. She thought it was best to keep him on 2 grams of bute. We fought off bed sores, a shoe boil on his elbow and Surpass skin irritations. I started letting him loose in the indoor arena. He would walk around and play with his favorite toy, a traffic cone. He'd grab the wide end at the bottom and flip it around. I could throw it and he'd go get it. Flax the retriever.

In the spring, he was turned out for an hour or two in a round pen, depending on the footing. We tried glue-on shoes, which seemed to help.