90 degree meltdown

Regarding her vet-imposed time off, I've been so impressed by Lucy thus far. She's remained calm, happy, and acts as though she likes her vacation.

Yesterday, though, she was very unhappy. It was 90+ degrees all weekend, and very humid. The bugs were awful and she seemed pretty hot and miserable in her paddock, so after Maddy and I went and got hay, I took her out to hose her off and get some of the dried sweat off of her. Some other boarders had walked their horses past the barn to ride in the outdoor and that got her excited. She wanted to go with them and started pawing in the aisle as I was getting my bathing stuff together. Then I took her out to the wash stall and hooked her up to the cross ties and she continued acting like a brute, but I ignored her and started hosing her off. She did ok for the most part, and I was almost finished scraping the water off of her after her bath when she randomly had a complete meltdown, sat back on the cross ties and broke them, and whipped backward as I was walking past her front end. She caught my right inner leg with her left front foot and then stood, shaking, a few feet away. Maddy happened to be standing right there and caught her. I was honestly a bit in shock that I had just gotten kicked in the leg, and my leg was quite numb but I could tell it was going to start hurting in a few minutes. I was already annoyed about a variety of things and I quite seriously wanted to throttle the horse for acting like such a complete moron. If she hadn't had an activity restriction, I would have taken her down to the outdoor and kicked her little heinie down a notch, that's for sure.

Thank goodness for Maddy, who kind of took charge and probably saved my sanity and Lucy's horsey life. She did some basic "pay attention to me, you idiot" groundwork with her and got her brain back in her head while I stood there and pondered what just happened. It was a depressing afternoon :(

I guess, though, that this was the first truly bad day in her month and a half of rehab so far, so that's probably a fairly good record. Up until now the most she's done is walk down to the outdoor to stand around with me, but I think I need to start at least hand walking her, or something, because her brain capacity has gotten so reduced from going from stall to paddock to stall to paddock for 6 weeks that she apparently cannot handle anything!!

The acupuncture treatments are still going, and last week was better than the first session. The vet took his time with her and got one needle in, but did it without any reaction from Lucy. When he first arrived, she was immediately suspicious and didn't want anyone touching her sides or hind end, so we took it back a few notches and started very basic. He spent the first half hour just rubbing her forehead and getting her into almost a trance. She was grooming him, which I have never seen her do! That was pretty cool. He wanted to gain some of her trust first, and then after she was nice and relaxed and in this trance-like state, he put the one needle in her shoulder, then went back to rubbing her forehead and letting that needle do its thing. After another 20 minutes or so, he removed the needle and we called it a day. I really, really, really appreciate that he's willing to a) work with her at all, given that she can be such a fruitcake, and b) be so patient with her. We'll see what happens this Wednesday.