Fetti is doing much better after her hock injections. We’ve ponied into the park several times, both across the river and trailering in. One on occasion we moseyed into the river with a friend on a bit of a whim, bareback and in a nylon halter – thankfully not ponying at that point, as we proceeded to head into the park for the first time that year. Fetti was fantastic. I am very, very lucky.

I took a week earlier this summer to go traveling to Asia. We’d gotten some trail rides in prior, pulled ticks off the horses as per usual – that’s just how it works around here. Midway through the trip I noted a bit of a rash on my chest. I wrote it off to being an obnoxious bug bite. It happens. I react. No big deal.

Since I’ve been back, we’ve been working hard on getting some (very, very tiny) miles on Polly. I have zero horse-starting experience. Thankfully my best riding partner has done this before! Polly’s had a saddle on a number of times, and I lucked out finding a very similar one to what Fetti goes in. Saddle reaction: eh, whatever. Getting on for the first time was fairly anticlimactic. I hung off the fence for a while, overused various muscles in weird ways, and eventually slid on over into the saddle. She thought it was a little weird but generally didn’t care. Yay!

I was rather unusually sore the following week, and wrote it off to climbing on the fence and dangling my weight onto the pony. Shrug. It was a little weird, though, and somewhere in here I noticed that the rash had grown.. and looked suspiciously problematic. I got it looked at. We ordered some tests.

Polly and I did our first walking steps, our ground crew leading us around. She’s still sorting out the whole “balancing with a human” thing. I haven’t lost the weight I was hoping to, so we’re making do. Slow and steady.

My jaw hurt for about a week. Then my neck. Then my.. foot? OK, I have a baseline level of pain all the time, but this was above and beyond, and in weird places.

Test results came back positive for Lyme. That explained a lot. At least riding doesn’t hurt as long as I skip the stirrups.

I turned out Polly and Birdie, and went to get Fetti. I heard a bit of a scuffle. Everyone was chill when I got in eyesight. My friend pointed out the bleeding cut on Polly’s leg.

Cue three days of watching, cold-hosing, and wrapping. Polly is not a fan of the standing for wraps part, but totally fine with the wraps. Her brain is fantastic, yall, at least when she’s not picking losing fights.

It’s been a long week and I’m hopeful that this week will get better.