”Romme was going well but something was nagging at me . . . he did not feel as supple as I remembered him.”
how upset Romme was when he was delivered. There was no news about any incidents.
“I called a local vet who felt that Romme was stiff from the trip and to give him
more time off, and then start him in light work,” Linda reports. “Giving him more time wasn’t helping, so I called in Dr. John Steele and Dr. Tim Ober who examined him and reported that the ‘whole horse was sore.’ They determined he had some kind of trauma before arriving, and now the horse was in a lot of pain. He didn’t pass his flexions yet his x-rays were good. So together we started him on a rehabilitation program in order to make him comfortable.” It was a combination of injections, along with massage, chiropractic and acupuncture therapies. This of course took time, stopping and starting him numerous times for more than a year. Eventually Romme was feeling well enough to go into dressage work.
SURGERY AFTER SURGERY Romme was by now six, and Linda finally got him in the show ring at training level and first level in late 2004 and early 2005. They consistently scored in the high sixties and won most of their classes in the competitive South Florida show circuit. “Romme was going well but something was nagging at me . . . he did not feel as supple as I remembered him,” says Linda. In early 2005, they were showing first level and scoring well, when Linda
felt something not quite right while performing a leg yield. Concerned, Linda brought him to her vet, and they started blocking his legs, and eventually found a radial spike just below the knee joint on both front legs. This radial spike, or small bony growth, was invading the carpal sheath near the superficial and deep flexor tendons. So that April, Romme had his first surgery to remove these spikes. It was performed by Dr. Ben Schachter at his surgical center in Wellington. After a long slow recovery, later that year, they were back in full work. In early 2006, they again showed a little first level. “Then one day, out of nowhere, Romme couldn’t canter either direction. His trot work was fine, but he tripped several times in the canter almost falling down!” Linda recalls. She called in Dr. Schachter to take a look. At first they treated him for EPM, but later determined his canter work still
wasn’t right. “Dr. Schachter performed a specific block on the hind legs and suddenly it was the canter that I loved and remembered. This time, Romme had a condition on both legs called Fibrotic Myopathy,” says Linda. This condition is when an injured muscle is replaced with fibrous scar tissue, no longer elastic, and in Romme’s case it was in the thighs of his hind legs. Surgery was the only option to “cut the cord.” So in 2006, his second surgery was performed and another long, slow recuperation period followed. By then it was 2007, and Linda started to work Romme again. “This time as I
rode him I was feeling something in his right hind, so I called the vets in again. After everything we’d been through, my heart just sank,” Linda remembers. “He didn’t pass his fetlock flexions, so they injected both hind fetlocks, and immediately Romme was happy again.” Linda put him back in regular dressage work, and after awhile, he was more than just off—Romme was very lame. “The vets x-rayed his hind legs, and there were no bony changes, but they saw a fibrotic joint capsul in the fetlocks,” says Linda. They ultrasounded his fetlocks and confirmed he had villonodular synovitis in both hind fetlocks, a condition where, due to trauma, there is
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