PTL - Good Vet Report!

PRAISE THE LORD!
Huge praise report. =]

Huge huge huge. Turns out... right when we got there [after the assistant guy ran Dakota up and down the driveway so Dr. White could watch how he went] the doc took some farrier's tongs [dunno the technical name for them. They're metal pliers with flat surfaces, and he pressed them on either side of Dakota's hoof] and found that my baby was sore in the HOOF! Although, he did say that the calcium deposit looked like it had been pretty bad before it healed over.

ANYWAY.. He took a thermograph, and saw that there was tons of heat in a certain spot at the bottom of the hoof. Which means there was more blood in there than there usually is. So, He took an x-ray of the calcium deposit as well [that was cool, you could see the bone and the calcium. Some of it was attached to the bone, where doc said it was prolly infected at some point, but then there was just floating calcium. pretty awesome. Sorry, sidetracked. ^_^] and saw there was no problem there. Then he took an x-ray of the bottom of the hoof and it was AWESOME again. haha. You could see little think lines going from the outside of the hoof to the inside. Doc said those were where blood vessels were. We saw the x-ray of a normal hoof, where the lines were about 1 cm wide. Then we looked back at Dakota's hoof, and his blood vessels were dilated to about 3 cm wide. So... BRUISING!

We got a formaldahyde/iodine hoof paint to put on the sole of his hoof for 6 days straight, then 3 x a week for a few weeks after that. We also got bute [painkiller in the form of a gel that you pretty much shove in their mouth using a syringe - fun, I know] to give him 2 grams daily for 6 days.