My mare, Angel, had one of the worst laminitis cases that my vet in 2004 had seen, and laminitis is his specialty.

At the time, I had just gone through laminitis and founder with another mare, and it occurred to me that I should chronicle Angel’s case with photos, especially after abscesses appeared on both feet. The previous mare didn’t have abscesses. This was new territory for me. In fact, I pretty much had a heart attack when the first abscesses opened up around Angel’s coronary bands. It looked like her hooves would fall off. And, as time wore on, most of the hoof wall did.

Angel’s damaged hoof wall eventually sloughed off.

This journal was designed for print, and I didn’t make any effort to control the file size when I made it, so it’s a whopping 300 megabytes in its original form. It took me a while to get it down to under 4 megabytes. And you can still read it. I think that’s as good as we’re going to get. You may have to zoom out a little to fit it all on your screen.

I laid it out vertically for print, not ideal for Web viewing because you have to keep scrolling up and down. But, it’s a good case study.

Angel did return to various levels of soundness over the years, but she often did too much once she was sound, running around with her herd mates, and then was left with more damage.

If I had known insulin resistance was the cause, we could have combatted the problem back in 2004 and perhaps turned this around. Angel likely ran extremely elevated insulin levels and suffered the abnormal hoof proliferation for all seven years after her original acute laminitis case, right up until she finally had to be put down in May 2011.

This diary is 15 pages, and the photos of the abscesses start on Page 4.