When should I start riding my horse?

About a gazillion years ago, I asked our so-called qualified vet that very question regarding our then coming two-year-old and was told (word for word): “He’s a lot stronger than he looks, so go ahead.”

That has to be the single worst piece of horse advice in the history of bad horse advice, and I’ll tell you why. 1) No young horse is stronger than it looks, and of course it isn’t; no matter what it looks like on the outside, it’s still a baby on the inside. 2) Any vet who tells someone that is a moron.

Instead of talking to myself for the next twenty pages (since I doubt horse folks who’ve made up their minds and/or have their own agendas and reasons for doing things will listen to little-ol’ me), I’ll just post a link to
Deb Bennet’s (Ph.D.) study on equine skeletal development

Read it; repeat it; print copies off and hang them up in your barn or leave them on the table in your Boarder’s Lounge or pass them out at your kid’s local 4-H or Horse Club meeting. Futurities be damned; I want my horses alive and sound beyond the eight-year-old mark.

I don't think so, Doc

Well, I’ve met with the specialist, had a biopsy (here’s a word of advice: “A little pressure” is doctor jargon for “excruciating pain”), gone in for my pre-op blood work and had a CA125 test. Now, as long as I don’t catch a cold, the surgery will take place on August 24th.

Oh yes, and the doc advised me to quit smoking at least ten days before surgery.

Quit smoking? He must be joking. As if my nerves aren’t shattered enough at the myriad of horror stories one hears about surgery—being awake throughout and unable to tell anyone; dying on the table because the doctor is a quack, or because the anesthesiologist is a quack, or because the doctor is making google-eyes with Nurse Buxom, or because the anesthesiologist is making google-eyes at Nurse Buxom, or because the doctor and anesthesiologist are making google-eyes at each other; dying in recovery because that Nurse Buxom is in the janitor closet with the doctor and anesthesiologist instead of monitoring my stats; dying because the anesthesiologist doesn’t know that my veins have a tendency to collapse with such force as to shoot catheters across rooms like lethal ninja weapons, perhaps killing said doctor, nurse and anesthesiologist, leaving me to bleed to death before the surgery has even begun; waking up at my own autopsy.

I’m kidding of course. I don’t really believe any of that. I’m just a Fiction writer who's a little neurotic when it comes to anything medical. I know nothing will happen before, during, or after the surgery. Ah, but just in case, I won’t be quitting smoking anytime soon.