How I got a dressage lesson during an ultrasound lab

Disclosure: I’m about to go full on Science Geek about anatomy, dressage & ergonomics. So if that’s not your speed…… skip to my next installment!

Seriously no hard feelings.

Now that you’ve been warned

I was learning how to ultrasound a stifle.

For the record,

horse stifles are complicated

way more complicated than stifles in dogs

I found myself dusting off my equine anatomy book (literally)

and reminding myself of vocabulary words like medial femoro-tibial ligament, accessory cartilage of the patella, medial trochlear ridge, peroneus tertius, oh yes it gets better from there

Next I was holding an ultrasound probe for the first time in EONS and trying to translate black & white images into the anatomy I was pulling out of the cobwebs.

We were getting pointers on where to push lightly, where to push firmly, which direction to line up the probe, which angle to hold the cord, it can all be pretty complicated.

And this is where it got interesting.

The instructor was explaining how to hold the probe without tightening the rest of our body and how important ergonomics are to quality ultrasound images.

The instructor asked our little group, “Do you ride?”

We all did.

She immediately changed course and one at a time said, “Give me your hand.”

Here’s how it went.

She started with what she called a “New York handshake”. Firm grip, tight arm.

Next she asked for “the dead fish” and coached each of us through relaxing our entire arm without slouching or leaning.

Each of us had an area we were tighter in, wrist, elbow, shoulder and once we achieved the dead fish we had to resist tightening up while she “drove” our arm around.

I was starting to get this odd feeling.

Then she said, “OK, tighten your fingers just enough to hold the probe without tightening the rest of your arm.”

That’s when she identified that I have tight elbows and took a moment to be sure I could hold the reins, I mean the ultrasound probe without tightening my elbows.

All I could think was, “O M G that’s my sitting trot and my bouncing hands”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know in that video my *ss is bouncing as much as anything else. But now that I’ve finally got that happening a bit less, I’ve been glaring at my hands in all my videos & couldn’t figure out how to stop them from moving.