Axel just might be arthritic afterall

So here we are thinking Axel's knee is kind of swollen. But it's not soft and it's not hot and it doesn't look a whole lot different to me. J says it's big. So being the OCD type I am I go and look at my Flickr photos and search for "Axel" and "leg" and I find this picture I took in May of 2009. If you'll note his right knee, it's kind of bigger near the bottom than his left. A little more pointy and this is what J is seeing.

Follow that up with a photo from May of 2008 (I guess I take leg photos in May oddly enough) where you can clearly see his knees are generally big. The right a bit bigger than the left. I'll have to take another photo of what he looks like right now but I don't think there's any change.

So I cross check the dates with entries in my blog and I find out that he was sore and stiff in his left knee nearly the whole winter '07-'08. May 2008 we start him on the 4-in-1 HA that has a variety of joint supplements. There's no mention of lameness for the whole winter of '08-'09 while he was on the supplement. I took him off the supplement in Nov. 2009 with the thoughts that joint stuff wasn't going to help ringbone at all. Forgetting that maybe I had him on there for his other joints. And now he's sore in his right knee. So even though he's not working out of his pain in the arena i wondering if this is just arthritis acting up.

I'm going to load him with MSM and keep him on that for the rest of the winter and see what happens. I'll get some X-rays this spring (if it doesn't get worse before then) and we'll see where we're at, if it's indeed arthritis. If so we'll probably keep up with the MSM if it's working and maybe add DMSO or Surpass or something for times when it flares up. I can't believe I didn't remember that he has a sore knee a couple years ago. Especially since it was sore all winter just like now. The MSM is supposedly an anti-inflammatory so maybe it'll also help his sheath swelling.