What do fainting women, biting ants, pulling calves and thunderstorms have in common??
Me. They have me and my Fourth of July adventures in common. Suffice it to say that my on-call holiday is scarcely half over and already I have tales to tell and barrel full of monkeys. My day began at 7:30am with a dog that had mysteriously acquired a broken leg. The owner had his daughter, who was driving a duely diesel pickup bring the dog into the clinic. The poor dog had an open fracture through two bones in his right hind limb. I took a radiograph to characterize the break. Since I was solo and there was no one to man the DeWalt drill to pin the leg, we would settle for a splint and pain medication until Monday when more help was available. I had to sedate the dog to "set" the fracture and splint it. As I did this the girl was feeling the stress of the situation and before I could catch her had fainted, crumpled to the ground, and hit her head on the hard floor. I quickly checked her pulse and put a towel under her head. She woke and panicked, forgetting where she was. She didn't recover well and was queasy and unsteady. I had to call her father. I was worried about her driving.
Shortly after that party I got a call from a man named Bud in a town about 30 minutes away. He had a first calf heifer that was calving breach. He wanted me to come pull it. I armed myself with a vet truck and all the necessities, called our newest veterinarian to come with me and set off. He brought his wife and let me just pause here to say I am so very, very glad that they came. We arrived in Deliverance, Arkansas to a dairy farm/pallet rebuilding junkyard with 14 dogs and a house that looked like a barn. I glanced at my passengers as we arrived with impending doom and thankfulness for their presence. After dodging dogs and going through what seemed like 17 shoddy gates we arrived among rocky terrain and dirty pens with sheet metal and trash piles. The heifer was indeed calving and the calf was backwards and twisted into the strangest position I'd ever felt. After the two of us assessed the situation we tried for half an hour to turn the calf and get the legs out. But to no avail. I recommended a C-Section. While pulling the sky had turned dark and the rain pelted down in gigantic drops rolling down our faces, dripping from our hair and filling our shoes. The client refused to let us do a C-section and we kept pulling, or rather the heifer kept pulling us..around and around the pen. After two hours of not much progress I stopped and told the client we would do a C-section at the clinic or he could figure out something else to do. He said we could do the section but we had to do it in the field. In the dirt, in the rain, in the filty premises. I was skeptical about the cows survival but I had no other choice.
With our hair dripping rainwater and an inch of water and other substances in our shoes, with ants crawling up our necks and biting us as we couldn't scratch or get them off with what was on our hands, we trudged back to the vet truck to gather our surgical prep and instruments. We applied a local line block and opened the cow up. As we were getting the uterus into position to incise and remove the calf the cow was straining and "blowing" her rumen and massive amounts of blood out the skin incision hole and all over our faces. As you can imagine, we were quite the sight....dripping wet, covered in blood and trying to contain a rumen while cutting open a uterus to remove the calf. We got the calf out, sewed the heifer back up all the while fighting ants, still dripping as the rain started pelting us again. We cleaned our instruments and buckets, spread a drape out over the seat of the truck and went on our merry way. I have never wanted to leave a place so badly or to take a warm shower more in my life. I made it back home to call the 6 numbers that had called the pager while we were pulling the calf, took a shower, assessed the welts all over the right side of my neck and lived to see another day.
Happy 4th of July everyone.
Shortly after that party I got a call from a man named Bud in a town about 30 minutes away. He had a first calf heifer that was calving breach. He wanted me to come pull it. I armed myself with a vet truck and all the necessities, called our newest veterinarian to come with me and set off. He brought his wife and let me just pause here to say I am so very, very glad that they came. We arrived in Deliverance, Arkansas to a dairy farm/pallet rebuilding junkyard with 14 dogs and a house that looked like a barn. I glanced at my passengers as we arrived with impending doom and thankfulness for their presence. After dodging dogs and going through what seemed like 17 shoddy gates we arrived among rocky terrain and dirty pens with sheet metal and trash piles. The heifer was indeed calving and the calf was backwards and twisted into the strangest position I'd ever felt. After the two of us assessed the situation we tried for half an hour to turn the calf and get the legs out. But to no avail. I recommended a C-Section. While pulling the sky had turned dark and the rain pelted down in gigantic drops rolling down our faces, dripping from our hair and filling our shoes. The client refused to let us do a C-section and we kept pulling, or rather the heifer kept pulling us..around and around the pen. After two hours of not much progress I stopped and told the client we would do a C-section at the clinic or he could figure out something else to do. He said we could do the section but we had to do it in the field. In the dirt, in the rain, in the filty premises. I was skeptical about the cows survival but I had no other choice.
With our hair dripping rainwater and an inch of water and other substances in our shoes, with ants crawling up our necks and biting us as we couldn't scratch or get them off with what was on our hands, we trudged back to the vet truck to gather our surgical prep and instruments. We applied a local line block and opened the cow up. As we were getting the uterus into position to incise and remove the calf the cow was straining and "blowing" her rumen and massive amounts of blood out the skin incision hole and all over our faces. As you can imagine, we were quite the sight....dripping wet, covered in blood and trying to contain a rumen while cutting open a uterus to remove the calf. We got the calf out, sewed the heifer back up all the while fighting ants, still dripping as the rain started pelting us again. We cleaned our instruments and buckets, spread a drape out over the seat of the truck and went on our merry way. I have never wanted to leave a place so badly or to take a warm shower more in my life. I made it back home to call the 6 numbers that had called the pager while we were pulling the calf, took a shower, assessed the welts all over the right side of my neck and lived to see another day.
Happy 4th of July everyone.
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