Friday Frustrations

Today was a quite a day. After getting home and hearing the tragic news of what happened in Sandy Hook, CT, my day doesn’t seem quite so rough. My thoughts and prayers are with all those families.   

I had an hour drive home from my last call of the evening and had an internal debate with myself the entire way,  on whether or not I should actually write about today’s calls.  When I decided to write about being a large animal veterinarian, I thought it was important to shed light on all that we do, some of it really cool, some of it joyous and some things are just down right frustrating. 

This post may be a bit disgusting to some,  so be warned….

My day started with a call at 7:00 am, from another veterinarian who was on call the night before.  The emergency call was for a twisted uterus (a.k.a. uterine torsion). The on-call doctor had to be at another farm for a previously scheduled appointment and wasn’t going to be able to handle this call. My first scheduled appointment was for 9am so I had the time to take care of the emergency.  

The uterus of a cow is suspended in the abdomen of a cow by two ligaments, called the broad ligaments and then attached via the cervix, to the vagina.  The more calves a cow has, the more stretched out these ligaments can get.  Active movement from the calf, inside the uterus, can cause the uterus to twist. I’m not sure anyone has actually watched a calf do somersaults inside the uterus, causing a twist; but usually as calves are repositioning in the uterus, there is an opportunity for a twist.  When the uterus is twisted, the birth canal is much tighter (picture the end of a bread bag as you close it up) and there is no way for the calf to be born without untwisting the uterus and opening the birth canal back up.

There are a few different ways to get the uterus untwisted.  Some people will use their arms and get the calf to start swinging. If you can get enough momentum, you can swing the calf the whole way around, opening the birth canal. After years of playing softball, I find this to be way too hard on my shoulders.  I almost always opt for rolling the cow. In this situation, we lay the cow down on her side and as one person applies pressure on the stomach, via a plank or themselves, holding the uterus in place, two other people roll the cow over. This is essentially swinging the cow around her own uterus. I’ve had very few instances where this hasn’t worked.  Then it’s just a matter of delivering a calf! Easy right???  Or something like that…..

My next call was for a routine herd check. During these appointments, I check with a portable ultrasound to see if the cow is pregnant or not. The earliest I can tell a cow is pregnant is 30 days after she was bred.  I can even tell if the cow is going to have a boy or girl (bull or heifer) if they are between 60-85 days pregnant! I’m not sure the cow really cares what she is having, but this farmer does!!!  

Call number 3 was another calving. This was a situation where the calf’s head got stuck on the pelvis, on its way out. The head was bent way down to the left and its neck was almost bent in half. This was just a matter of having long arms to reach in, find the head, get it in position and pull the calf. Still a job in itself, but is about medium difficulty in the realm of calvings.  

The next call was a cow with pneumonia. With the weather being warm, then cold, then warm again, it tends to wreak havoc on cows respiratory systems.  Her prescription was amoxicillin for 5 days. I think she’ll be just fine.  

Next call was a beef heifer that scratched her eye. She needed some eye medication and to stay out of the sun due to her photosensitivity.   She may have some corneal scarring, but hopefully we caught it early enough where she will regain complete sight.

I was really hoping that was going to be all the calls we had for the day as I was planning on going to my little cousins Christmas program this evening. I had to leave my house by 5 to make the program on time, and after the day I had already had, a shower was an absolute must. But as I’ve said before, we are on call 24/7/365. The weekend on-call doctor was still doing her other regularly scheduled calls when yet another calving came in. I was the only doctor available,  so batter up….

This was a beef cow and when I arrived at the farm, I saw only one foot out.  After further questioning, I found out that this poor cow had been trying to calve since Wednesday.  Now, waiting two days before you call the vet is completely and utterly unacceptable. I made this clear to him when I found out, but either way, I had to get the calf out.  Cows have calves on their own, without any help, all the time. But, when a farmer knows a cow is starting labor, they should be checking that cow every hour to make sure she is progressing. If there has been no progress after an hour, assistance is needed, or at least the cow needs to be checked to make sure things are lined up the way they should be.  Still, every hour there should be progress and the calf should be born within two hours.

This calf was coming backwards so I only had the back feet- make that one back foot. I had to go find the other one.  I found the back foot and was able to get it up into the birth canal, but the calf’s hips were too wide to get through.  The calf was dead, and had been for quite some time.  We always want a live calf and a live cow, but life doesn’t always work that way. In cases where the calf is already dead, we do what we can to save the cow.  This requires a fetotomy, or “cutting” the calf out. The cow receives an epidural so her back end is numbed. We have special tools that we use to protect the cow as we use cutting wire to cut the calf.  These can be 3 hour jobs in certain cases. Luckily I only had to make one cut; splitting the pelvis of the calf in half. With one leg and hip removed, there was enough room to pull the rest of the calf out.  The cow stood up and walked around the pen when we were all done. 

After I was all cleaned up, tools disinfected, and I’m climbing back in my truck I look at the clock: 4 pm. I was cutting it close, but I thought I would still be able to make the Christmas program.  As I’m half way to my house, I get YET ANOTHER call for a cow with a prolapsed uterus (I’ll talk about this another time).  There was no way I was going to make the Christmas program and hence my Friday Frustration.  In this job, we never know what is going to happen or when. It would be really nice to be able to walk out the door at 4, turn the phones over to an emergency clinic or shut the phone off all together, but that’s not the career path I chose. Like I’ve said before, I really do love what I do, but there are times, that what I love to do, takes over from other things I want to do.  I want to tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly; today was a little of all three.