...you come to work to find your patient dead. I guess I wasn't that surprised, the little poodle had been a long time without being on insulin for his diabetes. Still, I try my damnest to save them all if I can. After this morning's greeting, I expected the rest of the day to go without any other episodes - wow, was I wrong. After pregchecking a few heifers, I felt like a schmuck when I had to put a large "O" on all but three of them. When there is a wreck, there is a wreck. You see, the "O"s stood for open, that is empty, meaning there would be no calf for them in the spring. This was a heck of a lesson learned - test the bulls in the spring. One (bull) plus one (heifer) should equal two (cute of a baby calf). However, in this case, the equation equaled a big fat zero. Well, that should have been all of the excitement for the day, right? Wrong again. The next thing that I had to do was to look at a bloated calf that was to come into the clinic. For those that don't know, imagine how you feel like after eating at a buffet (I guess I can only speak for myself). The bloated ruminant (word of the day) looks like a woodtick that is about to pop. How you treat it is to pass a tube down it's throat and let the gas spew out (don't light a match). Well, this one came running in, and as I was trying to put it in the head gate, she went tits up. I grabbed a hose and shoved it down her gullet, but the gas wasn't coming off fast enough. I grabbed my necropsy knife (maybe that was a premonition) and tried to stab her, but it was sharp like a butter knife. I quickly found a scalpel and poked her side, and within a minute, the gas was gone out of system...but unfortunately, the spark was also out of her eye. You know they say hindsight is 20/20 - well, I should have stabbed her right away. No, wait, I should have been an accountant instead.
So the last thing I did today was to rework the waterworks of a steer. Waterbelly is like a blocked cat - and as a vet may say, both are equally challenging. For those who don't know what that is, it is when a stone gets stuck in the waterworks, and there is nowhere for the urine to go. The stone was found and released - I now hope the bugger will pee till the cows come home.
But you know what they say, things happen in threes.
Perhaps I should change my name to Dr. Kavorkian.
I'm not a vet and we had a bit of that on our farm recently. Our old boar and sow have decided they won't make it through the winter. An old ewe we've been nursing went horizontal...We have the bull in with the cows and I hope we do better than last time! Farming and vet work must be so rewarding :)
ReplyDelete