The Gift of Pets: Stories Only a Vet Could Tell (5 page)

It seemed unwise of me to enter that pen with the nine-hundred-pound beast, but there was no way I was going to let Dr. Boyd see my reticence. Immediately, I scaled the five-foot-high wood-rail fence and jumped down into the pen. I could feel ice forming in my veins as the great head turned to assess the scrawny person who had entered the pen with her. She was facing the open side of the building, peacefully chewing her cud, the picture of domestication. I looked questioningly at Dr. Boyd for further instructions.

“Go to the side away from the chute. She’ll turn away from you and head into it. I’ll clamp the chute on her neck once her head’s through.”

I skirted to the right side of the cow, giving her a wide berth, then positioned myself just in front of the acute angle in the corner and started in with what I thought were irresistible cattle-prodding phrases.

“Get along there, heifer,” I offered weakly. The cow did not move. In fact, it lazily turned its head away from me again.

“Gonna have to say it like you mean it. And she won’t move unless you do. Go ahead and move in closer.” I could hear Dr. Boyd chuckle under his breath.

His mirth at my inexperience motivated me more than his encouragement. With an assertiveness born of embarrassment, I shouted at the cow and moved toward her, waving my arms. I had not moved more than a step or two when the cow did turn, but not in the direction of the chute. Before I could react, she was facing me full-on. I did not know cattle expressions well, but I was sure she was fixing me with a malevolent glare. Then two things happened simultaneously.

One was an urgent shout from Dr. Boyd. What was it he said? Something like “Get out of there NOW!” At the same time, I realized that the cow was charging me, her head down, moving at a surprising speed, given the lack of room to accelerate. Then the flat of her forehead hit me full in the chest, the force of the blow smashing me against the wooden rails in the corner where the fences met. It evacuated the air from my lungs with such force that I let out an involuntary grunt, loud and long. There were no words, just a guttural yell of primal proportions. Then the heifer turned and ran into the chute, where Dr. Boyd snapped the head gate closed around her neck.

I was completely unhurt, though surprised beyond belief. Despite the abruptness of the impact, I had been hit harder during games of flag football, although never by a player who outweighed me by a thousand pounds. Fortunately, the heifer had no horns. Only the flat expanse of her forehead had impacted my chest. The fence had kept me from flying backward and ending up feet over tail amid the manure. I was simply stunned and remained standing in the corner with my arms spread across the top rails, crosslike. The only person more surprised than I, perhaps, was Dr. Boyd, who raced to the corner where I was standing, his eyes wide and entreating.

“You okay?” he asked, breathless, no doubt visions of legal liability flooding his consciousness.

“I’m fine. Just surprised, that’s all.”

The rest of the farm visit fades from my memory. Dr. Boyd did something with the foot after tying it up to the rails of the chute. But I cannot recall the details. The look in that cow’s eyes was too firmly imprinted on my brain to concentrate on much else.

*   *   *

The next call was five or six miles to the west. Dr. Boyd kept up a steady monologue while driving at breakneck speed down the snowy roads. I’m sure his purpose was to engender within me a level of continued enthusiasm for veterinary medicine. His ongoing discourse centered on the ways to best protect yourself from the sundry methods a half-ton animal has to disable you. But my mind was still abuzz with memories of the impact of that huge head.

As we drove onto the farm, Dr. Boyd was in the midst of assuring me that this call would go better and I would be in no danger. Our patient here was a cow that had recently freshened. Dr. Boyd had used this term as if I knew what it meant, which I did not. It was not until I asked for clarification that I learned it meant she had just had a calf. This particular beast had failed to pass the placenta after calving. Our task would be to remove the retained placenta. I knew these calls were designated in the appointment book simply as RPs. But I had no concept of what this entailed. We gathered the supplies and medications he thought he would need, placing them in a stainless-steel bucket, and headed into the barn.

My first sense was one of relief when I saw that the cows in the barn were lined up facing the outside walls, their heads in stanchions that kept them in place but allowed adequate room for them to move and tug at the hay that was placed in the mangers in front of them. No rodeos here, I thought.

My second sense was to wish I had one sense less. Filling the entire expanse of the barn was a powerful stench that would have made a coroner gag. To say that the barn reeked would be like saying that sugar is sweet, an offense to the definitive example of an entire genre of sensory experience. I realized that that smell could well be the measure against which all future uses of the word would forever be compared. It was the embodiment of decay; the scent equivalent of blasphemy; a putrid presence insinuating itself into my nostrils, my sinuses, my insides and filling me with a revulsion from which there was no escape. Holding my breath did not help. The smell was a living thing that appropriated my skin, burrowing into it, breaching it, and invading through it directly into my bloodstream. My eyes began to water and my nose to drip in protest. I wanted to turn and run to the relative freshness of the manure pond we had passed on the way into the barn, drinking deeply of the refreshing scents there, almost floral by comparison. But I had to follow Dr. Boyd, who was clearly ignoring the screaming voices of common sense that most beings with cognitive abilities and the power of ambulation would have heeded.

I did not think it possible for the smell to strengthen. But as we plunged deeper through the cloud of putrefaction, the smell grew larger and more intense. About the time I thought my consciousness would desert me, I saw, through the almost visible vale of odor, that Dr. Boyd was setting the stainless-steel bucket down behind a cow that was placidly pulling at the hay in front of her. She would have seemed normal had it not been for the purple-and-red trail of decaying tissue hanging from her backside. It was from this disgusting mass of rotting material that the smell was emanating.

“That is a retained placenta,” Dr. Boyd said, smiling.

I couldn’t conceive how he was able to smile. I could not bring myself to part my lips even to speak. I just nodded dumbly, my face squinched up in a feeble attempt to close my nostrils.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?”

I nodded again, thinking that I might have to deposit my breakfast into the gutter behind the cow. Gutters in dairy barns are ingenious inventions. In Minnesota, every dairy barn has the same system. The center aisle of the barn is about six feet wide. It is bordered on each side by a ten-inch-wide gutter, which is eight or ten inches deep. At the bottom of this trench is a conveyer-belt contraption that catches and transports the manure along the gutter, depositing it finally into a manure pond situated beside the barn. The manure pond is generally fifty or more feet across and perhaps four feet deep. To the contents of this pond are added water and a few other ingredients from a carefully developed recipe and mixed with the raw materials provided by the cows. Every so often, this swill is sucked up into the semi-size manure spreader and sprayed as fertilizer on the fields, a smelly job. It was a job I grew to despise when, several years after the visit described here, I worked for a summer on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. As a joke, the farmer I worked for had installed a diving board on the side of the manure pond.

“This is one of the worst jobs we have to do in veterinary medicine. Now you can understand why we hate to get these calls.” It was true. Many times I had seen his face fall when one of his clients called with this complaint. “What do you think of it?”

Finally, my speech centers recovered enough to respond. “It’s hideous, horrible. What in the world happens to cause this?”

“Well, most of the time after a calf is born, the placenta is delivered in just a few minutes. But occasionally, the connections between the placenta and the uterus don’t break down like they’re supposed to. They hang like that for a while and the tissues start to decay. We usually get the call to come out after they’ve been hanging there for three or four days—just at their worst.”

While he was describing the problem to me, I watched in horror as he slipped his right arm out of the sleeve of his coveralls, tucking the empty sleeve inside the waist. He then pulled on a shoulder-length plastic sleeve, working his fingers carefully down to the ends of the glove, and squeezed a generous portion of lubricant onto his now-gloved hand.

“What do you have to do to remove it?” I asked, afraid that I might find out.

“You just have to slip your hand up into the uterus and break down the connections that are holding the placenta in. I do this with my right hand and provide gentle traction on the tissue hanging out with my left. It feels kinda like separating Velcro.” He worked steadily as he talked, his arm inserted into the cow up to the shoulder. Before long, he let the vile three-foot-long section of placenta fall into the gutter behind the cow. He looked pleased with himself.

“How do you prevent this from happening?”

“Well, the textbooks all say that there’s nothing proven to effectively prevent retained placentas. It’s just something that happens.” He leaned in close and continued in a conspiratorial tone. “But I have found something that has worked in most cases to avoid these types of farm calls.”

“Really? What’s that?”

He looked up and down the barn, as if scouring a crowd for gunmen. The farmer had gone to retrieve some warm water for cleaning the stench from Dr. Boyd’s arms. Then he turned to me again and spoke in my ear.

“I teach the farmers how to do this on their own.” He held my gaze for a moment before breaking into laughter, proud of his wit.

“Now all we need is a quick shot of penicillin. Don’t want this to turn into an infection. That would be awful.” I handed him the huge barrel-size syringe filled with the thick white penicillin solution he had drawn up at the truck, and with a single deft motion, he expertly deposited liquid into the muscles of the cow’s thigh. “That ought to do it.”

He stepped back and pulled the plastic glove from his arm, turning it inside out as he did so. The farmer came back into the barn toting a bucket with steam rising above its rim. With a towel, Dr. Boyd began to rub the extraneous debris from his arms. In less time than it takes to describe it, the cow began to stiffen, her nose reaching up and forward and her tail pointing skyward. Then she began to shudder and tremble and from deep within her a bawl went out that sent shivers down my spine. Then she simply collapsed, falling onto her buckled legs as if she had been assassinated by an unseen sniper, and then she toppled onto her side. She did not breathe. She did not move. There was no spark of life in her eyes.

My reaction was to drop my jaw in astonishment. Dr. Boyd’s was to take off at a dead run like a sprinter off the blocks. With unspoken questions on our lips, the farmer and I watched him push through the closed door as if it was not there. He was out of sight for only a few seconds before he was racing once more toward us, drawing medication from a dark amber bottle with a syringe as he ran. When he reached the downed cow, he plunged the needle of the syringe deep into her neck, pushing the medication into her vein as fast as he could. Then he stood up, breathing hard, and stared silently at the cow, concern on his face.

Nothing happened for three or four seconds. Then the cow began to quiver again as she had before she’d collapsed. Another bellow escaped from her. Ten seconds later, she lifted her head and looked around like a drunk coming to after a binge. She seemed almost embarrassed, as if her collapse had been an unforgivable impropriety. She heaved herself back onto her chest before rising again. Within a minute of that injection, she was once again chewing idly at her hay.

I was dumbfounded, but Dr. Boyd turned to the farmer as if this was just what he had expected and gave instructions to him about aftercare for the cow and withdrawal times for the medications he had administered. Before I knew it, we had scrubbed our boots and were driving out of the farmyard.

“What happened?” I was almost shrieking. “Why did she go down like that? And how did you get her back so quickly?”

“That is called ‘anaphylactic shock.’ It doesn’t happen very often, but it is dramatic when it does. The cow had an allergic reaction to the penicillin. When it happened, I ran out to the truck and got some epinephrine. I knew I had to get it into her vein while her heart was still pumping, or we’d have no chance to save her. I wasn’t sure if I’d made it in time till she started coming around again.”

I have seen near-fatal anaphylactic allergic reactions only a few times in the twenty-three years I have been in practice. Each time, it has been as sudden, unexpected, and dramatic as the first time I witnessed it in the dead of a Minnesota winter in a dairy barn.

“That was amazing,” I whispered.

“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? And something else good about it.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It made you forget about the smell, didn’t it?”

“Nothing will ever make me forget that smell. Not ever! At least not until I’m as dead as that cow was.”

*   *   *

“We have one more call this morning before you have to get to class. This one is a milk fever case.”

“What is milk fever? An infection in the milk?” I asked.

Dr. Boyd chuckled. “No, it has nothing to do with the milk, actually. Many of the diseases were named before we knew what caused them. The old names usually stick, though. Milk fever is a calcium deficiency that often develops around calving time, when the cows begin to produce lots of milk. The lack of calcium makes it so the muscles stop working and the cows can’t walk or move. In many cases, the cows actually collapse. It can be life-threatening for both the cow and her calf, so for the farmers, it can be a double loss. At least that’s what I’m expecting to find. We’ll see when we get there.”