D E Larsen DVM
The rain was heavy and it was hard to see in the darkness.
I was glad that I had put my rain pants and boots on when I left the house. I pulled on my raincoat as I stepped out of the truck. I was wet before I got the jacket on; the rain was drenching.
I peered at a blank wall of small fir trees and brush. Ayres had said to come to this corner of his place when he called this morning.
The phone had shocked me awake from a sound sleep; the clock said 3:00 a.m. It was Ayres on the line.
Ayres was an old logger with a small farm on Scott Mountain. He had lost an eye in the woods, and I always had trouble making eye contact with his good eye, rather than the glass one.
“Doc, I have a cow down up on the hill. She is in bad shape. Glenn Hill and I have been looking for her all night.”
I hung up, pulled myself out of bed and quickly dressed. The truck was cold at first but started to warm up as I headed down the hill to the highway through Sweet Home.
The rain seemed heavier as I turned up Scott Mountain Road. Ayres had reminded me not to come to the house. They would meet me at the upper corner of his place. The cow was close to that corner.
I slowed the truck as I turned the corner, straining through the night and heavy rain to get a glimpse of Ayres. There they were, a couple of shadowy figures moving out from under a large tree. Dressed in rain gear and both wearing wide brim hats, they looked like something out of a Jesse James movie.
I waved as I stepped around the back of the truck. Ayres and Glenn Hill, his neighbor, both waved back.
“Bring your stuff, and we will spread the wire so you can get through the fence.”
Having the fence spread for me was quite an honor. My grandfather would have tanned our hides if he’d seen any of us kids stretching the fence wire when we were growing up.
“This is that half Holstein cow,” Ayres said. “I raised her from a calf. She is about 5 or 6 years old. Calved yesterday. We have been looking for her all night. She rolled down the hill into a big old patch of Himalayan berry vines. One hell of a fix; she is flat out, Doc.”
I grabbed the bucket filled with supplies and headed across the ditch full of runoff, ducking through the barbed wire that Ayres and Glenn held apart for me. Ayres shined his flashlight down into a tunnel gouged into the briar patch, maybe 30 feet down the hill. I peered in. You could see the cow. She was lucky her head was uphill; probably why she was still alive.
“How the hell did you find her?” I asked.
“Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. We looked all night in this damn rain; almost gave up but finally worked our way up to this corner. Glenn is the one who noticed this hole in the brush. I was surprised to see her down there.”
With a deep breath, I squatted down, and sort of duck walked down the tunnel of briers to the cow. Her head was up, allowing the rumen gas to escape. If her head was downhill, she would’ve been dead already.
The rain clothes provided protection from more than just the constant rain. There was minimal room, and every stray movement was met with a tangle of berry vines.
My exam was very cursory. I;d already made my diagnosis: milk fever. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to miss something obvious.
The cow’s temperature was low, 98°, her udder normal, no vaginal discharge. A rectal exam showed firm dry stool. All this was consistent with the diagnosis.
The final confirmation would be the patient’s response to treatment.
I grasped her nostrils with my nose tongs and pulled her head back, tying the tongs to the hock with a quick release knot. I opened a bottle of calcium and secured the IV set to the top. Everything was sterile, but that was sort of a joke at this point.
The rain was still heavy, but the vines caught the downpour and converted it to large heavy drops. With this mud and rain, it was impossible to keep things clean.
I took the needle out of the autoclaved pouch and leaned against her neck to further stabilize her. Holding the jugular vein with my left hand, needle in my right hand, held by thumb and forefinger. I struck the jugular with the heel of my right hand twice in a rapid motion and then turned my hand and seated the needle into the vein on the third stroke. Releasing my grip on the needle as it passed through the skin kept it from piercing through the vein. Then I quickly threaded it down the vein.
I’d learned this technique when I worked in the feedlots while in school.
Hooking the IV set to the needle, I started the infusion at a rapid rate for the first bottle. Giving it too fast could cause a cardiac arrest – a dead cow. It seldom happened to a cow this far advanced, her blood calcium could be below 4.0.
I leaned back and rested a little, looking at Ayres. He was concerned, hadn’t said a word, just held the flashlight and watched.
“Milk fever!” I said. “Not an uncommon condition in older dairy cows. She would have been dead in the morning. Good thing you found her.”
“Is she going be OK?”
“I think you will be surprised. Might take a couple of bottles here and a little time but there is a good chance she will walk out of here.”
When the first bottle was done, she was a little more alert but not struggling against the restraint. I started the second bottle a little slower. I couldn’t decide which was worse, the torrential downpour or the constant large drops falling out of the berry bushes.
By the time the second bottle was done, the cow was struggling against the nose tongs, clearly feeling better.
I pulled the needle out and put everything back into the bucket. I moved around to her side and pulled the free end of the rope, this released her nose. Her head swung around and she almost knocked me down. I was able to pull the nose tongs out of her nose. She kicked and righted herself to her sternum. Then in one motion, sprung to her feet and raced up the hill and out the tunnel.
Glenn, who was watching from the entrance, had to jump out of her way. Ayres went flying one direction, and I went the other. The bucket and its contents were scattered. When I got off my back, Ayres was still unhooking himself from the briers.
“Damn, glad I was dressed for the rain,” he said as he gathered the light and started to give me a hand.
I grabbed the bucket, a little dented now, and started putting things back into it. Everything was there, except the needle. Before me was a mire of mud, cow tracks, and footprints. I swept my hands across the wet ground.
“What are you looking for?
“I lost the needle. Should be here somewhere.”
Ayres helped me look for a minute or so then looked at me with his one good eye and asked, “Is it valuable?”
His eyebrow over his good eye raised up a little for emphasis.
“No, not valuable, just not the kind of thing you don’t want to leave behind.”
“Look Doc, it’s 3:00 in the morning, raining like the devil. Here we are in the middle of large brier patch at the far corner of my place. There isn’t going to be anybody in here for the next 100 years. Just leave it.”
Made sense to me. Besides I had a full day ahead of me. So I left the needle. We crawled up the tunnel and into the drenching rain. It felt good to stand up straight again.
Glenn was still standing there, looking somewhat like a drowned rat.
“That was some show. What did you give her Doc? I might need some of that stuff.”
I crawled back through the fence and stuffed things into the truck. I would have a chore cleaning things up in the morning. I peeled off my raincoat, just about as wet inside as outside.
Pulling myself into the truck and shut the door. Dry at last. This would be a short night tonight, I thought, as I started up the hill, looking for a spot to turn around.
About 5 years later Ayres gave me a call to look at his old ram. Flies were gathered around an ugly spot on the side of the ram’s head, where the tip of his horn was buried in the skin. A full curl plus some; this old ram would be a trophy in the wild.
Ayres had been a little embarrassed about having me look at the old guy.
“He probably ain’t worth the cost of the call, poor old guy. Probably should just put him out of his misery,” Ayres had said when called.
I looked the ram over.
“Sure enough, the tip of that horn is buried in the skin. We probably don’t want to take the whole horn off; that would be pretty hard on a ram this old. I should be able just to trim the end and solve the problem for a couple of years.”
“Couple of years? This guy will be lucky to survive the winter.”
It was an easy task to trim off the tip of the horn off with a wire saw and clean the wound.
Ayres leaned on the fence and watched as I turned the old ram out into the pasture.
“Do you remember that night that you lost that needle up in that brier patch four or five years ago?”
“Do I remember? That was quite a night, pretty hard to forget.”
“Well, a couple of months ago I decided to clear some brush up in that corner. Don’t know why. Sure don’t need any more land. I can’t do as much as I used to do.
“I was working along, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t step right on that needle! It went through the sole of my boot, through my foot and poked out the top of my boot.
“Damn, that hurt! I sat down and pulled it out. That hurt like hell too.”
“I was a real mess for a while. Limped around for better than a week. I was going to go to the doctor and get a tetanus shot but it started to feel better, so I forgot about that. Must have been OK, I’m still alive. Maybe because that was a sterile needle?’
“I don’t know, Ayres. That needle couldn’t have been too sterile, lying in the mud and dirt for the last few years.”
“Well, no matter now. I was the one who wanted you to leave it so I could get back to bed.”