The Gift of Pets: Stories Only a Vet Could Tell

by Bruce R. Coston

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 himsel
f.

  “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.”

  The ride was enjoyed in silence, both of us breathing in the sweet fresh air from the windows we had left cracked to the icy air. I was still recovering from the olfactory onslaught, and frankly, Dr. Boyd was still pretty ripe. From the way he looked at me, I suspected he felt the same about me. As we neared our destination, he turned to address me.

  “Just so you know, this farmer is a bit unique.”

  “Oh yeah? In what way?”

  “Well, among Minnesota Lutherans, he’s particularly devout. I always am careful to mind my P’s and Q’s when I’m on his farm. He’s one of the few farmers I know who calls cow manure, manure. So watch yourself here.”

  “Dr. Boyd, have you ever heard me swear?”

  “No, I haven’t, but this is not the place to start.”

  Once on the farm, we loaded the ubiquitous stainless-steel bucket with supplies. Included among them were two or three of the brown glass bottles that I was accustomed to cleaning and sterilizing at the office. I had not known what their use was, and I was pleased to think I might find out. We then followed the farmer into the barn.

  It was clear immediately which of the many cows in the barn was our patient. While most of them were standing in their stanchions, absentmindedly chewing on wisps of hay, one heifer was lying flat out on her side, her fanny hanging over the gutter. Her breathing was shallow and her sides intermittently quivered with involuntary spasms that shuddered from her nose to her tail. She was clearly very close to calving, her huge abdomen bloated beyond belief.

  Dr. Boyd knelt beside her and listened to her heart with his stethoscope while at the same time feeling the pulse in her carotid artery. The cow’s eye followed him as he moved around her, though she was unable to move her neck to do so. He then turned his attention to her distended abdomen. Placing his clenched fist against her side, he pushed it deep into her belly, feeling the full-term calf bump up against it. I could see the cow’s side move as the calf responded to this insult. At least the calf was still alive, even if its mother appeared too far gone to save.

  Dr. Boyd positioned me at the cow’s head and gave me a dose of liquid in a one-liter amber bottle to which he had attached a long section of sterile plastic tubing. I watched as he slipped a needle the size of a sixpenny nail into the cow’s jugular vein. He gave me instructions to hold the bottle up at shoulder height as the fluid flowed through the tubing and into the dying cow.

  “That’s a calcium solution to replace this cow’s calcium deficits. It usually works pretty quickly and it’s almost a miracle. If it goes in too quickly, though, there can be some effects on the heart rhythm. So I’ll listen for a bit while it flows. If I tell you to slow it down, hold the bottle lower; hold it higher if I tell you to speed it up.”

  I watched as he listened through the stethoscope to the cow’s heart, directing the speed of calcium flow by positioning the height of the bottle. I was the orchestra, he the maestro. But it was a symphony only he could hear. He and the cow—who appeared to be feeling better already—I presume. Abruptly, he got up from kneeling beside the cow and began to strip
the clothing from his upper body, exposing a large but powerful pearly white Minnesota chest and belly.

  “Milk fever completely paralyzes the muscles in a cow. It leaves both the voluntary muscles and the involuntary muscles useless. This cow is ready to calve, but she can have no contractions with her calcium so low. This is actually helpful for me now because I can feel the position of the calf and turn it if necessary without fighting against the labor contractions. Uterine contractions can squeeze the heck out of your arm.” I saw a look of horror cross his face, and he turned to the farmer.

  “Pardon my French, Tom.” The farmer turned a cold, disapproving eye on him and nodded curtly.

  Dr. Boyd then lubricated his right arm with a sterile lubricant and lay down on the floor behind the cow, inserting his arm up to the shoulder into her birth canal. It was an unbelievable sight for me as a junior in high school: a man with eight years of higher education stripped to the waist on the floor of a frigid Minnesota dairy barn, his body bridging the manure-filled gutter and his arm buried to the hilt inside a downed cow. The irony of it hit me as I held the calcium solution aloft.

  If I still flirted with any temptations to become a dairy practitioner, that day had quashed it. This was the third in a series of career-defining calls. I resolved in my mind at that moment as I surveyed the scene before me that horse practice was my goal. What happened next, though, sealed the deal.

  I could sense that as the fluid flowed into that cow’s veins, her strength was returning. At first, she was just able to lift her head and gaze behind her at the man lying in the gutter. She seemed to be as surprised as I was. Then I realized that the muscles of her tail had begun to work, and she was able finally to flick it around at the annoying occurrences at her posterior. Since it had been hanging uselessly in the manure trench for many hours, this was particularly unpleasant for Dr. Boyd, who was having his chest and back painted liberally with the stuff. I was impressed with his self-control, for he avoided using a few choice words when confronted with this indignity.