Seventeen Bites, From the Archives

 D. E. Larsen, DVM

Mrs. Wilson was standing by the exam table holding her cat, Fluffy, in her arms. Fluffy was an average-sized female cat with long gray hair and striking blue eyes.

“What’s up with Fluffy this morning, Mrs. Wilson?” I asked.

“She has been sick for several days,” Mrs. Wilson said. “She hasn’t eaten a bit for at least two days, and this morning she started vomiting. I am sick with worry.”

“Let’s set her on the table, and I will get a look at her,” I said.

“Can you get a blanket for her,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Fluffy is used to soft surfaces, and that table looks cold and hard.”

Joleen retrieved a soft kennel mat and placed it on the table. Then she pried Fluffy from Mrs. Wilson’s arms. 

“She will be safer on the table if I hold her,” Joleen said as she directed Mrs. Wilson to a chair.

I petted Fluffy, and she did not respond to the attention. Opening her mouth, her oral membranes were dry, with some whitish mucus at the corners of her mouth. I picked up the skin on her back over her shoulder blades. It almost stood up on its own, slowly sliding back to a normal position.

Palpating Fluffy’s abdomen revealed a painful bladder. I squeezed the bladder slightly, and Fluffy cried a bit and deposited a few drops of bloody urine on the exam table. Mrs. Wilson was out of her chair and at the table to comfort Fluffy.

“We need to get some blood and urine out of Fluffy,” I said. “She obviously is very dehydrated. It might be wise to keep her overnight for some IV fluids and any other needed treatment.”

“I am not going to leave Fluffy overnight, Doctor Larsen,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“This could be a serious illness,” I said. “Treating her as an outpatient could be difficult and threaten her life.”

“If Fluffy is going to die, she is going to die at home,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I can leave her for a few hours while you do your blood work and treatments, but she is not going to be left here overnight.”

“Let me get a look at these couple of drops of urine real quick,” I said. “I just want to see if the kidneys are working.”

The urine had many red blood cells, white blood cells, and some crystals. The good thing was the concentration was very high, so we probably had functional kidneys.

“Okay, Mrs. Wilson, we can try to work within your limitations,” I said. “It looks like Fluffy is probably not in kidney failure. But she does have a serious urinary tract infection. We will do some blood work to make sure my initial assessment is accurate and get some urine for a urine culture. For her dehydration, we will give some fluids by subcutaneous injection. That is less than ideal but may be functional. It will leave a large squishy lump on her back, and her elbows will be baggy this evening. Then we can recheck her in the morning.”

We kept Fluffy and started by drawing blood and getting some urine from her bladder with a needle poke.

Her blood and urine showed a significant urinary tract infection, and we started a urine culture. 

In the cat, lower urinary tract disease is usually caused by diet-related issues and is seldom complicated by infection. Fluffy’s prognosis was pretty favorable with antibiotics, fluids, and a special diet.

Joleen had the treatment table set up to give Fluffy some subcutaneous fluids. We gave Fluffy an injection of amoxicillin in her kennel and then moved her to the treatment table for her fluids.

I commonly treated cats with fluids administered under their skin. It was a fast procedure and generally well tolerated by the cat. It was satisfactory in mild disease, but I would have preferred to have Fluffy on an IV due to the degree of dehydration. 

I stuck a sixteen gauge needle into the skin on her back, and Joleen started the fluids. I stood holding Fluffy by the nape of her neck, and Joleen was applying some pressure to the bag of fluids. We made some idle conversation as Joleen watched the fluids in the bag.

“How much do you want to give her?” Joleen asked.

Suddenly, Fluffy exploded!

Like is visualized in cartoons, Fluffy made circles around and around my arm, starting at my wrist, and in a brief second, she was at my shoulder. I managed to grab her and return her to the table.

“Are you okay?” Joleen asked.

“I think so,” I said. “I think she just scratched me.”

“I don’t think so,” Joleen said. “I think those are bite marks.”

We examined my right arm and my right side. Many bite wounds were evident on my arm and the side of my chest.

“I guess I better get a doctor to look at these,” I said. “The only animal that has ever put me in the hospital was a cat.”

I took a couple of cephalexin capsules and headed for the doctor’s office. They counted seventeen bites on my arm and my side.

“Do you think you should flush these wounds?” I asked the doctor. 

“I’ll have the nurse scrub these really well, and we will get you started on some Augmentin,” the doctor said. “That will be more effective than the cephalexin that you took. I think that should take care of things for you.”

I was cleaned up and returned to the office just in time to send Fluffy home.

“I hope Fluffy was okay for you, Doctor Larsen,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“Well, actually, she objected to the subQ fluids a bit,” I said. “In fact, she bit me seventeen times on my arm and the side of my chest.”

I held up my arm for her inspection.

“Oh my, Fluffy, did that mean man upset you?” Mrs. Wilson asked Fluffy as she reached into the kennel to console her.

“Well, we will be a little more cautious with Fluffy in the future,” I said. “We should recheck her in the morning. If things are improved, we will repeat the fluids and antibiotic injection and set you up with medication for home. And we will need to get her on a special diet for a time.”

“Whatever you say, Doctor,” Mrs. Wilson said. “We just want our little Fluffy to be well.”

“Well, if you remember, I wanted to keep her on an IV overnight,” I said. “This treatment is our second choice, and hopefully, it will work out okay.”

“Yes, I remember, but Fluffy will be much happier at home tonight,” Mrs. Wilson said.

***

Fluffy was much improved in the morning. We repeated the fluids, but this time we had Fluffy restrained in a cat bag. The urine culture showed an E. coli infection in the urinary bladder.

Fluffy went on the heal and returned to her old self. But she remained on my naughty list.

My wounds healed uneventfully.

Photo by Cocoparisienne/Pixabay

Another Witch, Another February, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

I turned into the old farm’s long driveway off of Cochran Creek Road, north of Brownsville. I had been here only a couple of times before. The farm did have some character, with an old barn nestled up against a hillside, and an old trailer not far from the barn that served as the living quarters.

Duane had lost his wife some years ago and lived by himself now. They had planned to build a house, but I think Duane was content to live in the trailer for now. He was a well-built guy whose black hair was accented by patches of gray at both temples.

This February has been particularly wet, with heavy rains almost every day. Massive dark clouds filled the sky this afternoon.

Duane had called about a cow with some sort of a prolapse. But he didn’t leave any instructions about where he had the cow. We stopped at the corral that was out by the main road. We had worked cows in this corral before.

“I hope she’s not in this corral, it looks like it is a sea of mud from the rains,” I said more to myself than to Joleen. “At least it is not freezing.”

“Oh no,” Joleen said as we pulled up to the corral. “That mud must be a foot deep. The good thing is there is no cow, and I don’t see Duane.”

“Let’s go on up to the barn,” I said. “I don’t know if he uses it except for picture taking, but if he does, we might be undercover if these clouds decide to dump buckets on us.”

At one time, it had been a functional barn. Now it was picturesque but aged almost beyond use. Himalayan briers reached high on the sides of the barn. There were a few openings through the vines that were kept open by foot traffic. There were multiple holes visible in the roof from missing shingles, and the barn wood was weathered by time to a delicate steel gray. The barn looked like it should grace a canvas in someone’s living room.

Duane stepped out from under the barn’s front part and waited for us in a pathway through the berry vines. The barn sat against the hill, and the slope provided enough room under the front of the barn for a small corral. At least we would be dry.

A large Santa Gertrudis cow stood in the middle of the corral. She looked less than happy at all the attention she was getting. There was nowhere for her to go in the cramped space, but the big red cow turned a few circles looking. I slipped a rope over her head.  The only place to tie her was to the support beam in the corral center. 

“I hope she doesn’t pull the barn down on top of us,” Joleen said as I started an exam on the old cow.

She suffered from a problem that I had often seen in these Brahman-Cross breeds. As they approached the calving date, their cervix becomes enlarged and inflamed. Just this distended cervix hung from her vulva.

“This shouldn’t be much of a problem to fix,” I said to Duane. “But you are going to have to watch her close until she delivers.”

I knew from experience that Duane was not one of those guys who called at 3:00 in the morning with a calving problem. I would have to do a closure on this vulva so that it would tear out quickly if she goes into labor.

Joleen sat out the necessary supplies to do an epidural injection for anesthesia to the vulva. I prepped a small area over her spine, where the tail joined the sacrum. The cow was standing quietly. Standing on her right rear, I grasped the tail with my left hand and palpated for the space between the bones that would allow access for the needle into the spinal canal. With a finger of my right hand on the site, I popped a needle into the space.

The cow jumped. Almost in slow motion, I watched her right leg come up and felt her hock brush my left thigh. In younger days, I maybe could have responded to this stimulus. Now I just sort of observed the symmetry of motion. Her lower leg moved across my thigh roughly. Finally, after a brief eternity, her hoof caught my inner thigh. She extended her leg briskly.

Feeling somewhat like a golf ball that flies into the air off the clubface, I am launched in a sloppy cartwheel toward the distant tangle of berry vines. The next thing I know, I’m picking myself up. Joleen, hushed and concerned, is helping me up, unhooking the grasping vines.

“You damn witch!” I say to the cow, picturing a large pile of hamburger. My thigh is throbbing. It takes no small amount of force to knock me ten or twelve feet.

I get another rope and tie the cow a little more securely. I finish the epidural injection and clean and replace the cervix quickly. My only thought is to get ice on my thigh. I throw a quick closure across the vulva using hog rings and small cotton umbilical tape. The hog rings only pinch a small piece of skin, they will easily tear out with a slight push from mamma.

“She should be able to tear this out when she calves, but you need to watch her closely,” I instruct Duane as we hastily throw things back into the truck. I grab an ice pack out of the cooler and set it on my thigh as I start to pull out of the barnyard.

Spotting a cow out in the field with a pair of feet sticking out of the vulva. Jolene opens her window and hollers at Duane.

“How long has she been in labor?”

“Damnit, Joleen, I need to get this leg iced,” I say with a frown.

“You can handle that, can’t you?” I ask Duane. “She probably will pop that out with no problem.”

“Oh sure, that is no problem for me,” Duane says. “I didn’t even know she was close.”

My thigh has turned multiple shades of red by the time we get back to the office in Sweet Home. It is not the first time I’ve been kicked, and probably won’t be the last. It always seems that it is my left thigh. I’ll limp for a few days with this one.

Photo by Helena Lopes from PexelsCopy

Hallowed Ground, Prefaced, From the Archives

Preface

  I have posted this story before on this blog, but it is the most fitting story I have for a Memorial Day post. It speaks to the tremendous sacrifice suffered from a small group of farm families living along the banks of Catching Creek, a small tributary to the Coquille River.

I grew up in Oregon’s Coquille River Valley in the 1940s and 1950s. After a stretch in the US Army from 1965 to 1969, I returned to school and graduated from Colorado State University School of Veterinary Medicine in 1975. I practiced in the foothills of the Oregon Cascade Mountains for 40 years.

The loss of my close childhood friend, Don Miller, was the driving force for my return to school following my tour in the US Army.

             Dave Larsen

Hallowed Ground

D. E. Larsen, DVM

  We hurried across the cow bridge at the upper end of Uncle Dutch’s farm. We were in a hurry because we planned to hunt up to the Bartlett farm this afternoon. This would require us to cross Catching Creek one more time, and that crossing would have no bridge. Don Miller and I were in the fall of our 8th-grade year. Living on neighboring farms out of Myrtle Point, we hunted ducks and anything else along the creek as often as we could.

  Don was a little smaller than I, but we were both stout young men and growing as we hurried along. I had on pair of hand-me-down hip boots. Don was in tennis shoes. That meant that I would have to carry Don across the creek piggyback. 

 As we rushed across the field toward Bartlett’s lower ground, a ruffed grouse sprang from the creek bank. We generally collected several wood ducks on these evening hunts. Occasionally, we would run into a flock of mallards. If we were lucky, a China rooster would cross our path. But this grouse was an unexpected surprise, and he was quickly dispatched.

  We had been hunting the creek for a couple of seasons now, and we were crack shots with our shotguns. We knew every riffle in the stream, and we knew where we could expect ducks. Most of the time, we didn’t have enough time to get this far up the creek. We would have to hurry to get back to our fields to shot ducks as they came back down the creek heading to roost in the swamp near town.

  When we came to the creek crossing, I pulled my boots up, and Don jumped on my back. With Don holding both shotguns, we crossed the creek with no problems. We had worried about this ford when we were planning to hunt higher in the creek. We hunted along the creek in Bartlett’s lower field, jumping a group of mallards. Don and I both added a large mallard drake to our bag. This was a great addition to our typical hunt.

  As we headed back down the creek, I stumbled while carrying Don across the ford. We came close to ending up in the water. I did recover my balance and ran the last few steps to the far bank. We sat and rested and laughed at the near disaster. We knew it would have made the trip down the creek a chilly walk.

  We had about a mile to go. We didn’t need to follow the creek going down. We had jumped all the ducks on the way up the creek. We just wanted to get to our field at the base of the Cowhorn (our field was named for its shape, the Cowhorn on our side of the creek, and Horseshoe Bend on Uncle Dutch’s side). The ducks flying down the creek in the evening would cross this field every evening. We seldom hit a duck here. They were high and flying fast, but it gave us a lot of fun shooting, and just maybe we would get one.

  As we reached the field, we had to follow the creek a short distance to reach our shooting area. We both stopped at the same time. There were riffles, many of them, in a quiet area of the creek. This had to mean a whole flock of ducks. We spread apart, crouched a little, and snuck along the creek bank. Expecting to see the sky fill with ducks, we burst into an open grassy area of the bank, guns at the ready.

  There were no ducks. A cow was floundering in the water. She seemed unable to recover her footing and was struggling to keep her head above water. I laid my shotgun and game bag down, pulled up my boots, and entered the creek to hold her head.

  “Don, run over to Lundy’s and call Dad,” I shouted to Don.

  He dropped his gear and took off like a shot. 

  The cow settled down a little with me holding her head. It was going to be 20 or maybe 30 minutes before anybody got here. I was glad I had my hip boots.

  The first to arrive was Vern Lundy and Don. They drove in Vern’s old pickup. Dad was on his way with the tractor, an old Ferguson, a small but function tractor. Next to arrive was Uncle Dutch and Grandpa. They stopped and tended the gate while Dad drove the tractor through the gate and up to the creek bank.

  Dad came into the water with me, standing on the other side of the cows head. He had a large cotton tow-rope.

  “We are going to tie this around her neck and pull her out with the tractor,” he said.

 “Won’t that break her neck?” I asked.

  “Not if we do it right, now you watch. We are going to tie a bowline with the knot placed under her chin. The rope will be tight against the back of her head,” he said as demonstrated the knot and the placement of the rope. 

  When he was done, he looked at me and said, “Savvy?”

  “Savvy!” I replied

  “Now you do it,” he said as he undid his knot and handed me the rope.

  With little problem, I wrapped the rope and around her neck, pulled it tight against the back of her head and ears, and tied a bowline that fit under her chin.

  “Good,” Dad said, “Now, hold her head until I start pulling her, then you move out of the way, so you are not in the bite of the rope in case it breaks or something.”

  With the rope secured to the tractor, Dad started pulling the cow, I moved away, and the tractor pulled the cow up the grassy bank and up to a level spot in the field. The men were quick to untie her and help position her half sitting up. I waded to shore, still thankful that I was dry. 

  “The vet is on his way, he should be here before too long,” Grandpa said.

  “I have to get heading for home, or it will be dark by the time I get there,” Don said as he picked up his shotgun and ducks.

  I watched as Don started across the Cowhorn, headed for Felcher Lane, that would lead him to his house. We both knew that we hunted and fished on hallowed ground. Less than 20 years before, this same ground was covered by Phil Bartlett, who was lost when he crashed his Navy fighter plane into a mountain on a night mission in the Pacific. Stan Felsher also covered this same ground, he died in the Batan Death March. Bayoneted by a Japanese soldier while on a detail to gather firewood. Bob Lundy was decorated for his service on a flight crew in the Pacific, and my Uncle Ernie was a bomber pilot. I had several cousins who fought in Korea, a couple of them in the thick of things. 

  What we did not know was that Don had but 7 years left to live. He would be killed by a 50 caliber round in a friendly fire misadventure in Vietnam. I received that news in a letter from Mom while I was stationed in Korea. This was, indeed, hallowed ground. A tremendous sacrifice of young men from such a small area of close-knit farm families.

  Dr. Haug, the veterinarian, arrived shortly. He hurried through a quick exam and started an IV, I guessed he probably had dinner waiting. When Dad asked him what he thought about the cow being in the creek, he was pretty brief. “The creek just got in her way as she was going down, this cow has milk fever,” he said.

  Dr. Haug finished the second bottle and put his stuff away. Slapping the cow on her back, she was quick to right herself and get to her feet. Everybody was relieved.

  “It probably would be a good idea to put her in the barn tonight, that will help her warm-up. It is unlikely that she will go down again, but if she does, there won’t be any duck hunters to find her tonight,” Dr. Haug said, glancing at me with a smile.

  Dad and Uncle Dutch started the cow toward the barn, I knew I would be expected to finish the job. I picked up my shotgun and game bag, and as I passed Dr. Haug, I asked, “Which do you want, the mallard drake or the ruffed grouse.”

  He was quick to take the grouse, smiled, and said, “Thanks,” as he got into his truck and headed to the gate. I hurried to catch up to the cow.

Epilogue:

Stan Felsher:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/56788026/stanley-r_-felsher/photo

Phil Bartlett:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/115949598/phillip-f-bartlett

Don Miller:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/103386505/donald-gene-miller

http://thewall-usa.com/info.asp?recid=35282