Lambs and Crab Legs

Lambs and Crab Legs 

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Gus Johansen came through the clinic door in a rush. His stocking cap was in his hand, and his gray hair was sticking out in every direction. Gus was a large man who came from Norway as a young man. He was a king crab fisherman who had a small sheep ranch a little way out of Enumclaw. 

“Doc, I am glad I got you,” Gus said, almost out of breath. “I have a ewe that is ready to lamb. Her insides are pushing out. She is so large, there have to be 3 lambs in there. I have never seen a ewe so large.”

“Sounds like I should get a look at her,” I said. “I haven’t been to your place Gus, can you leave your address, and I can get out there this afternoon.”

“We brought her with us in the little trailer,” Gus said. “I hate to pressure you, Doc, but I have to leave to go fishing tomorrow. I can’t leave this problem for Ella to deal with alone.”

“Okay, pull around back, and we will unload her into one of the large dog runs,” I said. “I will be able to look at her in 20 minutes or so. I have to finish the morning treatments on a couple of dogs in the hospital here. The girls will get her cleaned up during the time.”

I sent Kathy out to help unload the ewe and get her rear end clipped and scrubbed. I was guessing he was talking about a prolapsed vagina. A ewe with large twins or triplets made it almost common for them to prolapse their vagina before delivery. They would just run out of room in their abdomen.

“Boy, your description was pretty close,” I said to Gus as I looked at the ewe. Her entire vagina was prolapsed, with the cervix bulging a little. There was content in this prolapse, maybe the bladder, some intestines, or maybe one of the lambs. 

“Gus, it looks like she is pretty close to lambing,” I said. “She is dripping milk, and the mucus plug is gone from the cervix. If we are up against a wall, time-wise, it might be better to just take these lambs with a C-Section. There is a slight risk in doing that, these lambs could be early, and we could have problems saving them.”

“I was hoping you would take them now, Doc,” Gus said. “This is one of Ella’s favorite ewes. The lambs would be nice, but the ewe is our biggest concern. And I am going to be gone for at least 2 weeks. I want to make sure Ella doesn’t have to deal with this.”

“You have my home number,” I said. “Ella can call me any time if she has problems while you are gone. She needs to know that I am okay with her calling.”

Gus went back to the car to discuss the decision with Ella. This would make a busy morning for me, but it will be better than working with a hysterical Ella at midnight.

“I think we want you to do a C-Section, Doc,” Gus said. “Can you do that now?”

“Yes, we will do it right now,” I said. “I will only use local anesthesia, so she will be able to go home just about any time after we are done. If you and Ella want to stay and watch, that is fine.”

“Oh, no, you don’t want her here,” Gus said, jerking his head toward Ella in the car. “We will go home and do a few chores and get set up for a couple of lambs. Will you be done by noon?”

“This is not going to take me very long,” I said. “And I am going to get started right away. And Gus, my guess is there are 3 lambs.”

“That will be nice,” Gus said. “She is a good momma, but we might have to bummer one them. That will keep Ella busy while I am gone.”

“So, let’s get a surgery pack, towels, and a drape, gloves, and some Lidocaine,” I said to Kathy as Gus and Ella backed the trailer around so they could leave.

We rolled the ewe on her back and clipped and prepped her belly. I planned and ventral midline incision right in front of her udder. 

It was quite a sight with her on her back. She had one large belly.

C-Sections on ewes are usually a snap. With the ventral midline approach, the lambs are within easy reach. The surgery is often brief.

With everything set up and the incision site blocked with Lidocaine, I made the incision. The incision was complicated by a large milk vein coursing its tortuous path right up the midline. I would have to dodge it through the entire procedure.

One lamb kicked me as soon as I entered the abdomen. I pulled his head up out of the incision and incised the uterus over his head. Grabbing him behind the ears, I pulled him out. He was shaking his head before I even let go of him.

I found another lamb in the same uterine horn as soon as I reached back into the uterus. I grabbed him by the hind legs and pulled him out of the same uterine incision. By now, we had all the girls from the office out to take a lamb as I handed him off.

I explored this right horn of the uterus to make sure there was not another lamb there. Sometimes I found it easier to make a second incision on the opposite uterine horn, but this time there was plenty of room to reach the left side. I immediately ran into the head of the third lamb.

“I knew there would be three of them with the size of this belly,” I said as I extracted the third lamb.

“You better check for another one,” Kathy said. “You know what happened to Dr. Jack a while back.”

I smiled as I handed off the third lamb.

“Yes, I will check, but the odds against having 4 lambs are pretty high.”

I ran my hand into the depths of the left uterine horn, trying to remove some of the membranes.  And then this guy kicked me. I looked at Kathy and smiled.

“There is another one!” She said. “Can I have it? Please! Ella will be too busy with 3. They will never suspect there were 4.”

“Kathy, you know we could never do that,” I said as I pulled the 4th lamb out of the incision. “I would never be able to talk to Gus with a straight face.”

With all the pulling and tugging on the lambs, the vaginal prolapse had corrected itself. 

“She is going to have so much room in this belly she won’t know what to do with it,” I said.

I closed the four-inch uterine incision with number 2 Dexon and the linea alba with the same suture, using a sliding mattress on the linea alba. After closing the skin, she was ready to go.

We rolled her over onto her side, and she just kept on going and landed on her feet. She immediately turned her attention to the lambs.

“You go in and give Gus a call,” I said to Kathy.

“They said they had chores to do,” Kathy said.

“That was just so they wouldn’t have to watch,” I said. “Ella will be home sitting by the phone. I bet it won’t ring twice.”

I was right, of course. Gus and Ella pulled into the driveway in less than 10 minutes. They were all smiles when they got out of the car. And then they noticed that there were 4 lambs.

“There were 4 lambs, and they are not tiny ones,” Gus said as Ella opened the gate and went in to hug the ewe and look at the lambs.

“Do you think she can raise all 4 lambs?” Ella asked. 

“I would sure let her give it a try,” I said. “You might need to supplement them with a bottle, but they will benefit from being with mom. Supplement them with a little milk replacer and get them eating some pellets early; they will do better than if you make a bummer out of one or two of them.”

“Give me a call when you get home, Gus,” I said. “I will run out then and take the sutures out of her. It might be a day or two before she passes her membranes. You have Ella give me a call if she has any concerns about how things are going.”

“Oh, we brought you a bag of a little something and a bag for the girls, also,” Ella said as she retrieved a couple of full grocery bags from the back seat.

They loaded up and headed home as one happy group.

I looked in the bags as they pulled out of the driveway, two bags stuffed full of frozen king crab legs.

Photo by skitterphoto on Pexels

Harry’s Place

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Hi Doc, I’m glad you could come this morning,” Harry said as he stepped out of the mobile home into the morning mist. “I have a couple of new calves with diarrhea. They are still up and around, but I don’t want to take a chance on losing them.”

A couple of young girls followed Harry out of the house as he motioned me toward a small shed down the trail. The morning mist was getting heavier, almost a light rain, and there was still some fog that hung over the river. 

Harry was an older man than I, probably in his 50s. Tall with thick dark hair that had just a touch of gray. His features were rugged, telling of hard work in his life. His voice was different for Western Oregon, a strong Southern drawl was my first impression, but that didn’t really fit. Maybe from the Appalachian regions, I was guessing now.

“Did you get these calves from the sale?” I asked. 

“No, I know a guy who got them from a dairy, out in the valley,” Harry said. “I know better than to buy those poor baby calves at the sale barn. They get exposed to every bug in the county. Some of them don’t last a week.”

I started looking the calves over. They were bouncing around and sucking on my pants leg or anything else they could get their mouth around. Temperatures were normal, and their navels were okay and looked like they had been treated with iodine. The shed was not much, but it was watertight and windproof.

The girls were joined by a boy now. They were hanging on the fence rails of the calf pen as I was trying to crawl back out. I don’t think Harry had stopped talking the whole time I was looking at the calves. I admit that I am not always a good listener when I am working, but he was talking about raising calves in North Carolina, Tennessee, or someplace back there.

“Harry, I think these calves are going to be fine with a little medication,” I said. “They are probably just a little upset with the move and the change from milk to milk replacer. I am going to give them a dose of BoSe, which is a Selenium and Vitamin E supplement that calves need here, some antibiotic tablets, and a couple of doses of oral fluids to use this evening and in the morning instead of their milk replacer. That will give their gut a chance to rest a bit.”

After treating the calves and giving Harry the additional medication, we started walking back to the truck. Harry proved to be much more of a talker than I was. 

When we got to the truck, and I put things away, got out of my boots and coveralls, Harry was still standing there in the rain with no hat, talking away.

“We come here to take care of these kids,” Harry says. “Their father died last year, and then their mother, our daughter, was killed in a car accident this summer.”

I didn’t know what to say, I wished then that I had been listening to him a little better when he was talking earlier. What kind of a man, a couple, does it take to pull up roots to take care of their grandkids. And what an undertaking, to raise young kids at his age. 

Harry didn’t let my lack of response slow him much. He continued to talk. The rain was dripping off his eyebrows and his nose, he didn’t notice. We stood there in the rain, my schedule faded into the background, and Harry talked, I listened. My respect for the man grew by the minute, which probably came close to an hour.

Harry had a lot of knowledge of livestock, but it was from a background that was not familiar to me. Most of his understanding seemed close to correct, but just seemed based on a different set of standards than I was used to, sort of like something you would read in Fox Fire. 

The kids would come and go, mostly because they tired of standing in the rain. Harry would put a hand on their head or shoulders as they stood close, but it did not slow his conversation. We were both soaked when I finally got back into the truck.

I would see Harry from time to time, for little things mostly, but it was a couple of years before he called for some cow work. He had moved to a small farm on Hamilton Creek at the time. He had a heifer that needed to be dehorned.

Harry and his crew were racing to the barn as I came to the end of the long driveway. The kids were older now, and they were actually helping instead of just being in the way. I know how that made them feel because I was always at the barn from the time I was three. I always felt almost grown-up when I could actually do something helpful.

“I got this heifer for an excellent price,” Harry said. “She is pretty handy with those horns, though. I don’t know why people don’t get them off when they are babies? It is so much easier then.”

“This won’t be a problem for her,” I said. “We are early enough that flies won’t be a problem and late enough to be done with most of the rain.”

“The kids are worried that it is going to be painful,” Harry said.

“I will show them how to give an injection of Lidocaine,” I said. “We will numb these horns up, and she won’t feel a thing.”

Deshawnda and Nathan had the heifer in her stanchion and a rope halter on the heifer already. I think they didn’t want me to use my nose tongs. I pulled the head to the right and tied the lead rope to hold it there.

I drew up 10 ccs of Lidocaine in a syringe and pointed to the four points I was going to inject to completely deaden the horn. Actually, when I did a group of heifers, I would only block the main nerve at the base of the horn at the 6:00 o’clock position. The injections were completed effortlessly with the head well secured.

“This is going to smell a little bit, sort of like burnt bone,” I said as I place an OB wire saw around the base of the horn.

I leaned back, putting a lot of my weight on the wire. I wanted to go quick, but also I wanted the wire to get hot enough that there would be little or no blood. 

With a number of long strokes of the wire saw, the horn popped off. It was a clean-cut, and the vessels were sealed from the heat of the wire, and not a drop of blood for the audience. The frontal sinus was open, leaving a gaping hole, which was typical for this age of heifer.

Harry picked up the horn from the ground and glanced at it. His face fell as he dropped the horn back to the ground.

“Oh no,” Harry said as he turned and stepped into the barn.

I repeated the process on the other horn and pulled all the vessels so there would be no bleeding. I covered the openings to the frontal sinus with a patch of filter paper. It would only last a couple of days and probably served no real purpose, but I thought it might make Harry feel better.

I was just finishing up when Harry came back from the barn.

“How bad is it, Doc?” Harry asked. “She is such a nice heifer, it makes me sick.”

“How bad is what, Harry?” I asked.

“The Hollow Horn,” Harry said. “I saw the horn, how bad do you think it is going to be for her?”

“Harry, in a heifer of this age, a hollow horn is normal anatomy,” I said. “The frontal sinus extends out into the horn. The old disease called  Hollow Horn was one way of explaining what was wrong with a cow when they couldn’t know what was really wrong. Those names and disease explanations were used before we knew much about parasites, viruses, and bacterial diseases.”

“You think she is going to be okay?” Harry asked.

“She is going to be fine,” I said. “This dehorning is not going to slow her down one bit. Those holes into her frontal sinus will heal with no problem.”

“Okay, Doc, I trust you,” Harry said. “I have heard of Hollow Horn my entire life, but I had never seen it before.”

We turned the heifer out into the field, and she joined the others and started grazing as if nothing had ever happened.

Photo Credits: Dye family photos

Trip to Portland

D. E. Larsen, DVM

We made a trip to Portland a while back for my 4-year checkup from prostate cancer treatment. My Radiation Oncologist wants to see me next year, so it looks like they expect me to live that long, at least.

  Traveling to downtown Portland lets one realize how lucky we are to live in Sweet Home. Traffic was horrendous, both going and coming. We parked in a parking garage at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital. We took a ticket from the machine when we entered the garage. 

  When we left the doctor’s office, the receptionist asks if I wanted a get out jail free card for the parking attendant. I almost declined it, but on Sandy’s urging, I took the small slip of paper with a scan code from his outstretched hand. 

  When we drove to the exit gate, the attendant was just going on a break. He was a short black man with a slight build. What hair remained on his head was white. I imagined that this was a significant supplemental income for his meager Social Security check.

  Following the instructions on the exit machine looked pretty easy. It reads; “Insert your ticket, when the fee is posted on the screen, you can do one of two options:”

 1) pay the fee, and the gate will open.

 2) scan your card from the doctor’s office, wait for the price to change to zero, and the gate will open.”

  By now, there are 3 cars behind me. I insert the ticket into the machine, we were parked for just over an hour. The fee is posted on the screen. It says $64.00.

  $64.00 for an hour of parking, it takes me a few minutes to recover from that shock. “Do you see that fee?” I say to Sandy. “Talk about highway robbery!”

  Now there are seven cars behind us. I place the card from the doctor’s office in the scanner. The limp paper is a bit crumpled from being in my shirt pocket. It does not scan! “How the hell are we suppose to get out of here now, I will be damn if I’m going to pay $64.00 an hour to park!” Sandy does not respond.

  I don’t know how many cars are behind us now. The end of the line is around the corner.

  I scan the card again, nothing. I turn it around and scan it again, still nothing. 

  There is a number to call for help, but inside the garage, there is no service on the cell phone. Such a big help that is. The guy behind us is getting impatient, he guns his engine a couple of times. I see the attendant come out the door back by the doctor’s offices. He looks alarmed and starts running toward us. I scan the card one more time.

  It works! The fee returns to zero, and the gate opens. We pull out of the garage just as the attendant reaches his station, somewhat out of breath.

  The phone still has no service, so the navigation is not working. Which way do we turn? The guy behind us is right on our tail now. Sandy says, “Turn right!”. I turn left. So starts the discussion until we finally get the navigation working and make it back to the freeway, but heading to Seattle.

  Next time we might drive to Wilsonville and call a cab.

Photo Credit: Photo by Levent Simsek from Pexels