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

Don’t Put Her in the Barn

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Looking around as I waited for George, it was apparent this is a well kept old ranch, probably by a perfectionist. There was nothing out of place. The barn was old, with a little bow in the roof’s ridgeline, but it had a fresh coat of bright red paint. The small white ranch house set in the middle of an immaculate yard, with a white picket fence and rose bushes galore.

The old cow in the corral looked like she had lived many years here also. She was a cow that I would have recommended culling from the herd years ago, had I been asked. Her udder anatomy had to have been an issue for many years. Her two hind teats were large and hung low, almost dragging the ground, making them almost impossible for a calf to nurse. By the time the calf nursed those teats,  the quarters would be devoid of milk. The incidence of mastitis in cows with this type of anatomy is high; virtually all of them will have problems if they live long enough. I would guess that is the problem I am going to look at today. Even though George just said a sick cow when he called.

I got out of the truck and walked over to the corral fence to look at the cow a little better. I could see George putting on his shoes on the porch of the ranch house. Here he came on a trot. 

“Hi, Doc, I’m sorry I made you wait,” George said as he extended his hand. “The Mrs. had me hanging pictures of the great-grandkids.”

“That is no problem, George,” I said as I shook his hand. “This is the end of the day, and I have plenty of time. I am betting that this is the sick cow. And I am betting that she has mastitis.”

“Your correct on both bets,” George said. “You can’t see from here, but she has a black teat on the back teat on the far side. And she is pretty sick; she stands there and doesn’t want to eat or drink. She hasn’t worried about her calf at all.”

“Did you just notice her today,” I asked. 

“She was fine yesterday,” George said. “But you know, she has been a thorn in my side every year for the last several years. I have a devil of a time getting her calf hooked up on those back teats. I know you are probably going to tell me I should have sent her down the road a long time ago. But you know, she always weans one of the best calves in the bunch. Some of these old girls earn their hole in the ground.”

“Now your right on both counts, George,” I said. “I would have told you to cull her years ago. And because she pays you for your extra efforts with a super calf every year, she probably does deserve her hole in the ground.”

“Do you think you can do anything for her?” George asked.

“Let me get a few things and get a look at her,” I said. “Do you think I need a rope?”

“She hasn’t moved a muscle in the last hour,” George said.

Her problem was easy to see when I walked around the cow. Her right hind teat was black and cold to the touch. The discoloration extended up the backside of the quarter. Here was a case of mastitis with a dead quarter. Probably an acute E. coli mastitis, the circulation is disrupted by the infection, and the tissue dies. The cow will die unless we can get the disease under control.

“I am going to have to cut this teat off, George,” I said. “And maybe open up this quarter more than just the teat.”

“Isn’t that going to bleed a lot?” George asked.

“No, this tissue is all dead,” I said. “The only chance we have of saving this cow is to get some drainage out of this quarter, put her on some antibiotics and hope for the best.”

I took a scalpel and cut the teat off. There was a lot of fluid that drained out of the quarter, and some tissue hung out of the hole. I gave a little tug to the yellowish chunk of tissue hanging out of the hole left by the missing teat. I large mass of dead mammary tissue plopped out of the hole. With my gloved finger, I was able to pull another two chunks of tissue out of the quarter. I flushed the quarter with Hydrogen Peroxide and followed with Betadine.

“I will give her some long-acting antibiotics so you won’t have to mess with her in the morning,” I said. 

After treating her, I was putting things away in the truck and explaining to George how the tissue it that quarter was dead and that more chunks would fall out of the large hole where I removed the teat.

“If you see stuff hanging out of that hole, you need to pull it on out of there,” I explained. “Otherwise, it will just block the hole, and we will lose the drainage.”

“Do you think she is going to be okay?” George asked.

“We are just going to have to see what morning gives us,” I said as I got into my truck to leave.

“Do you think I should put her in the barn tonight?” George asked.

I looked at the barn. The door on this side of the barn was open, and all I could see inside was a maze of small pens. It must have been an old sheep barn.

“If she dies, can you get her out of there easily?” I asked.

George looked at the barn and thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think I could get her out of there very easy at all,” he said.

“Don’t put her in the barn tonight,” I said as I pulled away.

The old cow did live through the night. The entire quarter fell off eventually, and it did heal up. It didn’t look good for a time. The old cow raised another calf the next year before finally finding that hole in the ground.

Photo Credit: https://www.pexels.com/@candine-dufant-2073653

The True Nature of Things

By guest author John Marble

If you are going to be successful running a small business in a small town, especially a small town that you weren’t born in, you had better be able to get along with the locals. In Doc Larsen’s case, of course, this meant not only getting along with the cats and dogs and cattle, but being able to sooth the humans. Dave’s bedside manner was based partly on distraction. If a gal came in with a broken-legged dog, Doc would soon have her talking about her high school graduation party. A fellow whose favorite cat was dying of kidney failure? “Gosh, I see your grandson’s doing pretty well on the wrestling mat this season.” With me, he always talked about fishing.

And so, toward the end of cleaning up a nasty prolapse on a recalcitrant cow, I wasn’t really surprised when the Doc mentioned that he’d been spending some time up at Lost Lake, dragging in fat trout just for fun. He began to give a short lecture about the nature of catch and release as a management tool, but I cut him off. Knowing that Thursday afternoon was his traditional off-time, I jumped right in:

“How ‘bout we just run up there on Thursday and catch some fish?”

The presentation was perfect, I guess, and the hook was set.

“Uh, OK.”

On Thursday we slipped the boat into the water and made our way out to the deep hole. We were casting Wooly Boogers: heavy wet-flies made of hair and feathers and wire, designed to sink to the bottom and look like immature insects. I had learned about wet fly fishing from my father-in-law, a highly-skilled fisherman. Unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a talker or a teacher. I knew that you could catch a lot of fish on wet flies, but I never knew why. All I knew was that fishing wet flies required a much greater degree of focus and maturity than dry fly fishing did. There’s just something exciting about a rising fish breaking water and grabbing a fly. It’s like a shiny piece of aluminum to a raven. It just gets your attention.

Doc and I were pretty busy dragging in big fat trout with those ugly-bug flies, but I couldn’t help but notice that fish were rising occasionally, taking flies off of the surface.

Cast, cast, cast.

“So, Doc, how come we’re fishing wet flies when there appears to be a pretty good hatch going on?”

Cast, cast, cast.

“Well, it has to do with the bugs: they spend 99% of their time on the bottom, or making their way toward the surface. Doesn’t it make sense than that we should imitate them as wet flies, rather than the few seconds that they spend fluttering around on the surface? It’s just the true nature of things.”

Cast, cast, cast.

“Well, Doc, speaking about the true nature of things, I have a question for you on a completely different topic. And I’m afraid it is one that might be a little close to home.”

Cast, cast, cast.

“Alright. Shoot.”

(Here I should probably pause to remind folks that at this point, Dave Larsen was working his way up the ladder in Sweet Home hierarchy. He was a local businessman, a Rotarian, he was on the School Board and he did business with nearly every person in town. He had the pulse of the community, and that’s why I wanted his opinion.)

Cast, cast, cast.

“So, Doc, this “Golden Boy”, the one who’s in the paper every week, the one with all these big plans for developing Sweet Home into a tourist mecca, the one who’s leasing all of these properties down by the river…you know who I’m talking about?”

“Oh, yes. I know exactly who you mean.”

Cast, cast, cast.

“Well, do you think that guy is for real?”

Dave glanced my way for just a fraction of a second.

“Oh, hell no he’s not for real. I don’t know exactly everything he’s up to, but this whole thing is going to wind up blowing up in Sweet Home’s face. And it probably won’t take too long. And some people are going to lose a bunch of money”

Cast, cast, cast.

“So, why do you suppose he’s doing all this? And why are people so excited about the whole story?”

“Well, it’s just like these flies. They look kind of like the real thing. This guy is a great story-teller, and people in Sweet Home are hungry for a good story. In fact, they’re just starving for a good story.”

With that, Dave cast out again, then turned to me and peered over the top of his glasses.

“It’s just the true nature of things.”

And that, right there, was a fine teaching moment.

John Marble