A Chilly Birth

D. E. Larsen, DVM

I stood looking out the living room window. The world was blanketed with six or eight inches of snow. This was unusual for Sweet Home. 

“Are you going to the office this morning?” Sandy asked. “Nobody has come down the road yet.”

“You need to call the girls and tell them not to worry about coming in early,” I said. “Maybe check about noon, and we will see what the snow is like then.”

“I don’t think you should plan to go to the office in this stuff,” Sandy said. “The county won’t get around to plowing this road until this afternoon or tomorrow. Last night’s news said it would be cold, down in the teens or the single digits today.”

“I have a dog in the clinic that needs to be taken care of, and I can forward to phone to the house so you can answer any calls,” I said. “Judy cleared the morning appointments before she went home last night. But with this snow and these temperatures, we are bound to get a call with a downer cow that is half frozen.”

“You shouldn’t be out on these roads until they are plowed,” Sandy said. “You won’t do anybody any good if you wind up in a ditch somewhere or worse.”

No sooner than those words were said, the telephone rang.

“Good morning, Doctor Larsen. This is Sue out on Berlin Road,” Sue said. “Our first ewe had a lamb sometime last night or this morning. She is doing okay, but the lamb is nearly frozen. This is a young ewe. I don’t think she knows what she is supposed to do. Can you come out and get a look at it?”

“I’m not sure I can get up your hill, Sue,” I said. “I guess I’ll put chains on the truck and try it. If I can’t make it, you need to get that lamb in under a heat lamp in the barn or in the house, dry it off, and warm it up. Then milk the ewe and get some milk into the lamb.”

“Bob is gone until tomorrow,” Sue said. “Maybe longer with this terrible weather. I can’t do those things, Doctor. That is why I am calling this morning. I don’t think we have a heat lamp, and I will not bring that lamb into my house.”

“Sue, I am not going risk my neck to try to save your lamb if you are not going to do your part,” I said. “If that lamb is not dried off and warmed up, it will die. So if I come out, you will end up with a lamb in front of your fireplace.”

“How long are you going to be, Doctor?” Sue asked. “I guess we will have a pet lamb for a little while this morning. At least the kids will be happy.”

“I have no idea what shape the roads are in, Sue,” I said. “My truck is in the garage, so I can put the chains on without laying in the snow. But our road is not plowed, and I doubt if have your road plowed either. I will get there as soon as I can, but I am sure it will take more than an hour. While waiting, you run a load of old towels or blankets in the dryer so they will be warm for the lamb.”

When I hung up the phone, I went to the kitchen and filled a thermos with coffee.

“You be careful out there,” Sandy said.

I pulled on my down vest and then my heavy jacket. 

“I’ll be alright,” I said. “I will give you a call when I get back to the clinic. I will stop there and forward the phone. Just take names and numbers, don’t make any promises. This will probably be a slow day. At least I can put the chains on in a dry garage.”

With chains and four-wheel drive, the truck thought it was driving on dry pavement. I stopped at the clinic, checked the dog, and forwarded the phone to Sandy at home. Then I headed out to Berlin Road. Sue’s place was up the hill from Pleasant Valley. It might be a challenge to get to today.

There were no tire tracts in the fresh snow. Things went well, I slipped a bit on the first corner going up Berlin Road, but otherwise, things were fine. Sue must have been watching for me because she was heading out to the barn as I pulled into her driveway.

I realized how cold it was when I stepped out of the warm truck. I filled my bucket with warm water and grabbed my bag before heading into the barn.

Sue had the ewe and lamb bedded down in a pile of straw just inside the door. The ewe seemed comfortable but concerned about her unresponsive lamb.

The lamb was very cold. His mouth was cold, and there was hardly a suck reflex when I stuck my finger in his mouth. The ewe had done a pretty good job drying him off, but the cold was more than he could handle.

“This guy is so cold, he could be too far gone to save,” I said. “I’m going to milk this ewe and get some milk into him, and then we will take him in the house to warm up.”

“Will the one feeding be all he needs?” Sue asked. “I’m not sure I can milk that ewe, and I am not going to town for milk replacer in this snow.”

The ewe was fine to milk, and I emptied both sides of her udder. Then I gave the lamb a good meal via a feeding tube.

“The plan is to get this guy warm enough to take a bottle,” I said. “There is enough milk here for two feedings. Hopefully, by then, you will be able to reunite the lamb with this ewe. I would leave the ewe right here.”

“I called Bob, and he is coming home this evening,” Sue said. “At least he will be able to care for things then.”

“This lamb will do much better if we can get him back with his mother,” I said. “But he has to be up and about and able to nurse. If he doesn’t nurse, you feed him with a bottle and leave him with mom as long as he can get up and around and keep warm.”

“Doctor, if I take this lamb in the house and he dies, what am I going to do with him?” Sue asked.

“What does Bob do with dead animals?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Sue said. “This farm thing is his business. I’m a city girl, and this is more time I have spent in the barn than all of last year.”

“I don’t think this lamb will die if we get him warmed up in the house,” I said. “But if he does die, you call me first so I can have you check a couple of things to make sure he is dead, and then you can just set him outside for Bob to deal with when he gets home. The temperature outside is colder than your freezer right now.”

I picked up the lamb and handed Sue the bucket of milk from the ewe.

“Okay, I will help you get this guy settled in a warm spot in the house,” I said. “Did you warm up some towels or blankets?”

“Yes, the drier is running, and the kids have a spot ready in front of the wood stove,” Sue said.

The lamb was starting to stir a little when we got to the house. The feeding was doing its job. We balled him up in a pile of warm towels, and the fire in the wood stove was roaring.

“You kids can help by petting this lamb and rubbing him to help him warm up,” I said. “You want to keep the dryer going and keep warm towels around him.”

“I have a heating pad,” Sue said. “Would that be okay to use?”

“It would be better not to use a heating pad,” I said. “We see some horrific burns from those things, especially in animals who can’t move around much.”

“What am I supposed to do with this milk?” Sue asked. 

“I brought you a couple of lamb nipples,” I said. “You can use them on a Coke bottle. Just make sure you sterilize it first. I want you to feed this lamb four ounces every two or three hours. I think you will have three feedings. Hopefully, Bob will be home by then.”

“Can I call you if I have any questions?” Sue asked.

“Yes, you can call,” I said. “But you are not my only client. When people start getting up and around, I might not be immediately available to the phone. But someone will answer, and I will get back to you. Sue, you are going to be fine. Look at the kids. This lamb will be up and ready to get back to mom in no time.”

“When should we put him back in the barn?” Sue asked.

“You get at least two feedings into him,” I said. “And if he is eating vigorously, you can put him back with mom. If Bob is not too late, it would probably be better to wait until he can put him out there and make sure he can nurse on mom.”

“That’s a good idea,” Sue said.

I left feeling that the lamb had a good chance of survival, even with Sue’s reluctance to become a farm girl. I slipped a little on the same corner going down the hill. And there were still no tire tracks in the snow other than mine.

When Bob got home, he called to let me know the lamb was back with his mom and nursing well. 

“Do you think I should get a heat lamp for him tonight?” Bob asked.

“That might be a good idea,” I said. “Those things are good to have around when we get a cold snap like this.”

“I hope I don’t have any more lambs until it warms up a little,” Bob said. “How do these newborns survive in a country like Montana?”

“Some of them don’t,” I said. “They try to miss the severe weather and protect things as best they can. But if you drive through that country, you will see animals with short ears where they have lost their ear tips to frostbite. Sometimes the tails on cows will also be frozen.”

The lamb did well. The ewe took him back, and they enjoyed the straw bed in the barn. Bob had a couple more lambs before the weather returned to mild temperatures typical of western Oregon. And I don’t think Sue ever became the farm girl Bob hoped she would.

Photo by Carolina Schornsteiner on Pexels.

Dancer’s Dilemma

D. E. Larsen, DVM

Dancer was standing in the exam room when I entered. Unlike her usual demeanor, she barely acknowledged me. She was concentrating on her next breath.

Dancer is a walker hound. A fine confident hunter, she is one of Leon’s leading girls. For Dancer to be distressed, she must have a major problem.

“Do you want her on the table?” Leon asked.
“He looks like we should leave her on the floor for now,” I said. “How long has she been breathing like this?”

“I noticed she was slow yesterday,” Leon said. “She was the last one back to the truck, and usually, she is leading the pack. But this morning, she has just been standing the breathing pretty hard.”

I pat Dancer on her head. She had no response, and she didn’t move when I knelt beside her. I noticed that she was breathing with a lot of abdominal movement.

I put my stethoscope on the left side of her chest. I could hear breathing sounds, and her heart sounds were normal. When I moved to her right side, there were no sounds.

I listened closer. I could hear muffled heart sounds, but no breathing sounds. I thumped her chest on the right side. The normal chest should sound hollow. On Dancer, it was a dull thud.

“I think her chest is full of fluid, probably mostly on the right side,” I said.

“Same as Roxy?” Leon asked.

We had lost Roxy to a prothorax not long ago. Her chest was filled with fluid on both sides, and we lost her before getting too far along in the treatment. When I opened her chest, I found the cause quickly. That is unusual in a prothorax. Roxy had a porcupine quill sticking out of her right lung. She had probably inhaled it when she tangled with a porcupine some months before her death. It took some time, but it finally migrated to the outside of the lung, contaminating the pleural space and causing the pus-filled chest.

“Probably, but it sounds like just one side of the chest is involved,” I said. “Hopefully, we will have a favorable result this time.”

“What do we need to do?” Leon asked.

“We need to get an x-ray,” I said. “But I am going to drain a lot of this fluid first. That will make her comfortable. Then we will decide how to proceed. My thought is to open her chest with a small incision, flush out all the exudate, and place a chest drain. That way, we can reduce the scarring in her chest. If the left side is not involved, we will be lucky. The mediastinum, the structure which divides the chest, is usually not complete in the dog.”

We clipped the right side of Dancer’s chest and prepped it with Betadine Surgical Scrub. I rigged a sixty cc syringe on a three-way stopcock with a discharge tube to a one-liter bag. After using some lidocaine for local anesthesia, I inserted a fourteen-gauge needle into the chest and started aspirating a thick exudate.

It did not take long to fill the one-liter bag. We changed the bag and had nearly a half liter before I could feel the needle bumping into some lung tissue. I withdrew the needle and reserved the last bit of fluid for culture.

Dancer looked like that elephant just stood up off her chest. She wagged her tail for the first time as she took a deep breath.

Her x-ray showed that there was still a lot of fluid on the right side of the chest, even after I pulled a liter and a half of exudate out of her chest. The left side was clear.

“I think I should open this chest and flush all this exudate out,” I said. “That way, we can start with a clean chest, and the antibiotics will work better. Then I will place a chest tube, close the chest and hang on to her for a few days.”

“Do you think this is another quill?” Leon asked.

“I would doubt that, but was she in the fight with the porcupine?” I asked.

“No, she wasn’t involved with the porcupine,” Leon said. “But what else could it be?”

“It only takes a little puncture into her chest from the claw of one of those bobcats she runs,” I said.

“Yeah, there is plenty of opportunity for that to happen,” Leon said. “So I guess I just wait for your call.”

“I will keep you posted,” I said. “But I will keep her for at least three days. I will flush this chest daily through the chest tube. I want the drainage to be clear before pulling the tube.”

We hooked Dancer up to an IV and got some IV antibiotics started. Then we went to surgery. I opened her chest on the right side between ribs five and six. A lot of foul-smelling yellowish fluid was in the chest. I explored the chest wall and the lung lobes as best I could but found no apparent cause.

It took multiple saline flushes before the fluid suctioned out of the chest was clear. I placed a drain tube and secured it to a suction device. Before I closed the chest, I instilled a dose of antibiotics.

Dancer’s recovery was unremarkable. By closing time, she was up and around and looking for dinner. Her breathing was close to normal, and she felt much better than when she came through the door.

The first thing in the morning, I flushed a half liter of saline into Dancer’s chest. To encourage the fluid to do a little slouching about in her chest, I allowed her to follow me on my morning rounds.

Dancer showed genuine interest in the other patients in the clinic. I wasn’t sure how she would respond to the cats, but she seemed to understand that we were taking care of them. At the end of rounds, I lifted Dancer up on the treatment table and drew off the fluid I had infused earlier. It was almost clear.

“I think you are doing pretty well, Dancer,” I said. Dancer looked at me like she knew exactly what I said.

We repeated the procedure that evening. And by the next morning, Dancer jumped down from the treatment table after her infusion and waited for me to start my rounds. She rubbed noses with dogs through their kennel doors and stood on her hind legs with her front feet on the lower kennels to watch the cats.

When the fluid was clear on the third day, I pulled the drain tube and started to go call Leon. Dancer followed me to my office and sat at my feet while I called Leon.

“Things are looking pretty good with Dancer,” I told Leon on the phone. “She is eating well. The fluid coming out of her chest this morning is clear. She can go home. The only problem is she will miss taking care of all the other animals in the clinic.”

“That sounds great,” Leon said. “We will be right down to pick her up.”

Dancer went home on antibiotics and returned to normal. She lived a good life and had a couple of litters of pups.

Photo by Leon Olson of Sweet Home.

Donica Lake Trip, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was early summer in 1978. We had lived in Sweet Home for a couple of years, and I was becoming involved in the community. There was a lot of debate taking place between the timber industry and environmental groups. The environmental groups had proposed a Middle Santiam Wilderness area. I felt that I needed to check it out.

Our family was young at the time, and Sandy was a good sport but not really an outdoor girl. We had 4 kids: Brenda, 11, Amy, 7, Dee, almost 6, and Derek, just 2.

We planned a 3-day backpacking trip into Donica Lake in the southern edges of the proposed wilderness area.

The trip involved a 3-mile hike, and the first 500 yards were tough, as we would have to traverse an ancient landslide that was still slowly moving. The plan involved packs for all the kids, one pound per year. My pack would be 45 pounds, Sandy would carry 20 pounds, Brenda would be limited to 11 pounds, Amy would have a 7-pound pack and Dee 6 pounds. Derek was given a pack, but it only contained a couple of clothing items.  

Amy’s and Dee’s packs included their sleeping bags and clothing items, and that was about all. Brenda’s was similar but also contained the tent poles to our large 6 person wilderness tent. Sandy’s pack included a lot of the food items, the rain fly for the tent, sleeping bag, and clothes. We were pretty strict with the weight of these packs. My pack contained everything else we would need over 3 days and the main portions of the tent. My pack tipped the scale at close to 50 pounds. I had carried more in the army.

Finally, the day arrived, and we were off. Leaving the highway at Mountain House about 20 miles east of Sweet Home, we traveled up Upper Soda Fork to the divide between the South Fork and Middle Fork of the Santiam River. We stopped at the massive old-growth tree that stood along the creek a couple of miles from the highway and then continued to the top of the hill. The road down the other side to the Middle Santiam River was steep and winding.

We parked the car, loaded up, and headed for the slide. This was more of an obstacle than I had been led to believe. On my first trip across the slide, I took all the kid’s packs and had Brenda follow my footsteps. She had no problems. Setting all the packs down, I returned for the others. With Derek on my shoulders and the younger girls on each hand, we managed to get everyone across. Sandy was having a few second thoughts about now.  

A young man was camping by himself at Pyramid Creek. We stopped and talked with him for a time. He was interested in going to Donica Lake and asked if he could travel with us. I figured he seemed nice enough, but then so did Ted Bundy. I just thought it would be better to have him with us, rather than wondering where he was behind us.

We started off up the last remnants of a logging road. We were clustered in small groups as we started up the hill. Sandy and the kids led the way, followed by the young man and then me bringing up the rear. I was glad that I had decided to carry my revolver. Probably would not need it, but it just made me feel more in control of the situation. 

It was easy going now with the road to the river and bridges across the river and Pyramid Creek. I noticed an excellent campsite along the river just before the bridge. The trail involved a logging road for the first mile and then a large clearcut that was all located within the proposed wilderness. There was a hill in this first mile, but it would be an easy hike from the top of the hill. Derek was the first to shed his pack, but Amy and Dee were not long after him when they realized Dad could carry more.

After the clearcut, we entered a prime old-growth forest. The shade was welcome, and the trail was level. Soon we reached a stream, and we missed the turn in the path where it crossed the creek on a massive old cedar windfall. The young man decided he had gone far enough and headed back to his camp. It didn’t take long to correct our error, and just over a little rise from the stream, we came to Donica Lake.

The lake was not very impressive, maybe 3 acres in size, but entirely surrounded by giant old-growth Douglas Fir trees. These trees were all 4 to 6 feet in diameter. On the eastern end of the lake, a small stream entered through a grove of massive red cedar trees. I had never seen such a grove of old-growth cedar trees. There was a nice sand bar here, and this is where we made camp.  

Everyone was tired from the hike, so we busied ourselves getting the tent set up and the sleeping bags laid out so the kids could relax. A gas backpacking stove made dinner easy to fix. The kids wanted a fire, but we convinced them that we would do that tomorrow. Early to bed tonight.

About 3:00 in the morning, Derek started vomiting. He was still vomiting when morning came. Sandy and I decided that we had better get back closer to civilization. If we got on the trail after breakfast, it would still be afternoon by the time we got back to Sweet Home. So I packed up while Sandy fixed breakfast. Derek was not up to eating. We loaded up, I took the two younger girls’ packs on my pack and put Derek on my shoulders. I told Sandy I would walk at a brisk pace and wait for her and girls every half mile or so.

By the third stop, Derek was digging through the pockets on my pack for anything edible. Nuts, Trail mix, and jerky were all disappearing. He was apparently well. We decided to continue on to the river and set up camp if Derek continued to improve. By the time we made it to the river, Derek had consumed everything available from the pockets on my pack. I was tuckered out after 3 miles with over 80 pounds on my back. The campsite on the river looked pretty good. There was no sign of the young man who had been camped at Pyramid Creek.

As it turned out, this was probably a much better place to camp. The kids had fun, and we were able to get each of them hooked up with a fish. There is nothing like fresh trout cooked over an open fire. The next two days were relaxing and comfortable. Now the only thing that we had to worry about was getting back across that slide.

Photo by David Baker on Unsplash.