One Sore Foot

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It was the middle of August, and we hadn’t seen any rain in weeks. You could almost taste the dust in this small pasture.

Bill Sieg looked down at me.

“Do you think he will fit in the chute?” Bill asked. “I haven’t tried to put him in it yet.”

We were in a small pasture behind the barn, and we were looking at Bill’s oldest herd bull. He was a massive Brangus bull. He probably tipped the scales at close to a ton.

“He is a pretty big bull,” I said. “Your chute should be wide enough, but this guy is tall. He might have to squat a bit to get under the tailgate.”

“I called that guy with one of those tilting chutes to see if he could look at this bull’s foot,” Bill said. “He didn’t think he could fit him into his chute. And even if he could, he wasn’t sure he could get it tilted with the bull in it.”

“That foot is pretty sore,” I said. “He doesn’t even touch it to the ground.”

“Oh, he touches it down a little when he gets excited,” Bill said. “But he is not interested in moving around much. The good thing is we’re done with the breeding season. But I don’t want to lose him because of a sore foot.”

“Well, let’s try to put him in the chute and see what I can do for him,” I said. “We might get lucky and find something simple.”

Bill had dogs, but they were bird dogs, springer spaniels, not cow dogs. I walked out around the bull to get him headed to the corral. His head was up, and he shook it at me, but he made no effort to move. Even still, I was in dangerous territory.

I picked up a couple of dirt clods and threw one, hitting the bull on his butt. He moved, reluctantly, toward the corral. The corral was small enough that he was in the crowding alley once he was in it.

I closed him into the alley and pushed him toward the chute. With Bill on the headgate, the bull squeezed under the tailgate and lurched toward the headgate, and bill caught him perfectly and leaned with all his weight on the bar to squeeze his massive neck.

I hurried and closed the tailgate and pulled the squeeze closed as hard as I could. We dropped the side panel to allow access to his feet. He was holding his right front foot up enough that I could easily slip a rope onto it and tie it up so I could work on it. I was a little surprised at the total lack of resistance to my efforts.

I did an initial exam of the foot. There was no foot rot and no foreign body between the claws.

“He acts like he knows we are going to help him,” I said. “I don’t find anything simple. I will grab my hoof stuff and see what I can find. These hoofs are almost as hard as steel this time of the year. Hopefully, I can trim this one a little.”

I ran to the truck and grabbed a medicine bag and my hoof bag. 

I squeezed hard on the lateral claw in several locations with the hoof tester. There was no response from the bull. Then I moved to the inside claw. With the hoof tester on the end of the toe, I squeezed. The bull bellowed and bounced the entire chute. 

I stood back a minute, thinking he could tip the chute over.

“I think you found something,” Bill said with a snicker.

I went back to work with the hoof tester. This time I put a squeeze on the middle of the inside claw, there was no response, and it was the same on the rear portion of the claw.

“I think he has an abscess on the tip of the toe on the inside claw,” I said. “The good thing is these will usually heal rapidly once they are opened and drained. The bad thing is I have to try to dig in the sole of this foot, and that is going to be hard.”

I ran a file over my hoof knife before I started, but even with a sharp edge, I couldn’t dig into the sole of the hoof. Next, I took the hoof trimmer and loped off the tip of the claw. The bull jumped a little, and pus sprayed in all directions. It smelled bad.

“Boy, that’s rank,” Bill said. “You must have found the pus pocket.”

“Yes, I’m going to clean this up a bit, but just getting that open is going to make him feel a whole lot better,” I said. “You can imagine how much pressure the pus was under by how it sprayed when I nipped the tip off his toe.”

I cleaned up the abscess and medicated it topically. I wanted to release his foot to see how he was standing on it, but I restrained myself, knowing it would be difficult to pick it up again. 

“I have a new thing that I am going to try on this,” I said.

“I’m not too sure about new things,” Bill said. “I sort of like doing things the old way you do them.”

“I’m going to epoxy a wood block on the bottom of his good toe,” I said. “That will keep this sore toe off the ground while it is healing. He should be a lot more comfortable.”

“Okay, that sounds like something that might help him out awhile,” Bill said. “But are we going have to get him in again to take it off?”

“The box says it will just wear off,” I said.

I retrieved the block and the epoxy mix from the truck. It was pretty straightforward. I just mixed up the epoxy to a thick consistency, spread it on the sole of the good claw, and seated the block onto the epoxy. 

We waited for the epoxy to harden, and I released the rope so the bull could stand on his foot. He seemed to enjoy having his foot on the ground.

I loaded him up on some long-acting sulfa boluses. That was a chore, but this guy was pretty gentle for a bull.

When everything was done, it was time to let him out of the chute. It was more difficult to release him than to catch him, but he finally sprung out of the open head gate.

He took a couple of steps and turned to look at us. I liked to think he was saying thank you.

Then on his next step, the wood block snapped off and flew through the air.

“I guess that wasn’t made for a bull his size,” Bill said. “I hope that wasn’t expensive.”

“My expense, Bill,” I said. “I don’t charge for trials that don’t work. My problem is that it comes in a two-pack, and I either have to find a gentle cow to try it on or throw the other one away.” 

“My guess is you would be better off just throwing the stuff in the trash,” Bill said.

I opened the gate and let the bull back into the pasture. He was limping but walking on his foot.

“He looks a whole lot better,” Bill said. “Do you think that will heal up okay?”

“I think he will be fine,” I said. “Getting that abscess open allows him to go from holding that foot up to walking on it with only a slight limp.”

The bull healed well, and when I dropped by to check on him the following week, he was walking normally in the pasture.

I took Bill’s advice and threw the other block in the trash. It seemed like a good idea, but it was probably thought up by some guy who had never worked with real cows.

Photo by Tony Mucci on Pexels.

The Lost Ball, from the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“I don’t know what is wrong with old Ben, Doc,” Gavin said as he picked his dog up and settled him on the exam table. “He started vomiting once in a while several weeks ago. I just didn’t think much about it. But now, he vomits everything he puts in his mouth. He takes a drink and turns around pukes it up.”

“Let’s give him a good once over, and then we will talk about what diagnostics we need to do,” I said.

Ben had obviously lost a lot of weight since I had looked at him, but everything else was pretty unremarkable.

“How long has he been vomiting, Gavin,” I asked?

“I said several weeks, Doc. But you know how time slips away. It could have been longer. I never noticed how thin he was until just now.”

I stood him up, but Ben was a little reluctant to remain standing. Finally, with Gavin holding him under his chest, I started carefully palpating his abdomen. He was thin enough, I could just about define every structure in his belly. 

The mass just sort of jumped into my hand as I palpated his mid-abdomen. Small, round, and solid, it was the perfect size to obstruct the small intestines. 

“Does he chew on rocks or anything like that,” I asked?

“No, he doesn’t do much of anything anymore. He is getting pretty stove up. He does retrieve my golf balls when I am chipping in the back yard.”

“Golf balls,” I said as I felt the mass again. “Have you lost any of those balls?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Doc. I really don’t keep track of them. Do you think that is his problem?”

“I can feel a solid round mass in the middle of his small intestines,” I said. “It is of the size that it could be a golf ball. It could be a tumor or something else.”

“What do you think we should do,” Gavin asked?

“We could send in some blood and get some x-rays to try to define the object. Or we could just do exploratory surgery. We can fix it, or it may be something that we can’t do anything about. Really, the only way to know is to go in and look.”

“Are you saying it could be cancer?”

“Could be, but I would bet on the golf ball. It was probably rolling around his stomach for a few weeks causing him to vomit. Then in the last day or two, it started down the small intestine. That is when the vomiting really got going. If it is the ball, it is a simple fix. If it is a tumor, we can probably take it out, and then it just depends on what type of tumor it is.”

“Let’s just do the surgery,” Gavin said. “When can you do it?”

“I think we can do it the first thing in the morning. We will give him some fluids overnight and get him started on some antibiotics. If everything goes well, he should be able to go home the following day.”

“Do we have any special care,” Gavin asked?

“Not much. We will keep him on fluids and nothing by mouth for 24 hours. Then he will be on a soft slurry of a diet for a week.”

The surgery went well. Finding the foreign body was not an issue. There was virtually no fat in the omentum or anywhere else in the abdomen, for that matter. Ben has had this problem for a lot longer than Gavin had recognized. I explored the intestine’s entire length and palpated the stomach for any trace of another foreign body. None was found.

When I opened the intestine and squeezed a well-worn golf ball from its lumen, it was apparent that it had been in the stomach for some time. The cover of the golf ball had lost most of its dimples.

I closed the intestinal incision, rinsed the area well, and replaced everything into the abdomen. I closed the abdominal incisions, and we recovered Ben.

Ben felt immediately better on recovered. I think he was looking for a steak dinner. “That’s okay, Ben,” I said. “We will give you some liquid steak tomorrow morning.”

When we placed a small bowl of water in Ben’s kennel in the morning, you would have thought that he had been in the desert for a week. It just disappeared. Then we followed with a small bit of dog food mixed to a slurry. Ben lapped that down and was wagging his tail for more.

Ben was bouncing around when Gavin came to pick him up. He was ready to go after having several small meals of slurry.

“He is doing well,” I said. “He is acting like he hasn’t eaten in a month. And that may have been close to the case.”

“He sure looks better. Thanks, Doc,” Gavin said.

I tossed Gavin the golf ball in a small plastic bag.

“It looks like it has been in his stomach for some time,” I said. “You want to keep it in that bag or air it out outside. It smells pretty bad. And you know the rules. It is a stroke and distance for a lost ball.”

“I think that Ben’s golf ball retrieving is over,” Gavin said as they headed out the door.

It was a couple of weeks later when Gavin brought Ben in for suture removal. Ben was a completely different dog. He had gained at least 10 pounds. You could still feel his ribs, but they were not visible, just looking for him.

“He is back better than he has been for a long time,” Gavin said. “That golf ball must have been in there for months.”

“Yes, as long as it was just bouncing around in his stomach, it was only causing him some vomiting. When it entered his intestines is when it caused him some major problems.”

We removed the sutures and patted Ben on the head as I sat him on the floor. He was straining at the leash to get out the door. 

“They never give me any credit,” I said as Gavin was being pulled along toward the door. “They just know this is not a pleasant place to be for any amount of time.”

Photo by Siddharth Narasimhan on Unsplash

First Sergeant Scagliotti

D. E. Larsen, DVM

After getting settled into our squad room, Bill Drake and I started preparing for our first twenty-four-hour shift as CQ. Sergeant Scagliotti had wanted our fatigues to be sharp with extra starch. Mine had been buried in my duffle bag since basic training. I dug them out and hung them in my locker for the night. Then I polished my combat boots before crawling into the bunk.

We were up and ate an early breakfast at Con-4, the battalion mess hall. It was a little before eight when we entered the orderly room. Sergeant Scagliotti was waiting for us.

“I like to see guys that show up early and are ready to go to work,” Sarge said.

“I didn’t expect to see you here on Saturday,” I said. 

“You won’t find too many people in this man’s Army who will outwork me,” Sarge said. “I just wanted to make sure you guys were lined out with your responsibilities. When you’re behind this counter, you represent me. I want to make sure you understand that part of your job.”

“My fatigues have been in my duffle bag since basic, but I did polish my boots,” I said. “I should have a couple of sets of fatigues from the laundry by our next shift.”

“That’s okay, Larsen,” Sarge said. “It will take a little time for everyone to get settled. Doug, here is my outgoing clerk. He is going to get you guys straight on all the paperwork. The one thing I want to emphasize today is the job of this orderly room. This is a duty company, and these guys are going to be pulling KP on a daily basis for months. And there will be other details they will get to help with around the battalion. We will have a morale problem if we don’t protect our troops. My main job, and your job, is to make life as easy as possible for these troops. I don’t want to hear of any officer who gives anybody in my company any grief. There will be no inspections, no walk-throughs, and no harassment. Those instructions come straight from Col. Mallet. He plans to be here most Sunday afternoons to cheer up these troops. Do you understand?”

And so it began. Bill Drake and I shared a squad room in a barracks. We pulled CQ detail for Sergeant Scagliotti on a twenty-four hours on and forty-eight hours off schedule for the next four or five months. It took some adjusting to the twenty-four-hour shift, especially around three or four in the morning, but we made it.

The orderly room was full of troops the first Sunday that we worked. Many of the guys were still adjusting to the activities of the base. With the company day room upstairs, the orderly room turned into a gathering place.

Suddenly, Col. Mallet stepped through the door. I snapped to attention, and before I could call the group to attention, Col. Mallet said in a loud voice, “As you were.”

Col. Mallet was an impressive figure of a man. He was large and well-muscled with a blond handlebar mustache. He was a Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War, leading the last bayonet charge in the Army.

He immediately mingled with the troops and discussed how things were going for everyone. He was concerned that we might need some organized physical training to keep everyone in shape while waiting for school.

Jason was quick to respond, “We are all in pretty good shape, Sir.”

“How many one-arm pushups can you do?” Col. Mallet asked.

“I can usually do three or four, Sir,” Jason said.

“I’ll match you,” Col. Mallet said as he dropped to the floor.

They knocked out five pushups before Jason gave out.

Col. Mallet stood up and said, “Anyone else wants to try me?”

The Col. had five other guys lined up, and he matched every one of them. Most of the guys had to struggle to reach Jason’s five. Col. Mallet was still smiling after doing nearly thirty.

“Larsen, you tell Scag that I was here,” Col. Mallet said. “I have to stop over to the Honor Guard Barracks now. I will be back next week, and I expect you guys to do more than five one-armed pushups.”

Sergeant Scagliotti almost giggled when I told him of the pushup contests.

“You guys need to call me Scag in this office,” Sergeant Scagliotti said. “The only exception is when there is a senior officer present. And I have decided that we need a dog. The lieutenant is going to pick him up this morning. He is a ten-week-old Saint Bernard pup. His name is Danny, and I am going to enlist him in the Army.”

As the weeks passed, Scag became more and more talkative, and Danny grew from a ball of fuzz to near adult size. 

One afternoon when a large group had gathered in the orderly room, Scag started telling war stories. The stories went on most of the night.

“I joined the Army in 1943,” Scag said. “I was eighteen and a kid who hadn’t been out of Brooklyn. The Army showed me Europe. I missed D-Day but was on the front lines as we pushed toward Germany. One night we were getting a shelling from German artillery. I was in a foxhole with my squad leader, an older guy. We were in that hole for a long time with shells landing all around us.”

Scag continued, “I said we have been here too long. I’m going to find another hole.”

“This is the safest place to be, Kid,” the squad leader said. “Just be patient, and it will be over pretty soon.”

“I’m going over to Charlie’s hole,” Scag said as he jumped out of the foxhole and ran twenty yards to a foxhole with Charlie in it. “I dove into Charlie’s foxhole head first. Less than a minute later, a shell landed square in the foxhole with the squad leader. I have never questioned my instinct since.”

And then there were stories from Korea.

“We had a compound on one hill, and the Turks had a compound on the hill next to us,” Scag said. “We had our compound lit up all night long, and guards posted all around. The Korean slicky-boys would still steal us blind. The Turks turned off their lights and went to bed, and they would never have anything stolen.”

“Why was that?” Bill asked.

“Early on, they caught and killed one of those slicky-boys,” Scag said. “They ran a rifle rod through his ears and hung him up over their main gate. Finally, a UN commander came by and talked with the Turkish commander. He told him he had to cut the guy down. So the Turks went out there and cut the body down, leaving the head hanging from the rifle rod. The head was there until the next visit from the UN commander. Those slicky-boys never bothered them.”

The next morning, Scag looked pretty rough. He had gotten a couple hours of sleep in his chair. He came out into the orderly room with his boots untied and his pants unbloused.

“Larsen, one thing I wanted to tell everybody last night that I didn’t get to,” Scag said. “The thing you need to learn about this man’s Army is that the people who run this Army are that Spec Four down at the personnel office. The generals think they have control, but those Spec Fours are the ones that run the Army. You get that figured out, and you can go far.”

One afternoon Scag was still at the office, well after his usual go-home time. He started pacing the hallway as the clock approached six.

“What up, Scag?” I asked.

“That damn little butter bar took a truckload of our guys out to Col. Mallet’s Vietnam Village on a work detail,” Scag said. “The mess hall closes soon, and he isn’t back. I am going have his ass.”

A short time later, the lieutenant pulled into the Company compound and offloaded the detail of the guys.

“Larsen, you follow me,” Scag said. “I might need a witness.”

Out the back door, we went. The lieutenant had the guys in formation and was getting ready to release them when Scag got right in his face. Scag’s belly prevented them from touching noses, but he was literally in his face.

I am standing to the side. The contrast between my starched fatigues and the dirty fatigues of the guys in detail was striking.

“How dare you take my men on a work detail and fail to get them back for chow,” Scag said. “You had better never plan to ask me for men again. And now, you load these guys up, take them over, and make sure the mess hall will feed them dinner. And if the mess hall won’t, you take them to the PX and buy them pizza, beer, or anything else they want.”

The lieutenant swallowed noticeably. “I’m sorry, Sarge,” the lieutenant said. “Time just got away from me.”

“Sorry doesn’t fill a belly,” Scag said. “You get these guys fed, or I will have your ass. And if you don’t like it, I will meet you at battalion first in the morning. Now you get your ass in gear and get these guys fed.”

Scag retreated to stand beside me, and we watched as the lieutenant loaded the guys back in the truck and headed toward Con 4. 

“When you have responsibility for men, Larsen, you stand up for those men against any man, regardless of rank,” Scag said. “This lieutenant will learn from this experience and have a little more respect for the men under him.”

It was the middle of April when I got a class assignment and transferred to Company G for night school. It was nice to be back to a daily schedule, but Sergeant Scagliotti had taught me well in those few short months I served as his CQ.