The Swollen Scrotum

D. E. Larsen, DVM

It looked like another hot day with no rain in sight. August in Sweet Home was usually hot and dry. 

With the heat, our days were often slow. Especially the large animal side of things. Dr. Craig had warned me that the cattle practice would be feast or famine. 

“Busy in the fall and the spring,  the winter would be okay, but, except for a few pinkeye cases, you will do almost nothing in the summer,” Dr. Craig had said.

So I was a little surprised to see Pete rush through the clinic door. Pete was an old guy with a hobby farm out in Liberty and hated using the telephone.

“Doc, I have a young bull with a scrotum that is all swollen up,” Pete said. “Do you think you can come out to look at him? I have him caught, and my two sons are at home to help, but only for a couple of hours.”

Pete was pretty shrewd. He had the bull caught, and he had help, but only if I could come right away.

“Okay, Pete, I can change things around a bit and run out there now,” I said. 

“Doc, don’t come to the house,” Pete said. “We have him down at the neighbors. Their place is the one with the Indian Council Tree in the front yard. You know where that is, right?”

“Yes, I know the place,” I said. “It will take me a few minutes to get things together, but I will be right along. Do you have any idea what happened to this guy?”

“I reckon I don’t really know what is going on, Doc,” Pete said. “But he is pretty uncomfortable.”

 When I pulled into the driveway, Pete, his two sons, and a bunch of onlookers were gathered around this reddish yearling bull. 

Looking at the bull’s scrotum, the problem was obvious. This scrotum was swollen to three times its normal size, and the skin at the top of the scrotum had been severed, I would guess, by an elastrator band. 

You didn’t need to get close to smell the infection.

I stuck a thermometer into the young bull’s rectum. I looked at Pete and his entourage while I waited on the thermometer.

“Pete, I thought you said you didn’t know what happened to this guy?” I asked.

“Well, I was a little embarrassed in your office,” Pete said.

“You know, you’re not supposed to lie to your doctor,” I said. “The same thing goes for your veterinarian.”

“I know, Doc,” Pete said. “But I figured you would figure it out fast enough.”

I pulled the thermometer out and wiped it clean. It read a hundred and four.

“He has a pretty good infection, Pete,” I said. “The good thing about this is when we cut all of this off, things should clear up pretty well. You’re probably lucky that he doesn’t have tetanus.”

“I have never heard of tetanus in a cow,” Pete said.

“Well, it happens, not often, but it happens,” I said. “And, most of the time, it is from just this sort of thing.”

I tied the bull to the only fence post I could find that didn’t wobble when it was pushed. Then I pulled him against the wooden fence rails with a sideline.

“You two guys can lean against this guy to hold him a little better,” I said to Pete’s boys. 

“I’m going to do an epidural anesthetic on this guy,” I said. “That is not something we do for a standard castration, but this will require a little digging. 

After doing the epidural, I pulled the bull’s tail up and handed it to one of the boys.

“Just hold it out of the way,” I said.

I scrubbed the scrotum and the wound that circled the top of the scrotum. I stuck a finger into the wound, and there, nearly an inch deep, was the elastrator band. With a scalpel, I carefully severed the rubber elastrator band, and it popped out of the wound.

I picked up the remains of the band and tossed it to Pete.

“These things work on baby calves,” I said. “They don’t work on an animal this size.”

I opened the scrotum with an incision down each side. Then, I dug through the swollen tissues with my fingers until I could expose each testicle. After stretching the cords out, I removed each testicle with an emasculator. Now all I had to do was remove this swollen mass of tissue that used to be a scrotum.

After manipulating the original wound, I just removed the entire scrotum with the emasculator. Making sure I held a firm crush on the tissues for a full minute.

“So what did I do wrong, Doc?” Pete asked.

“These little bands are made to work on lambs and baby calves,” I said. “At this size of a scrotum, there is just not enough strength to cut off the blood flow. The band cuts through the skin and some of the tissue. It probably cuts off the blood leaving the scrotum, but it doesn’t have enough tension to shut off the blood flow into the scrotum and the testicle. So they just swell up, making sure the band can’t do the job. Then it all gets infected, and if you hadn’t called me, this bull would have died.”

“I just can’t afford to have you come and castrate all my calves,” Pete said. “What is a guy supposed to do?”

“Castrate the calves when they are a few days old,” I said. “You can handle them easier when they are that size. These bands work at that age. You just have to make sure you get both testicles. The other way is to use a knife. I can show you how to do that if you bring a baby calf into the clinic next spring.”

“What will we have to do with this guy now?” Pete asked.

“I am going to load him up on antibiotics and spray him real well for flies,” I said. “I will leave you another injection to give him in two days and a can of fly spray to use daily. You will need to keep him up for a few days. Other than that, he should heal up just fine.”

***

I was able to stop by Pete’s place the following week. Pete wasn’t home, but I watched the new steer from over the fence, and he was doing well. Grazing like nothing had ever happened. 

Animals like this little bull are so miserable that they feel great when their problem is finally taken care of.

Photo by Schneeknirschen on Pixabay

The Hands Tell the Story

D. E. Larsen, DVM

The photo above is of my mother’s family, and this picture is an icon of the Davenport family.

 It was taken on September 19, 1934, the day before my mother’s marriage. Mom is seated next to my grandfather. 

I have looked at this picture multiple times in almost every year of my life. It has served as cement for the large extended family that grew out of this assembled crew.

Well dressed for the 1930s, and I am sure they were carefully groomed for the photo. Such photos in 1934 had to be a substantial investment. 

From the photo, at a casual glance, one could surmise this was a well-to-do family of a prosperous merchant or maybe even a doctor or a lawyer. The truth is they are the family of a farmer. A dairy farmer on Catching Creek out of Myrtle Point, Oregon.

The standing girls eventually ended up in California. Still, their attachment to the family and that piece of ground they had called home for so many years remained intact.

The youngest boy, Ernie, standing at my mother’s shoulder, would go on to serve as a bomber pilot in WWII. He spoke of paying for a plane ride from a barnstormer after he had enlisted in the Army Air Force, just to see if he would actually like to fly. After the war, he became the only one of the bunch to finish college. Teaching, coaching, and finally becoming a school administrator served as his career, but he also remained a farmer.

All the others remained close to the land. Close to Myrtle Point and Catching Creek.

I have no idea of the count of individuals in the four generations that have followed this group, but there are many. There were twenty-nine cousins in my generation. 

In all large families, the group has all degrees of success. As a whole, everyone in this family has done well to carry on the traditions of our grandparents. I cannot think of anyone who would be considered the family’s black sheep. 

Today, for some reason, when I glanced at the picture, my grandfather’s hands jumped out at me. 

He is fifty-four in this picture, and his hands are the hands of a man who knows a life of physical labor. Compared to the skin of my grandmother and his two daughters seated in the front, his hands are dark. Those hands have toiled in the sun. And though you can’t see the calluses on the palms of his hands, you know they are there by course skin and bulging vessels on the back of his hands.

Milking dairy cows in 1934 was not easy. Especially when you had to grow virtually all of the feed for the herd on the farm. By then, the older boys were building farms and families, so much of the work fell squarely on this guy’s shoulders.

The summer I was fifteen, I worked for this man. He was eighty-one that year. I was a stout young man in those years and just starting to build my adult frame. I thought I was pretty tough; by today’s standards, I probably was. The old man worked my butt off on a daily basis. And he was beside me every step of the way. During the whole summer, I saw him sit down once while we were working. 

“The hardest job I ever had was when I tried to retire when I was sixty-seven,” he told me that afternoon while he rested in the shade of a giant ash tree on the bank of Catching Creek.

My biggest surprise today was when I looked at those of my grandmother. She was a few days from turning 48 when this photo was taken. Her hands are mostly hidden from view in the picture, and I had to look closely. I am absolutely sure that I had never noticed her hands before.

In my memory, which I always try to think is pretty good, I never witnessed my grandmother in the barn. They had a garage located halfway to the barn, maybe a hundred yards from the house. Grandpa would always bring the car down to the house for Grandma to get into it. I am not sure I ever saw her walking to the garage.

Farm families in those years often had a division of labor, with the women working in the house and the men working in the fields and the barn. But look at her hands, and tell me that she had an easy life.

Besides the daily chores of cooking and cleaning, there were chores that we had completely forgotten about today.

Maintaining a garden for a large family is work enough, and canning the proceeds of the garden can consume days. Wash day was not just throwing clothes in the machine and pushing a few buttons.

Before the luxury of a wringer washer, it was a wash tub and scrubboard. And hanging the clothes on the line in the summer was a luxury, and getting them dry in the winter was a struggle.

The wash tub also gave kids their weekly bath, followed by yourself, hopefully, with some degree of privacy.

My mother’s hands are not the hands one would expect of a twenty-one-year-old young lady today. 

Notice the bulging vessel on her left wrist and enlarged middle knuckles on her left hand. Her fingernails were probably treated better than usual as she prepared for her coming wedding. Still, they are not long and not painted. I remember seeing a bottle or two of nail polish in the house when I was growing up, but those probably belonged to my sister. I have no memory of my mother with painted nails.

And finally, look at Lila’s hands. She is the youngest of the girls and is just fourteen in this picture. 

Her hands are smoother than my mother’s but show some telltale signs of wear and tear, even at her young age. And the nails are trimmed short and functional.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In this picture, the hands, not the coat and tie or the flowered dress, tell the story.

The True Nature of Things, From the Archives

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