Another day, another calving. Different farm this time, and at least this farmer had an idea of what was going on and knew to call the vet before it was too late. In this case he'd had a feel and there were two hindlimbs coming and the feet were quite big.
Thankfully I wasn't sent alone this time and we examined the cow and tried to assess if the calve could come normally. After a bit of pulling the decision was made - caesar.
It's been a good few years since I've seen one so I was happy to have the help! We had a nice debate on the merits of various local anaesthesia techniques - distal paravertebral, line block, inverted-L etc - then got on with it.
She was fairly well behaved considering what we were doing! The only difficult part was lifting the big 60kg calf in to the big wide world. They aren't the easiest things to lift at the best of times, and even worse when wet and slippery. The student put his back in to it, lifting and pulling and was rewarded by falling over in the shed with the calf on top. Thankfully he saw the funny side.
End results was one live calf, one live cow, one happy farmer, and a couple of vets with a few more bruises than we started. I've never yet managed to suture a cow without stabbing myself with the needle.
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About Me/Disclaimer
- Dash
- The ramblings of a vet(!) in the real world. As usual everything in this blog is my opinion alone and is not the view of any institution etc. I've changed the names, times and places of everything related to clinical work to preserve privacy.
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