We had a good day yesterday. Bruce got feeding done early enough that he actually was in the house at 9:30 and in bed by 11 for the first time in weeks. The heifer was in a big pen. We had complete faith in mother nature delivering a calf as designed. Bruce got up early in an effort to shift the craziness of our day some, and arrived in the barn to find the heifer had not had her calf. She was laying down so he ended up laying in the pen to check her. His diagnosis was a small pelvic opening, leg back and a larger than normal calf. He called the vet and she not only agreed with his findings but the size of her pelvis made a cesarean the only option. The nice thing about the clinic we work with is they have 8 vets, and since this would take much longer than she had planned, she called to see if someone else could do the surgery. Nate arrived before she left so Jill was able to attend something at school with her child and our heifer was still in good hands. Much to Bruce's frustration, I again started milking myself while he went back to feeding. Thankfully by the time he was able to help I had only gotten 1/4 of the cows done. He milked the heifers and we continued as the vet got the heifer ready for surgery. To explain how rare this is, I have been here 35 years and we have had 2 cesareans, both for calvings that involved deformed (water belly) calves. Both cows died of toxemia. She was prepped just like our DA surgery cow, except she preferred laying down. By the time we got to the end of milking the vet was ready for Bruce to help lift the calf out so I took care of the last few cows. Of course I didn't have a camera in the barn this morning but what surprised me the most is that she laid there up on her chest and head up like nothing was going on, seemingly indifferent to what they were doing. They delivered a very large dead heifer calf. As long as we had a vet here we asked his opinion about the calf with the infected joints. He pretty much confirmed what we suspected. The infection is in the joint itself. No amount of medication will fix it or undo the damages. She is bright and growing and eating well in spite of her issue but will have to be put down. We also had him check #12 and sure enough, she has a DA that has been twisting and untwisting. Surgery #2 before 10 a.m. By 11:30 the heifer was up walking around and the DA cow was already eating. The thing that always makes me smile is you can tell by the stitches which vet does stitchery. The end result is the same but not as pretty LOL. Bruce had a final appointment in town involving a medical issue that started in January 2010. In the process of wrestling with the heifer he managed to injure his back so he added an additional appointment to his day with a therapist that has been working on a shoulder injury (new heifer) from 3 years ago.
This afternoon our nutritionist Vicky came and checked out everyone. Bruce has added some baled hay to the TMR because the corn silage was chopped too fine last fall. We suspect that is also a contributor to the DA surgeries of late. As usual we have animals that should be pregnant that aren't, it's starting to warm up so we need to get the other fans going and we need to be watchful of the heifers due to have calves since a couple of them are smaller than we would like, but for the most part the news was good. She also suggested that her son Joe could maybe help milk tonight to give Bruce a break. He has been super busy in school so we haven't seen much of him this winter. The help was definitely appreciated!
I had planned on mentioning that we got the vet bill from last month. The call for the appetite drench on the last DA cow was $136 which of course was followed a few days later by the surgery itself which cost $336. Since today is only the 8th and we have a long month to go, last months bill will be looking much better when we get this months bill.
Tonight we have an evening out with friends at our monthly card party. We will get home too late, the alarm will go off too early, and hopefully tomorrow will be a non event. We are beginning to wonder if the animals here are vying for honorable mention in my evenings writings, since when I started this I expected many of the days would be "did the routine stuff". Hopefully that will be the case tomorrow.
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