The morning begins in a manner that is all too typical for a Sunday morning on call - I am awoken by the screeching of the pager. The text message on the pager states Cow with prolapse. I call the owners and determine that the cow has prolapsed her vagina, and they say they will load her in the trailer and bring her to the clinic. I have never personally replaced a vaginal prolapse, but I have assisted with the procedure numerous times. I feel pretty confident that this is something I can handle, but I call down to my parent’s house and ask my dad if he would mind going in to the clinic with me in case I need assistance. I dress quickly, pick up Dad, and we are soon on our way to the clinic.
A vaginal prolapse is a condition where the vaginal tissue inverts on itself and protrudes out of the vulva, much like a sock that is turned partially wrong side out. Once inverted, blood flow to the tissue is impaired and edema soon develops, which causes the tissue to swell. Sometimes this can occur to the point that it resembles a bloody basketball hanging out the backside of the cow. The underlying cause of this condition is usually hormonal and is often seen prior to or immediately after calving, but can occur at any time.
The clients are waiting for me when we reach the clinic. They are a middle-aged lesbian couple who have a small cattle outfit ten miles south of the clinic. I open the gate of their trailer and the cow jumps out with her head high in the air, looking for someone to charge. She is a large brahman-cross, dirty gray in color, and she is agitated to say the least. From behind the trailer gate I whistle shrilly, waving my arms in the air in an attempt to drive her down the lane. She responds by whirling and ramming the gate with her head. Dad brings a cattle prod from the barn and together we manage to get her into the alleyway and then into the hydraulic squeeze chute. I walk over to meet the clients as they walk into the barn, shaking hands with each as I introduce myself.
“How are yall doing today?” I ask. “I’m Dr. Colby Carpenter and this is my dad, Steve Carpenter.”
“Nice to meet you, Doc,” says the first, a brunette with a face lined and wrinkled from too many days spent outdoors. “My name is Nina and this is Laney.”
“Nice to meet you both,” I reply.
Laney, a blonde who looks quite a bit younger than her partner, looks quizzically at Dad and I and then says, “I know yall. Your mother was my home ec teacher back in high school. I graduated with the class of ’85. Yall were the chaperones on our senior trip.”
Dad exclaims, “I thought you looked familiar. God, that has been a while hasn’t it?”
As Dad and Laney continue their conversation, I turn to Nina and ask, “How long has the cow been like this?”
“You mean running around with her twat hanging out?” Nina asks bluntly. “We’re not real sure, to be honest. We just found her this way this morning, but it has been a couple of days since we seen her last. She’s a hateful old bitch and doesn’t come in to eat with the rest of the herd on a real regular basis.”
“Well, let me see if I can’t get it back to where it’s supposed to go,” I say.
I begin by drawing up 5cc of LIdocaine in a syringe. I open up the back of the chute and take the cow by the tail. I then give the cow an epidural to deaden sensation to her perineal area and to try to prevent her from straining. Next, I put on a pair of shoulder-length, plastic OB sleeves. I wash the blood and muck from the prolapsed tissue as best I can. By the appearance and smell, it appears that the cow has been in this state for several days. I take a jug of lubricant and liberally apply it to the basketball-sized prolapse. I then ask Dad to hold the cow’s tail, now limp from the epidural, out of the way while I work. Gritting my teeth, I begin to push the ball of flesh back where it came from. Imagine trying to push something the size of a basketball through a hole the size of a softball. Talk about a round peg, square hole-type situation! After five minutes of straining and grunting, it falls through the vulva and back into the pelvic canal. I am dripping with sweat. Both arms, thankfully protected by the OB sleeves, are smeared with blood and lubricant. I breathe a sigh of relief.
Suddenly the cow arches her back and begins to strain. The tissue that I have been struggling to replace starts to prolapse back out again. I thrust forward with my right hand, catching it before it gets all the way out and hold it back within the cow, my forearm buried inside her body up to my elbow.
“Hey, Dad,” I say over my shoulder, “I think I’m going to need you to put on a glove and give me a hand.”
“How come I get the feeling that you mean that literally?” he says with a groan as he puts on a sleeve.
“Yeah, that’s because I do.” I say. “If you would hold this in while I sew her up, I’d sure appreciate it.”
As Dad takes over the arm-in-cow duties, I pick up my Buhner needle, which is a foot-long needle the diameter of a pencil, and thread it with umbilical tape, which resemble a shoe lace. I then turn back to the cow.
“Hey hold up there, son!” Dad exclaims. “Just what do you have in mind with that thing while I have my arm up this cow?”
“Don’t worry Dad, I promise if I stick you, I won’t feel a thing,” I say smiling. “But seriously, just keep holding that in her while I run a purse string suture around her vulva. I promise I’ll be careful, and I’ll tell you when to move your hand.”
As carefully as I can, I stab the big needle through the skin below the cow’s vulva and push it under the skin all the way around the opening and come back out through the skin at the top. I grab the end of the umbilical tape and pull the needle back out. I then pass the needle on the other side in the same manner, rethread the needle at the top, then pull the needle and tape back out at the bottom. I tell Dad to pull his arm out and pull the ends of the tape tight, tying a knot to secure it. This essentially sews up the cow’s vulva, but I am careful to allow enough of an opening to allow urination to occur. The procedure finished, I notice for the first time that the cow has quite a large udder. I turn to the clients.
“When did she calve last?” I ask.
“She’s still nursing last year’s calf,” Laney answers. “It’s about 9 months old now; we just never got around to weaning it.”
“Ah. Let me change gloves and we’ll check her pregnancy status,” I say.
With a fresh glove, I palpate her rectally. Sure enough, I feel the fully formed head and front feet of a near-term fetus. Houston we have a problem.
“We’ve got a bit of a problem here, I’m afraid,” I say. “She’s got a big calf inside her that’s pretty close to term. Usually we use the cow’s udder development to gauge how close she is to calving, but we can’t do that seeing as how she is still nursing last year’s calf. She can’t calve with her vulva sewn shut; you’ll have to untie it when she goes into labor.”
“So how will we know when she goes into labor? Nina asks.
“That’s the problem,” I say grimly. “There is no way of knowing how close she is. The only way would be to watch and see when she started straining and you would have to be right there to untie the stitch to let her calve. I don’t think there is any way that you can watch her that close. You really tun the risk of losing both the cow and the calf. If she were mine, I’d be hauling her to the nearest sale barn as soon as possible. She’ll sell for slaughter, but at least you’ll get something for her.”
We turn the cow out of the chute and load her back onto the trailer. I make out the bill and the clients pay up and pull out of the parking lot. Dad and I put away the drugs and equipment that we used and head for home.
Three hours later, I am sitting on the couch at home when I get another page from the same client. I call them back and they report that the cow has started to strain in the pen that they have her in at home. Afraid that she might be going into labor, they called me.
“I imagine that the epidural is just starting to wear off and she is straining against the suture, trying to prolapse again.” I tell them. “Keep an eye on her, but I think everything is okay.”
Another three hours go by until I get another page from the same clients. “She’s still humped up straining,” Nina says, “and now she is laying down and getting up over and over again. Do you think she could be going into labor?”
Well shit! This isn’t going to work. They are going to call me every time this cow blinks from now on and we really aren’t going to know if she’s starting to calve or not.
“I tell you what, Nina,” I say. “I can take another look at her and if she isn’t in labor, we’ll go ahead and induce her. She’ll calve in 24-48 hours and then we’ll be done with this.”
Nina asks, “What about the calf? How will we know that it won’t be premature?”
“We won’t know for sure,” I answer. “But if she goes into labor with her backside sewn shut, we run the risk of losing the cow and the calf.”
“Ok Doc,” Nina agrees. “But I don’t think there is any way that I can get that sorry witch loaded again. Do you think that you can come out here to look at her. I have a chute and an alleyway.”
“Sure, just give me directions,” I reply.
I am gathering up my things to go on the call when Emily walks into the room. “Where are you headed?” she asks. “You need help?”
“Sure,” I say.
As we are headed out to the farm, Emily happens to ask, “Where are we going anyway?”
“Out south of town on the Old Highway. Nina and Laney have a place about ten miles from here,” I tell her.
“Nina and Laney?” she asks with an arched eyebrow.
“Yeah,” I reply struggling to keep a straight face. “Lesbians like cows too you know.”
She glares at me. “You could have told me we were going to be seeing a couple of lesbians. I would have probably worn something besides shorts and a tank top!”
“Oh don’t worry too much, Em,” I say with a grin. “I’m sure they will just love you!”
When we arrive at the place, Nina and Laney are out by the corral with the gray cow, who is running circles around the enclosure. As we watch, she stops and hunches up, visibly straining. I introduce Emily to Nina and Laney, who are very polite and soon Emily is a bit more at ease.
“Sorry to bother yall with all this,” says Laney. “I’m starting to think we should just shoot this cow and be done with it. She certainly deserves it with her fantastic attitude.”
I survey their facilities, taking in the dilapidated condition of the squeeze chute. I work the mechanism to learn how it works and inadvertently disturb a nest of red wasps that had take up residence inside the metal. I take off running and waving my arms, but one of the wasps manages to sting me on the chest. Nina comes to the rescue with a large can of bug spray and once the insects are chased away, we proceed to run the cow into the chute. No sooner than we have her caught, she breaks the boards that make up the bottom of the chute. Fearing that the rest of the chute will soon share the same fate, I move quickly to begin examining the cow. I untie the Buhner stitch and insert my arm into the cow to check her cervix. It is still closed, so she is not in labor, just straining against the stitch. This is confirmed when she strains again and tries to re-prolapse.
“Emily,” I say. “I need you to put on one of those gloves.”
She only says, “Ooookaay,” but the look on her face is priceless.
After she has gloved up, I show her how to hold the prolapse back in just as I had with my dad earlier that morning. She looks decidedly less thrilled with the scenario than he had. This is made more evident when the cow raises her tail and defecates a large steaming pile of manure on Emily’s upper arm. Even though it is protected by the shoulder-length glove, I can tell that I am going to owe her for this one. A lot.
I run back to the truck to get lidocaine for an epidural, and get the dexamethasone and lutalyse injections to induce labor while I am there. Returning with the drugs, I give the two injections then proceed to give the epidural. At this time the cow decides to go down in the chute. When her hind end starts to drop, Emily is no longer able to keep her arm in place, and the cow re-prolapses on the way down. She is effectively sitting on the prolapsed vaginal tissue. I can’t put it back in with the cow in this position. We try for several minutes to get the cow to stand back up, even getting the hot shot from the truck and giving her a few good shocks in the backside, but she refuses to budge and remains stubbornly sitting down with her front feet braced against the head-gate of the chute.
“I can’t do anything with her like this,” I say in disgust. “Lets see if we can’t just turn her head loose and when she gets up, I’ll try and catch her again. Just in case, yall be ready to try and run her back in the pen if she does get loose.”
When I release the head gate, the cow surges to her feet. I swing the lever to catch her head, but the cow’s forward momentum is too much for the rusted metal and the mechanism of the head-gate breaks with a loud snap. Free from the chute, the cow runs for the open fields, oblivious to our attempts to head her off. My last sight of her was as she topped the ridge and headed into the woods, her prolapsed vagina bouncing merrily as she ran.
Perfect. What a train wreck this has become!
Nina asks, “Just let her go Doc. We’ll never be able to catch her now, but we might be able to get her back in with the rest of the cows when we feed tonight. Is it possible for her to calve like that?”
“Probably not,” I say resignedly. “If you can get her caught again, let me know, because we really need to put that prolapse back in. I guess there is a slight chance that once she goes into labor and everything starts dilating the prolapse might fall back in on it’s own, but I think that is a long shot. I’m really sorry this has turned into such a train wreck.”
Laney gives an eloquent shrug, “No worries doc, you did what you could. If we had a better chute she wouldn’t have gotten away. We’ve been intending to get a new one for quite a while. We wanted to shoot that stupid cow anyway. Come on up to the house and we’ll get you a beer. You definitely earned one.”
I declined the offered beer as I was still on call, but did take them up on a glass of iced tea. The four of us spent half an hour on their back porch, cooling off in the shade. With their laid-back attitude and understanding nature, Nina and Laney had quickly risen to the top of my Favorite Clients list. I never heard back from them that weekend, and when I saw them about six months later they reported that they never found the cow, alive or dead. I don’t know if she just kept running and jumped the fence or what, but she was never seen again.
Since then I have had several clients that are homosexuals. The Bible may be pretty clear on the immorality of this lifestyle, but I try to reserve judgement. All that I have met have been good, honest people for the most part, and without fail, all have been good clients and good caretakers for their animals. Perhaps this is because not very many of these people have children and their animals fill that role in their lives, but I really believe that you can tell a lot about the decency of a person by the way they are to animals. Just because you may not understand or necessarily agree with the way that a person lives their life doesn’t give you leave to sit in judgement of them. I figure that it’s better to leave the judging to the one that’s qualified and I only know of one that fits that role. And I’m pretty sure that He isn’t me.
