Chapter 4, Part 1

It is now the end of August. I have been in practice for about 3 months and pretty well have my feet under me by this time and have gotten used to the routine at the clinic. Most mornings start out with a series of small animal surgeries, consisting mostly of routine elective procedures such as spays and neuters. As we have only one gas anesthetic machine, we must take turns performing dog surgeries on the main surgery table. As cats are anesthetized with injectable drugs without needing to be maintained on gas, these surgeries are performed by another surgeon on a second surgery table set up in the kennel washroom. Usually all of the surgeries are finished by noon. The veterinarian who is not performing surgery starts seeing patients in the exam room or large animal cases in the barn and once the surgeries are finished, the surgery room may double as a second exam room.

As Dr. E and Dr. L are both faster surgeons than I and partially due to the fact that I am usually the last one to arrive in the mornings, I’m usually not the first surgeon up to bat. Thus, I become accustomed to starting my day operating on cats on the kennel operating table and quickly become very comfortable with cat spays, neuters, and declaws. As the other two veterinarians dislike performing declaws due to the high rate of complication associated with the procedure, I soon inherit all of these surgeries. My success rate is higher mainly because I give post-op pain medication and antibiotics to all the cats that I declaw.

When it’s my turn to take a turn on the surgery rotation, I am competent, but slow.

________________________

I am walking out the clinic door to get in my truck and head home when the pager goes off. It is 10pm and I have spent the last two hours treating a cow with anaplasmosis out in the country. When I got to the people’s place, the cow was actually down in a pond. I helped them tie a rope around her and then we proceeded to drag her out with a truck. Once on dry land I was able to examine her and discovered the yellow discoloration of jaundice in the whites of her eyes, the inside of her mouth, and the inside of her vulva that is classically associated with anaplasmosis. This disease is caused by a microscopic organism that parasitizes the red blood cells, causing them to rupture, which leads to anemia and the resulting jaundice and weakness. It is spread from animal to animal through blood transmission by biting flies and ticks. Due to this we usually see it at the height of the summer. The disease also causes a high fever which results in the animals seeking water in which to cool off and apparently this cow was weak enough that she fell in and couldn’t get out again.

I treat the cow with an injection of oxytetracycline antibiotics and an iron supplement to help her rebuild her blood cells. I also take a small vial of blood back to the clinic to confirm the diagnosis and evaluate the severity of her anemia. At the clinic I look at a drop of blood under the microscope and identify the small dark shape of the anaplasmosis organisms on the periphery of the red blood cells. I centrifuge the remaining blood and determine that the cow’s packed cell volume is 8%. A normal PCV in cattle should be between 25-45%. This severe an anemia means that the cow will probably not make it through the night. I call the owners and tell them that the prognosis is not good and am getting ready to leave when I get the call. Cow with piece of wire stuck in eye.

Wondering how someone could notice a piece of wire in a cow’s eye at ten o’clock at night, I call the number on the pager. “Hello, this is Dr. Carpenter from the T-Town Veterinary Clinic. Are you having trouble with a cow?” I ask.

“Yeah, we sure are,” the man answers. “My name is John Harper and I live over in Wewoka. We usually use Ol’ Doc Thompson, but he don’t take night calls anymore and really don’t like doin’ cattle much anyways. But, I’ve got this cow; she’s really kind of a pet. She’ll weigh close to 1500 lbs, but she’s dog-gentle. Anyhow, she’s got this piece of wire sticking outta her eye and I’m afraid she’ll go blind if we don’t get it out.”

Our clinic has been servicing an ever increasing geographical area in terms of large animal calls and emergency work. Many of the veterinarians in the surrounding towns are getting older and are unable to hire associates to lighten their workload or even sell their practices when they wish to retire. As a result many no longer take emergency calls and have reduced their large animal work or have stopped taking large animal cases altogether. There just aren’t enough new graduates from veterinary school that are interested in going into practice in rural Oklahoma. Most are taking jobs at small animal clinics in urban settings because it is physically less demanding and the opportunities for making a profit are much greater. So we have been getting a lot more emergency calls after hours from the surrounding areas for large animal cases.

“Okay, do you want to bring her in and let me take a look at it?” I ask, thinking that it will probably be close to midnight by the time they can make it to the clinic from Wewoka, a town located in the next county to the east, a good 30 miles away.

Mr. Harper pauses, “That’s the problem, Doc. I don’t have no trailer or nothing to haul her in. Can you come out here?”

Having learned better by this time than to assume that cattle owners will actually have facilities to handle cattle, I ask, “Do you have facilities at your place to examine her? Like a chute?”

“I’ve got her up in a round pen, but it’s kind of big. Can’t you dart her or something?” he asks.

This is a question that I get asked almost as much as the old can’t you just rope it question. Besides being rodeo cowboys, all veterinarians should come equipped with National Geographic-style tranquilizer guns. I work on domesticated animals for a reason. If I wanted to dart wild animals for a living, I would develop an Australian accent, move to Africa, and get my own TV show. If you are going to have cattle, buy a frickin’ chute for pete’s sake!

“No, Mr. Harper, I can’t do that because we don’t own a dart gun,” I say patiently.

“Well can you give her a shot then,” Mr. Harper asks, persisting.

“If you have a way of restraining a 1500 lb cow long enough for me to give her a shot, then yeah, I can,” I reply. “But you don’t have a chute, remember? Why don’t you see if you can’t borrow a trailer from someone tomorrow and bring her in to the clinic?”

“I may be able to rig some panels together or something that might work. Can you come and try?” he implores. “I’m really worried that she’s gonna hurt that eye real bad if we don’t get that wire out tonight.”

I sigh in resignation, “Ok. I’ll come out and if you can throw something together that will hold her long enough to give her a shot, I’ll give it a try. But if I drive all the way over there and this doesn’t work, you will still be charged for the trip out.”

“I understand, Doc,” he says. “I’ll have the panels up by the time you get here.”

I load a tray with medication to treat a lacerated eye and get in the truck. As I drive along through the darkness, I contemplate the town of Wewoka. When we played them in football when I was in high school, the team had to be escorted onto the field by the local police. It was kind of a rough place, with a pretty big gang problem for a small town in Oklahoma. Back in the 30’s during the Great Depression, lots of Oklahomans migrated to California in search of work. As a result, many Oklahomans today have relatives living in California. There have been instances where the kids in California were getting into trouble with gangs and were sent to live with relatives in Oklahoma to straighten them out and get them away from bad influences. What happened was they brought the gang problem to Oklahoma.

I drive across the town of Wewoka on my way to the Harper place on the north side of town. At this time of night the streets are mostly deserted, so I don’t have to worry about whether I am wearing neutral gang colors. I pull into the driveway of the client’s house, which is on a small acreage a few miles outside of city limits. The Harpers meet me with flashlights in hand.

“Thank you so much for coming, Doc,” Mr. Harper says, shaking my hand. “If you want, you can pull your truck around back by the corral. I’ve got a couple of panels set up in the corner.”

I do as he suggests, surveying the facilities. In one corner of the corral, Mr. Harper has set up a couple of aluminum panels in a V-shape, with the ends of the panels baling wired together. The Harper’s plan on luring the heifer into this makeshift chute with feed and then sliding a post through the bars of the panel behind her, thus trapping her long enough for me to inject her with a sedative. This will never work. That heifer can break out of this whenever she wants. She better be damn gentle.

“Well, let’s give it a go,” I say.

Mrs. Harper pours grain into a bucket and places it in the corner of the panels. Mr. Harper and I ease the heifer towards the enclosure. She walks into the “chute” and Mr. Harper slides a post behind her. I quickly step up inject a dose of xylazine into the muscle of the heifer’s neck. When she becomes aware of the restriction of the panels, she starts to fight against the restraint. Seeing that she will quickly be loose of the panels before my sedative will have a chance to take effect, I move forward, illuminating her head with my flashlight. There is a piece of metal wire dangling from her right eye, protruding from between the globe and the upper eyelid. I pull a pair of pliers from my pocket and take hold of the wire. The heifer is slinging her head back and forth, making things as difficult as possible. As gently as possible, I tug on the wire. From the resistance, I can tell that the end of the wire is curved into a hook and that it has impaled the upper eyelid. Trying again, I turn the wire and pull the hook free of the eyelid. I then give the cow an injection of antibiotics and apply an antibiotic ointment to the eye itself.

As soon as I finish, the heifer manages to break the post that is holding her within the panels and escapes. She trots across the corral, slows to a stop, and promptly lays down as the sedative finally kicks in. Well that was convenient timing! Sure glad I gave it that shot!

“Well, I managed to get the wire out,” I tell the Harpers. “It didn’t appear to have damaged the eye itself; the wire was just in the eyelid. Should heal without complication.”

Mrs. Harper is visibly relieved. “Oh, Dr. Carpenter, you are a Godsend! Thank you so much!”

Okay, I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever been called a Godsend. I guess they were pretty worried about that heifer!

I tally up their bill. The charge for the trip out is more than the rest of the bill combined, but they happily pay it and ask for my business card to keep for the future. I must admit that as reluctant as I was to go on this call initially, thinking it was going to be a wild goose chase, I am really glad that I did. The feeling that I got knowing that I had helped these people made the late hour and all the miles traveled very worthwhile indeed.

Chapter 3, Part 2

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.

Chapter 3, Part 1

My dad and I run about twenty head of registered beefmaster cattle. Dad makes most of the breeding and feeding decisions while my role has traditionally been more along the lines of manual laborer. However, upon graduation my role has expanded to include veterinarian and herd health consultant as well. It is in this fashion that I find myself down at the barn after work one day, about to attempt a cosmetic dehorn on a yearling bull. In veterinary school I was able to perform half of this procedure, removing one horn on a calf while a classmate removed the other. For some reason I decide that I am ballsy enough to duplicate the procedure on one of Dad’s herd sire prospects.

A cosmetic dehorn consists of first deadening the horn base with lidocaine, incising around the horn with a scalpel, cutting the horn from the head, removing a portion of the skull around the horn base, then suturing the incision closed. The purpose of this is to make the animal appear polled, or as if the animal was born naturally without horns. It also heals much faster than if the wound is left open, as with traditional dehorning. Both are particularly desirable with show animals. In this case, my dad wants to put this particular bull in a registered sale and hopes that the procedure will improve his appearance and thus increase his value.

So as I set out the tools and instruments that I will need to perform the surgery, I try to remember all of the steps of the procedure. It has been over a year since I did this in vet school, and that animal didn’t have horns nearly as large as the pair in front of me. You know, I don’t feel quite as ballsy anymore. Actually I feel a bit green. Must have been something I ate.

Dad puts a halter around the bull’s head and ties him around to the side of the chute. As he shaves the hair off the head and begins scrubbing around the horns with surgical scrub, I draw up a syringe full of lidocaine. I then make a series of injections around the base of the horn. The bull fights against its restraints and a surprising amount of bleeding occurs with each needle stick. I don’t remember the one in school bleeding this much. Off to a stellar start! Afterwards, I test the skin to make sure it is deadened by pricking the area with the needle. The bull doesn’t move a muscle.

“Ok, Dad, here we go,” I say, picking up the scalpel blade.

He stands off to the side and says, “Just let me know if I can do anything to help.”

I begin by making an elliptical incision around the horn, making the apex of each arc several inches above and below the horn itself. Blood pours from the cuts, running down the side of the bull’s face and begins to drip into a pool on the ground below its head. The base of the bull’s horn is bigger than my fist, too big in diameter to remove with the dehorning tool, so I am forced to saw through the base with a wire saw. I angle the cut to remove the horn and the portion of the skull that makes up the base of the horn, shaping the head into a more aesthetically pleasing form. This is a lengthy process and my arms are aching from the repetitive back and forth motion by the time the horn finally falls to the ground. Fortunately, the bull remains calm and sedate through it all, my local anesthetic making this a pain-free experience. With the horn removed, blood now spurts freely from the severed arteries, arcing several feet in the air before splattering against my coveralls in crimson stains.

“Give me a second to pull those bleeders,” I tell Dad, “and it will get a whole lot less gory around here. But I’m sending you my dry-cleaning bill, FYI.”

“Sure, and I’ll send you the bill on your room and board for the first eighteen years of your life,” he replies. He is standing quite a bit further away now than he was a few minutes ago, eyeing the bleeding speculatively. “But less bleeding sounds good to me.”

Dad has ran cattle long enough that he is used to the amount of blood involved with the dehorning process, but he has to be a bit apprehensive. I know I am, as this is the first time I have attempted this procedure on my own and nobody will be able to bale me out if a complication occurs. Why did I think I could do this again? I could be siting in the house playing X-Box, but no, I had to be the big shot vet helping out the old man. I’m such an asshole.

Hands shaking a bit, I take a pair of hemostats from the surgery pack. I grasp the severed end of each artery and gently pull, stretching the vessels out of the tissue until they break. The broken end recoils back into the tissue, which causes the artery to constrict thus stopping the hemorrhaging. This process takes quite a while and by the time I am finished, I have blood spray all over my face and hair. I bet I look like something from a slasher flick. Bwaahahahaha. I carefully examine the entire incision to ensure that I have stopped virtually all of the bleeding. The torrent of blood is now but a drip. However, I am now left looking at a hole in the side of the bull’s head big enough to burry my fist up to the wrist. A large lump appears in my throat and I swallow hard. That is one hell of a hole. I sure hope I can get this closed.

Dad looks at the gaping hole skeptically and asks, “That’s one hell of a hole. Are you going to be able to get it closed?”

“I was wondering the same thing myself, to be honest,” I say sheepishly.

“That doesn’t just fill me with confidence,” Dad says.

I take the scalpel blade and begin freeing the skin edges from the bone, making it possible to stretch the edges of the incision over the gap in the skull. Taking a pair of clamps from the surgery pack, I hold the edges together.

“It’ll be a bit of a stretch, no doubt,” I say, “but I’m pretty sure it will work. I’ll need you to help me keep tension on the suture as I sew.”

“Whatever I can do to help,” Dad replies.

Taking a large, curved needle and a long length of suture, I begin to sew. The hide of the bull’s head is close to half an inch thick and it is a tedious process to push the needle through both sides of the incision.

“That stuff’s pretty tough, huh?” Dad asks.

“Yeah, it’s like sewing through leather or something,” I reply sarcastically.

“Ok, smart ass, just watch where you’re going with that thing,” Dad says as he holds tension on the suture line. “I’d just as soon you didn’t make my hand a permanent hood ornament.”

“You mean you don’t want to be blood brothers to this guy,?” I ask, still finding sarcasm an appropriate outlet for my tension.

“I think I’ll pass,” he says.

By the time I tie the final knot in the suture line, the sun is sinking rapidly to the west. There isn’t enough daylight left to remove the other horn. We’ll have to finish another day.

“Well, I guess you could always market him as a unicorn,” I say as we release the bull from the chute and he trots away, his lopsided head held high in the air. “Hope the other bulls don’t make too much fun of him.”

“I think he will look pretty good if we can get the other side to match,” Dad says appreciatively.

“Yeah, that’s the tricky part,” I say.

Dad just looks at me, “You mean what you just did was the easy part?!”

_____________________________

A few days go by before we have the time to finish the surgery and remove the other horn. The process goes smoothly, without complication. When we are finished, Dad and I stand back and eye the bull’s head critically.

“Well, Dad, what do you think,” I ask.

“Looks good, son,” he says. “You did a good job getting both sides to look symmetrical. If you want, I’ve got several others you can do next.”

“I hope their horns are a bit smaller than this one,” I say with alarm.

“Yeah, he was almost too big,” Dad agrees. “No, the others will be smaller. But as good a job as you did with this one, I think you ought to start advertising this service at the clinic. Nobody else around here can do that any better.”

“I’ll talk to Dr. E and Dr. L about it tomorrow,” I say. I don’t think they do too many cosmetic dehorns, so they might be agreeable to that.”

The other veterinarians saw my work when we took the bull in for a breeding soundness exam and were both suitably impressed. They agreed to add the procedure to our list of services. Over time I made a few changes to my technique, which reduced the operating time significantly. I also purchased a human osteotome, a kind of chisel used by orthopedic specialists and plastic surgeons to shape bone. This allowed me more freedom in shaping the skull and led to more cosmetic results. I soon begin performing cosmetic dehorns fairly regularly on show cattle for the area FFA and 4H kids and I have my first marketable skill that is unique from those offered by my colleagues.

Chapter 2, Part 3

The surgery the next morning went very well. Dr. E is a great teacher, informative without hovering. I incise through the skin and superficial muscle layers of the dog’s thigh then separate the muscle bellies of the quadriceps muscles until I locate the fractured ends of the femur. I then place the stainless steel rod through the middle of the femur, passing down along the marrow cavity and screwing the threaded end into the thick bone by the knee joint. The tricky part is to not go all the way through the bone and into the joint itself. After the pin is placed it is a simple matter to close the incision. It takes about 30 minutes from start to finish and is really a lot of fun. The rest of the day passes uneventfully.

That evening, Emily and I drive into Oklahoma City to have dinner with Moose and Amber. After graduation, Moose took a job at a small animal practice close to where he grew up. His employer was excited to add Moose’s extensive exotic animal experience to their range of services. As we drove to the restaurant, Moose and I traded war stories in the front seat.

“I really thought that they would kind of ease me into the on-call schedule,” I say, complaining to Moose. “At least let me get my feet under me and figure out where things are at in the clinic and the pricing, but no. Pretty sure I was there for a week before they put me on call, and then it was Memorial Day Weekend, so it was a three-day weekend to boot!

Moose shakes his head sympathetically, “Dude, that sucks.”

“Being on call really sucks, especially at first,” I say as I navigate the metro traffic. “Half the time I didn’t know what was going on with the patient or I didn’t know what to treat it with, and if I did figure it out, I couldn’t find the medication in the clinic anyway. And then I didn’t have a clue what to charge because they don’t have a set price list for anything! I bet I called the other guys at least five times a night that first weekend. I really looked like a jackass. It’s getting better, but my heart rate still goes through the roof whenever the pager goes off.”

Moose shakes his head and says, “Yeah, I’m really glad that we’re not on call. That’s what the emergency clinics are for.”

“We don’t have any in our area,” I say, “and besides, none of the emergency clinics see large animal cases anyway. So even if we did, I’d still have to pull calves and treat colics.”

“Are they letting you do much surgery,” Moose asks. “The guy I work for is kind of a surgery hog. I’ve only done a couple of spays and neuters since I started.”

“That’s one thing about these guys,” I reply, “they definitely believe in getting your feet wet, even if sometimes it is sink or swim. I do a couple of spays and neuters a day most days. And so far I’ve done a cystotomy on a dog with bladder stones, enucleated an eye on a kitten, and even got to pin a broken leg on a dog that had been hit by a car the other day.”

“Wow, that’s cool they are letting you do all that,” Moose replies. “Are you set up pretty well with diagnostics?”

“Not as good as I would like,” I confess. “We have an ultrasound and a really old radiograph machine, but no in-house blood-work.”

Moose asks, “Where are you sending your blood to?”

“To a lab in Edmond,” I answer. “A courier comes to the clinic every weekday around noon to pick up the samples and they fax us the results by that afternoon. So if I can draw a blood sample in the morning during the week I get same-day results. The problem is if the animal comes in after lunch I have to wait a full day for results and if it is on the weekend you might as well forget it. By the time three days go by, half the cases are better or dead. How about yall?”

“We’ve got in-house blood-work, but it is kind of slow and cumbersome to work with,” Moose replies. “Our x-ray is pretty decent, but we don’t have ultrasound.”

In the backseat, Emily and Amber discuss things other than veterinary medicine. Amber has been attending physician’s assistant school at the University of Oklahoma. It is an intensive program, lasting two-and-a-half years with no breaks. She is discussing her latest test.

“We had a cardio test on Wednesday and I don’t think there is anyway that I could have passed. I felt like I knew nothing on that thing,” she complains.

“Oh, Amber, that’s what you say every time, and you always end up acing them,” Emily says with a smile.

“I’m just sick of school,” Amber groans. “I’m sooo ready to be done.”

At this I have to smile. I know exactly how she feels. I had those exact same thoughts through almost four years of veterinary school.

“Be careful what you wish for, Amber,” I say. “Moose and I said that not that long ago and look how much fun we’re having now.”

We arrive at the restaurant and our evening passes eating good food in the company of our good friends. It is some years later that I learn that during the car ride to the restaurant, while Moose and I griped about the pitfalls of our new jobs, I had accidentally made a call on the cell phone in my pocket. It had dialed Dr. E, who heard every word of our conversation. I would have been mortified if I had known that he had heard me complaining about the job, but he didn’t say a word about it until some two years later. When he did, he didn’t give me a hard time about it as I deserved, but was actually sympathetic. He seemed to remember having a similar conversation thirty years ago with one of his classmates.