Chapter Three

 

                   A 1990 VETERINARIAN STORY

 

 

   Veterinarians are strange people. They get excited over the oddest things. This spring, I had my first ever case of milk fever. My vet had never seen a goat with milk fever, either.

   “Yes, sir, looks like a classic case. How about that! See? Her eyes are dilated and don’t contract with light. Well, what do you know. My professor told me goats were resistant to milk fever.”

   My vet acted thrilled to have proven his prof wrong. I just wanted him to save my goat. Ilsa had seemed fine when she freshened with three big kids. I’d turned her out with the herd the next day – sooner than usual because her kids were so big and sturdy and I needed her kidding pen for another about-to-pop doe.

   I worked in the barn most of the day, and didn’t think it odd that Ilsa was out in the pasture grazing, while her mother stayed by the barn babysitting everybody else’s kids. Lots of grandmas get stuck with that job.

   I didn’t even spark when Ilsa came in later and would have nothing to do with her babies. I thought she was just being cantankerous, so I locked her in a pen and made her let them eat. When I milked that night, Ilsa was lying down and didn’t want to get up. I thought she just didn’t want three babies poking at her. Not that I blamed her, but they needed to eat, so I got her to her feet. She staggered forward and collapsed.

   Panic stricken, I ran for the house and telephone. “Sounds like milk fever,” the vet on call said. “Can you load her up and bring her in?” Johnny and our teenaged son were home so I said yes. Four-year-old Ilsa weighs a ton, I’ve now decided. My husband says she’s closer to 175 pounds. Whatever, the three of us had all we could do to carry her to the van.

   I sat in the back with Ilsa, cradling her head and muttering profuse apologies for not realizing she was in trouble, while Johnny drove the 30 twisty mountain miles to the vet’s office. I get car sick very easily, and by the time we reached the vet’s I was feeling as bad as Ilsa.

   The vet, however, was in a fine mood. “I can’t be sure without tests, but there’s no time for those, and this acts like milk fever in cows. She’s just a little Jersey, isn’t she? Heh, heh.”

   Nauseous and worried, I found it hard to share his cheerfulness. The vet hooked up the IV and started running a calcium mix into Ilsa’s veins. While watching her respiration rate and heartbeat, he chattered about this and that.

   Suddenly, Ilsa belched – a great, rolling belch that went on and on.

   “Hooray!” shouted the vet. “Hear that? That’s wonderful.” Ilsa, as though warming to the praise, belched again and again. By now the vet was practically leaping up and down with joy and I began to think we had taken our goat to a lunatic.

   Seeing the look on my face, he laughed. “Vets are weird people. We love hearing animals with milk fever belch. It means their muscles are working again. When the calcium drains from their system, they can’t urinate, defecate, or belch. To us vets, a belch is beautiful music.”

   About then, Ilsa let out another chorus of sound. This time, it sounded good to me, too.

   After a few minutes, the vet encouraged Ilsa to stand, which she did, and promptly pooped on my shoe. “Great!” he exclaimed. Then she peed, and I jerked my foot back. The vet hollered, “All right! She’s not ketotic anymore! See? It didn’t turn purple.”

   I’ve seen people less excited over sitting down to a steak dinner than this guy was to seeing a pill that didn’t change color when he drenched it in urine.

   That was several weeks ago and Ilsa is fine. I’m not so sure about the vet.

   But he’s really no different from one of his colleagues, who tried years ago to teach me how to identify internal parasites. That vet had slides of lots of parasites, a chart and names. I looked through his fancy microscope and saw – little round things.

   “Look here!” he beamed. “Here are some liver fluke eggs!”

   I looked and saw – little round things, that looked just like all the other little round things.

   “Isn’t this a great microscope?!” he enthused.

   “Yeah, great,” I agreed. With it, you could see all the little round things you’d ever want to see. How you’d tell them apart remained a mystery.

   But in an effort to check the effectiveness of my worming treatments, I bought a flotation kit and a book called “Veterinary Clinical Parasitology.” In that book, I learned the truth.

   “Because of the similarity in egg morphology of a number of the gastrointestinal nematodes of cattle, sheep and goats in North America, it is difficult to identify the worm by a fecal examination.” Boy, I’ll say. In even smaller letters at the bottom of the page: “note: Cattle, sheep, and goats in North America harbor 27 species of gastrointestinal nematodes, the eggs of which are similar in morphology.”

   Yeah. They’re all little round things that look identical. Maybe with enough experience I could learn to tell them apart, but I doubt I’d ever get as excited about finding a liver fluke as my vet, so I took my fecal samples to him. It was fun to watch him hop about. “Oh, boy! Lookee here! A coccidium oocyst!”