Vet Tales

 

I started working for a local veterinarian when I was 15. No working papers or anything, just started cleaning kennels and feeding dogs on weekends filling in for my then boyfriend, whose job it actually was. It was one of several jobs I had that girls weren't supposed to be able to do back in those days.

He didn’t last, but I did, spending 8 years working my way up to assisting in the operating room and running the office.

Along the way I went on calls with an assistant vet my boss hired who later went on to be the boss doc at the Buffalo Zoo, and pretty famous. He was also a great guy, kind, caring, loved to teach. I was lucky to know him and learn from him.

However, in those days he was just Doctor Prowten to me, and when he wasn’t inviting me for ride alongs I often babysat for his children.

One of my first farm visits was unforgettable. I was not a farm kid….raised in my folks’ antique and book stores... and though I loved animals, I was remarkably ignorant.

 I didn’t particularly like cows either. However….

There was a cow that wasn’t getting on with calving and the farmer knew he needed help so he called the office early one morning. Wish I could remember who it was, but that was long before I became deeply involved in the local farming community.

Anyhow, when doc did a preliminary exam it was not good news.

Schistosomus reflexus.

I learned the term that day and have never, ever forgotten it, despite the fact that I was only a teenager then and a lot of years have since gone by. Suffice to say that it is a nasty birth anomaly, the calf was very, very, very dead, had to be removed in bits and pieces and I was drafted to help. That is probably all the detail you need. This was a particularly egregious case, the calf was well on its way to decomposition, and the smell alone should have turned me off cows forever.

Obviously it didn't. Doc made everything interesting. 

Meanwhile a pair of adorably speckled newborn calves romped nearby. While we dissected the dead calf and got the mama doctored up and doing better the farmer regaled us with the tale of the twins. 

He and the doc and all the adults at the farm had matched them up, spot-for-spot, thinking that maybe they were identical twins. They had a high time discussing the possibilities.

Then one of the smaller kids pointed out the should-have-been-obvious. Twin one was a bull and twin two was his sister.

We laughed and laughed.

I never forgot that day. It was only the second calving I had ever experienced, the first being when a sweet neighbor farmer let me watch one of their cows giving birth. It sure stuck with me!

I went on to work a long time for the older veterinarian, marry a farmer, and birth many, many calves over the years. Ralph and I got pretty good at it, and later all the kids also developed some pretty mean skills.

I saw two more cases of Schistosomus Reflexus, which is pretty amazing as it is rare. Neither was anywhere near as bad as the first 

Someday I will tell you about the two-headed calf that got me out of chopping some pretty tall hay one day. 

And the time we were dissecting fetal pigs in college and Doc Prowten had me help him do a necropsy on a gigantic pig that had died on a nearby farm and was brought to the hospital in the back of a pickup truck. Sort of an extra lab or something. Trust me, you don't want details, but there was a huge abscess involved and Doc was a bit of a joker.....

Anyhow, I did real well in that class, and never lost interest in animal medicine, even though most of my life was spent as a customer. And I ended up really loving cows...just had to get to know them a little better.