Just One More Thing, Doc by Bradford B. Brown

Author:Bradford B. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tilbury House Publishers

15

Know-It-All Lonnie Boy

I got home around three A.M. from barn rounds one winter morning, and on the telephone pad was a note to call Lonnie Boy. My wife knew Lonnie Boy as well as I did. He ran a large dairy farm down in Lincoln County. I called Lonnie and got him on the phone.

He allowed that he had been trying to deliver a calf from a first-calf heifer. He went on and on bragging about his prowess and talent for delivering calves for anyone within twenty miles of him, but he now had one he couldn’t quite deal with. He said he had the neighbors in, lots of help, and they had been at it for a couple of days.

“What do you need me for, Lonnie?” I asked.

He said, “Well, I’ve got to get that calf out of the cow. The calf is dead anyway—I know that because I pulled the head off with a come-along. I gave up then and called Ed McDonald; he’s a pretty good vet, you know. He spent a couple hours but he gave up. So I said to myself, there’s only one vet that I know that can get that calf out, and that’s Dr. Brown up to Belfast. So anyway, I’d appreciate it if you’d come down. I’m going to be sleeping in my chair in the living room right next to the window, so when you drive in to the milkroom dooryard, just walk across the yard and tap on the window. I’ll come out and help you. I need a couple more hours sleep if I can get it. I’m exhausted. Been up two days trying to get that calf out.”

Probably about forty minutes later I pulled into his driveway and parked my car in front of his milkroom. I looked across the yard, through the window and saw Lonnie Boy asleep in his overstuffed chair. I said to myself, “I may as well look at the patient first.” So I walked into the cow barn and down the ramp to where the cows were. I saw this poor pathetic heifer, all bedraggled, with a big calf protruding from her vagina. There was no head on the calf. The head was on the floor, off to the side.

My first thought was to get the heifer out of pain. I gave her a pint of 50 percent dextrose to give her energy, and then gave her a spinal epidural. This would also stop her straining and allow me to work on her internally. I would need a lot of freedom to get that calf out.

I went to the milkroom and got a pail to mix up an iodine solution as a disinfectant. While I was doing that I noticed a super-sized box of Ivory dish detergent. “There!” I said, grabbing it.

Then I stripped to the waist to save my clothes. I lay down in the gutter behind the heifer and slowly but surely and very methodically started to lubricate the obstructed areas between the mother and the baby with the Ivory soap.

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