"How now brown cow?!"

Where to start? These past few weeks have been filled with moments, that just make you shake your head and go, “What?!” For instance, I had a phone call the other day, that my clinic’s sister passed on to me, which started something like this…”so we’ve got this elephant bull in musth…” Whoa!!! Whoa!! Whoa!! Now, I am learning a small bit about reproduction in various animals… but no where on the course do we cover elephants!!! Luckily I could pass him on to the right person!

We then had another call about a cow in labour. So I’m speaking to the owner, trying to get more of a history, so I ask him, what exactly is protruding from the rear end of the cow? Thinking he’ll tell me the head or the feet or something so that I can get some idea of what we’re dealing with… Instead, he tells me, “It’s brown.” Well, I suppose that’s a start!!

And talking of weirds and wonderfuls - the exotics clinic came through to us the other day for us to ultrasound a guinea pig! Needless to say our ultrasound probe was the size of the guinea pig!! But we were able to make out the little guinea piglet (don’t quote me on that one!) in amongst various other organs that were also on the screen at the same time! So we said that they needed to call us if they ever have anything else that they need help with. Well, we get a frantic phone call the very next day, to say that there is a wild dog which is having trouble giving birth… will we please do a caesarian section?! Is a duck’s ass watertight? Do bears s*** in the woods? Of course we’ll do a c-section on a wild dog! How cool is that! Well, I had no idea how much these things SMELL!!! |Seriously, gagging! And the weird thing is, the pups smell just as bad as you take them out the womb! Crazy huh?! She had 14 pups all together! Wow! Massive litter!

We got a call the other day to go and see a cow that was in labour. After getting a bit more of a history (more than, “It’s brown,” in any event!) I ascertained that she had been in labour since Monday… and it was now Thursday. This is when you just know that your day is about to go straight to worse… not even gonna touch ‘bad!’ And she’s in the rural areas about an hours drive away AND it’s already 4pm. So, I pulled myself towards myself, packed the combi with a few students and set off. Now directions in these rural areas are usually sketchy at best, and these were no exception. They consisted of “drive until you reach Big Al’s hardware shop and then phone” So an hr later, we reach Big Al’s hardware shop, more by luck than judgement, because the distances indicated were no where near accurate ie. 5km was actually 15km. So we call, and an old lady answers, and between my pidgeon Sotho and her pidgeon English, I resolve to stay exactly where we are until she comes to find us, never mind her directions to ‘carry straight and right’ when I’m pretty sure she means left. So after about 5 mins, she does appear and directs us to where the cow is supposed to be. So we pull up at a kraal of relatively healthy looking animals, and I’m already scouting for a cow that’s been in labour for 5 days. Not seeing anything. The herdman meanders over and there follows a rapid conversation in Sotho, with various gesticulating towards the vast bushveld that stretches as far as the eye can see in a northerly direction, and then the old lady turns to me and says, ‘Cow gone.’ Yes, I can see that. ‘Gone where?’ I ask, accompanied by the universal  open handed shrug. The old lady points north towards the previously mentioned miles and miles of bushveld…. Ah. “Houston. We have a problem.” The herdboy mutters something and goes rushing off in the supposed direction of the errant cow. So by this time I was having mild sense of humour failure… they had known that we were coming. We’d driven for an hour on some of the dodgeyist roads imaginable, only to find a cow that wasn’t there, and it’s now about to get dark. And to top it all off, the calf is going to be dead and smelly and the cow will probably end up dying despite our best efforts. So we gave them sometime, and when neither the herd man nor the cow made an appearance, I told them to find it, KEEP IT IN THE KRAAL and call us when they had it safely restrained. And we headed off on our hour return journey.

Then I was on outpatients last weekend and three jack rascals were rushed in with supposed poisoning. So we treated them generically for poisoning, but it wasn’t really fitting the profile of the more common poisonings that we see. They seemed completely out of it, one had had a slightly crazy 5 minutes and leapt out of the student’s hands and tried to bite people. So a little while later, after grilling the owner about any possible dips or topspots or anything, one of the dogs vomited up some seeds. The student who’s case it was rushed over to me, brandishing the vomit on a piece of blanket (yes, this is what I deal with everyday!) and told me that they were marijuana  seeds!! A quick round the room consensus sonfirmed that these were indeed, dagga seeds! Gotta love students!! And this did explain a lot of the dogs’ symptoms. So now I was faced with a very awkward conversation with the owner, because obviously these dogs had got into someone’s stash of marijuana… but I didn’t know was it the daughter’s? Was it the mothers? The gardener’s? Was it common knowledge??? How was the owner going to take me accusing her of smoking weed?? Anyway, so as I was bracing myself for a very interesting conversation, the owner phoned and said that she wasn’t sure if it had any bearing, but the dogs had got into her husband’s hemp seed/molasses mix that he used for carp fishing!! So these dogs had eaten a kilogram of hemp seeds between them and were stoned off their little heads!! It totally explained why they were so zoned out, why the one had a little paranoid episode! Everything!! So we just let them sleep it off in a cage and feed them when the munchies set in!!

And finally, on call this Friday and one of the students phoned to tell me that she thinks that one of our goat patients has died. Now this is not a 50:50 question!! Just as you can’t be “a little bit pregnant,” you also can’t be “somewhat dead!!” I told her to go back and make sure. Either it was dead or it wasn’t, but there were not half measures!!! Honestly!! Students!!!