Cow Surfing
Feb. 26th, 2005 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyspriteJudging from the responses in my 'Ten Things' meme, it seems like there are at least a few people looking at this who haven't heard the tidbit of wackiness that was my cow surfing adventure. So I'll do my best to write it up here, and apologize to any who are far too familiar with the tale already....
Before I say anything else, I would just like to state for the record that cow-surfing is, in fact, a legitimate medical procedure. No cows were harmed in this adventure; as far as I can tell the only injuries sustained were to a pair of coveralls and my dignity.
In vet school, all students are required to learn at least the basics of medical care for all species. People planning on working on racetracks and farms still need to spend their time in the puppy-kitty clinic, and those of us who never plan on working with anything bigger than ourselves still need to put in a couple of months at the large animal end of the hospital.
Food animal medicine has become part of an industry at this point, and the purpose of that industry is to make more cows. They want to make cattle as fast as possible, and they want those cattle to be as big as possible. The end result of this is that little young heifers are bred as soon as they're past puberty to the biggest stud bulls they can find. This leads to fetal calves that occasionally approach the size of the mama they're inside.
As a baby cow is getting ready to be born, it has to rotate inside the uterus, nose-to-tail and top-to-bottom. Nose to tail usually isn't a problem, but when the calf is big enough, sometimes there isn't room for it to turn top-to-bottom (going from /\-- to \/---) - so when it tries to turn like that inside the uterus, the uterus turns with it, twisting around the base. This makes it rather difficult for the calf to then fit out.
The ideal cure for this would be to untwist the uterus. Unfortunately, with the twist at the base and a 150-pound calf inside, one can't quite reach inside far enough to do roll the uterus inside the cow. Instead, you have to roll the cow around the uterus.
I learned this one weekend afternoon when I was called in on emergency to help treat a cow with exactly this problem. The clinician explained exactly what we would do - palpate first to confirm the torsion, lie the cow down, then roll her while applying pressure over the uterus to keep the uterus from rolling with her. It sounds simple, doesn't it?
The clinician palpated the cow first, and promptly broke the cow's water. This is far more eventful in an animal the size of a cow than it is for a human, and when it was done we were not quite ankle-deep in amniotic fluid. Which we then had to coerce the cow to lie down in. Making a cow lie down, I had been taught, was fairly simple. There's a way to wrap a rope around them that, when you pull on it, the cow just goes down. It had been demonstrated on the clinic's cows. Of course, noone had mentioned to me that after several years of training classes, the cows had learned to lie down when the rope was wrapped around them. This cow wasn't so complacent. Eventually, three students, the clinician, and the seventy-year-old farmer and his wife pushed and pulled and shoved and forced the cow down.... on the wrong side. Another ten minutes were spent pushing and pulling and shoving until she stood back up, then pushing in other directions getting her to lie on the proper side.
At this point, we had a fairly distraught cow liberally lubricated with amniotic fluid on all sides, some nasty-mucky ropes, and a handful of exhausted people. The clinician showed us how to tie the ropes around the cow's feet to roll her, and then looked at the three of us helping her. Finally, she turned to me. 'You're smallest, you apply pressure while we roll.' This made no sense to me, and I inquired why she wouldn't want someone larger and stronger applying pressure. Her response was that she didn't want to hurt the cow.
When I think of applying pressure, my mental image involves hands, and pressing. Apparently, more pressure than that is needed to hold a uterus full of calf still inside a cow. About, oh, one smallish woman worth of pressure. Standing on the cow, staying on the apex of the belly as the cow is rolled under her. I looked my teacher in the eye and laughed. She didn't laugh back.
So I climbed onto the slippery, sodden, struggling cow and, arms outstretched, balanced on her abdomen as my classmates grabbed the ropes tied around her feet and rolled her under me, and bounced gently trying to keep pressure on her uterus, keep the calf from rolling, and keep from falling on my behind in a huge puddle of cow juice. I succeeded in almost all of these, finally losing my balance and slipping to straddle the cow when, in the last bit of rolling, she flailed, tossed one of my classmates to the side, and rolled the rest of the way on her own. Luckily, I managed to climb off before the cow stood up, as I don't quite think she appreciated the role I had played in her medical treatment.
The rolling worked, I finally learned why my farm-bred classmates referred to the procedure as 'cow surfing,' and the calf survived. My coveralls were never quite the same, though, and I realized that while small animal medicine is my true calling, it will never have the sheer absurdity of farm medicine....
Before I say anything else, I would just like to state for the record that cow-surfing is, in fact, a legitimate medical procedure. No cows were harmed in this adventure; as far as I can tell the only injuries sustained were to a pair of coveralls and my dignity.
In vet school, all students are required to learn at least the basics of medical care for all species. People planning on working on racetracks and farms still need to spend their time in the puppy-kitty clinic, and those of us who never plan on working with anything bigger than ourselves still need to put in a couple of months at the large animal end of the hospital.
Food animal medicine has become part of an industry at this point, and the purpose of that industry is to make more cows. They want to make cattle as fast as possible, and they want those cattle to be as big as possible. The end result of this is that little young heifers are bred as soon as they're past puberty to the biggest stud bulls they can find. This leads to fetal calves that occasionally approach the size of the mama they're inside.
As a baby cow is getting ready to be born, it has to rotate inside the uterus, nose-to-tail and top-to-bottom. Nose to tail usually isn't a problem, but when the calf is big enough, sometimes there isn't room for it to turn top-to-bottom (going from /\-- to \/---) - so when it tries to turn like that inside the uterus, the uterus turns with it, twisting around the base. This makes it rather difficult for the calf to then fit out.
The ideal cure for this would be to untwist the uterus. Unfortunately, with the twist at the base and a 150-pound calf inside, one can't quite reach inside far enough to do roll the uterus inside the cow. Instead, you have to roll the cow around the uterus.
I learned this one weekend afternoon when I was called in on emergency to help treat a cow with exactly this problem. The clinician explained exactly what we would do - palpate first to confirm the torsion, lie the cow down, then roll her while applying pressure over the uterus to keep the uterus from rolling with her. It sounds simple, doesn't it?
The clinician palpated the cow first, and promptly broke the cow's water. This is far more eventful in an animal the size of a cow than it is for a human, and when it was done we were not quite ankle-deep in amniotic fluid. Which we then had to coerce the cow to lie down in. Making a cow lie down, I had been taught, was fairly simple. There's a way to wrap a rope around them that, when you pull on it, the cow just goes down. It had been demonstrated on the clinic's cows. Of course, noone had mentioned to me that after several years of training classes, the cows had learned to lie down when the rope was wrapped around them. This cow wasn't so complacent. Eventually, three students, the clinician, and the seventy-year-old farmer and his wife pushed and pulled and shoved and forced the cow down.... on the wrong side. Another ten minutes were spent pushing and pulling and shoving until she stood back up, then pushing in other directions getting her to lie on the proper side.
At this point, we had a fairly distraught cow liberally lubricated with amniotic fluid on all sides, some nasty-mucky ropes, and a handful of exhausted people. The clinician showed us how to tie the ropes around the cow's feet to roll her, and then looked at the three of us helping her. Finally, she turned to me. 'You're smallest, you apply pressure while we roll.' This made no sense to me, and I inquired why she wouldn't want someone larger and stronger applying pressure. Her response was that she didn't want to hurt the cow.
When I think of applying pressure, my mental image involves hands, and pressing. Apparently, more pressure than that is needed to hold a uterus full of calf still inside a cow. About, oh, one smallish woman worth of pressure. Standing on the cow, staying on the apex of the belly as the cow is rolled under her. I looked my teacher in the eye and laughed. She didn't laugh back.
So I climbed onto the slippery, sodden, struggling cow and, arms outstretched, balanced on her abdomen as my classmates grabbed the ropes tied around her feet and rolled her under me, and bounced gently trying to keep pressure on her uterus, keep the calf from rolling, and keep from falling on my behind in a huge puddle of cow juice. I succeeded in almost all of these, finally losing my balance and slipping to straddle the cow when, in the last bit of rolling, she flailed, tossed one of my classmates to the side, and rolled the rest of the way on her own. Luckily, I managed to climb off before the cow stood up, as I don't quite think she appreciated the role I had played in her medical treatment.
The rolling worked, I finally learned why my farm-bred classmates referred to the procedure as 'cow surfing,' and the calf survived. My coveralls were never quite the same, though, and I realized that while small animal medicine is my true calling, it will never have the sheer absurdity of farm medicine....
