A stitch in time

I got a call at 7am

“Heather! It’s Willum! Blood everywhere, it won’t stop, come quick!”

I’m not at my sparkiest at that time of day, I usually consider early morning to be my lowest ebb. So it was a flap to try and get myself together and bundled into the car. I flew up the road as fast as I legally could, rattling my teeth as I battered across the potholes.  The farmer heard me grinding up the drive and came running round to fetch me. “Wild bitch jumped the fence and ripped hersin on the barbed wire, it’s running like a tap and winna stop!

Right enough, the tall dairy cow had a gash in front of her teat which had clearly torn the vein and the blood was pouring out. She was a great big German beast, a new breeding line that was starting to appear in dairy herds and gave great yields but could be a little stroppy. “Right lads – you get a halter on and tie her to the post, Davie, you get a rope on that back leg and tie it to the gate so she can’t kick me. I’ll get some stuff.” The cattle crush was the wrong shape with the holes in all the wrong place for this job. I reckoned it would be safer, quicker and easier in a pen.

I ran back to the car and came back with suture material and my operating tools. They were still getting her into the pen and trying to get a hold of her. After the wild chase across the field she was pretty full of adrenaline and difficult to handle. Eventually she was secured and I opened my toolbox. I swithered before drawing up the local anaesthetic – it tends to sting when you inject it and the cows don’t like it, but it was better than her going nuts every time I tried to get a stitch in – and this was going to take a few. I touched the needle to the skin and braced myself to push it in, but before I could she suddenly reversed, snapped the halter in half, and ran off taking the gate with her – and the farmer who was still standing on the gate. They took off down the yard leaving a strip of clean concrete where the gate scrapped the muck away, liberally splashed with scarlet blood.

I'd never seen a cow that strong. I needed back up.

I phoned one of my professors from Vet School. 

“David? It’s Heather, I’m on a farm and I need to sedate a cow to stitch her up.” “Sounds fun” he said, “No bother, give her a bit of Rompun, what strength do you have?”

“None, the boss doesn’t like it so I’ve only got Sedivet or Ketamine”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that then. Good luck!” and he hung up, leaving me standing in the yard blankly.

At that, a yell heralded the return of the bucking bronco. They had chased her down, turned her round and she was heading into the parlour at top speed. We managed to fix the gates to channel her into our normal treatment area and, after some argy bargy, into the crush. As I thought, the central upright pillar in this machine was in exactly the wrong place and every time I approached the wound I risked breaking my arm – one kick in the wrong direction and the bones would be shattered against the steel frame. “Come on lads, we need to get this leg back again”. I lassoed the foot and tied it up where I thought it would do least damage. There was nothing for it but to go for it, the blood was pumping out of her at a great rate. I threaded a needle and blindly dived into the sea of red. I felt the hot splash across my face and heard it spatter on my collar as I tried to isolate the source of the bleeding. Her foot flailed past me several times but couldn’t connect due to the rope, only flinging muck at my cheek as I turned away. Time and again I tried to bring the edges together, large clumsy stitches trying to stem the flow. And then, it slowed, dripped rather than poured, and another stitch stopped the tide. We had won. We looked at each other and laughed. I was red and brown, caked in filth with aching fingers.

“Breakfast?” they laughed

“I’m late for surgery lads, I’d better go”

“You might want a wash first.”

I did my best to scrub off the worst with a twisted old nailbrush and gritty cracked lump of Imperial Leather. When I thought I looked half presentable, I stripped, put on the clean shirt I always carried in the car, and headed down to the surgery.

“What happened to you?” said the head nurse. “You’ve got blood everywhere”.

A month later the farmer called me to say that the cow had come in for milking that morning and a huge ball of suture material had come away in his hand “like a massive spider web”.