In my line of work, a phone ringing in the wee hours of the morning is never a good thing. It results in me rushing out the door with morning breath, bed head, and an inside-out shirt to calm someone’s personal chaos. On this particular morning, the caller was the owner of a dwarf goat that had a swollen, cold fetal leg sticking out of her nether regions. The goat had passed one kid on her own yesterday but the second had decided to do The Sprinkler out into the world and had gotten wedged.
Unfortunately when the owner found him 15 hours later, he was no longer alive and she was unable to rearrange him to get him out.
Despite my attempts to inform the owner that I, as an equine doctor, may not be the best qualified, I was unable to convince her to let me off the hook. She pragmatically replied that she appreciated my candor about my inexperience but if I did nothing the goats would all die. Well, with the bar set that low, how could I not try? I had made my disclaimer so, without guilt, but with a medical text open on the tailgate next to me, I proceeded to prove my ignorance of ruminant medicine (starting with not knowing the term for a female goat (____)).
In my ten years as an equine doctor I had assisted in the delivery of many foals. I was accustomed to reaching into a rather cavernous opening and feeling, at the most, 4 legs and one head. What greeted me that morning, was 12 limbs, 3 heads and absolutely no room to maneuver any of them around. What a tangled mess of feti!!!!
I needed to find two forelegs and one head and pull. But identifying what was what and what belonged to whom, was tricky. The last thing I needed to be doing was pulling on one foreleg from two different goats.
Once I finally got everything lined up, it was obvious that the fetus was too swollen to pass. I had to make him smaller and that required the grisly task of dismantling the fetus inside his mom (fetotomy). On days like this, I was glad I hadn’t had time for breakfast. But it needed to be done. There were more kids inside and there was a chance they were still alive.
Once the traffic jam was removed, I reached in and found another still, slimy kid. Damn. I placed this one aside and reached back in for the last one, a tiny runt that never had a chance. Just when the disappointment of not being able to save any of the babies began to flood over me, I heard a “BLLAAAAAAHHHHHHHH” from behind me! Number 3 was not only still alive but very pissed off that I had tossed him into a pile of discarded big brother bits. Yeahhhhhh!!!!! I shook him by his crooked back legs to clear out his lungs, dried him off then held him up to my face for inspection. My nose apparently looked sufficiently like a teat as he latched on and started nursing away. Success!
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