This Must Hurt!

I walked out to the pasture to check on Rosie.  Rosie is our Jersey cow that will be calving within the next few days.  When the time for delivering gets close, we like to keep on top of the situation to ensure that things are going well.  While observing Rosie, I saw something that was concerning to me.  Rosie had a big tear on her front right teat!  That must really hurt.

We try to do a good job of picking up debris in the pasture that the animals could step on or cut themselves on, so I'm not really sure how this could have occurred, but I have a pretty good idea.  I think she stepped on it.  Ouch!  You can see the tear in the photo below:

So i got her into the milking stall in the barn and distracted her with some Dairy Ration mixed with alfalfa.  While she was eating I got a wet rag and did my best to clean it.  During the heat of the day, the cows lay in the cool dirt and of course, the wound was dirty.  Rosie didn't like this at all!  She started kicking toward me and I finally had to hobble her to avoid catching a back hoof to the head.

We decided to do a little veterinary work ourselves and keep close watch on Rosie.  If we see signs of infection, we'll call out our veterinarian to come have a look.  In the meantime, we took some First Aid Antiseptic and mixed it with some vaseline petroleum jelly and dabbed it on the would.  The vaseline helps it to stick versus drip off.  Then we filled a small yogurt cup with the antiseptic containing iodine.

Using extreme caution, I dipped her teat into the cup of iodine several times so that the entire affected area was coated.

We will repeat this process daily and pray for healing.  We will have to wait and see how this goes. This is very concerning to us as pretty soon, Rosie's bag will be filling with milk and her calf will need to suckle on the teat.  We need it to be healed up as there will not be a convenient way of relieving the quarter of milk if she doesn't allow the calf to nurse or allow us to milk her out.

We were really hoping that the calf would come soon, but now that this happened we hope the calf is delayed in coming to allow Rosie to heal up.  It is always an adventure, but we'll get through this.