Elsie's BoBo

 

This is our girl, Elsie.  Elsie is a Jersey heifer and she should be a cow.  What I'm meaning by that is that she should have calved by now as she's been exposed during heat cycles to several different bulls.  It just never "took."  We had the vet look at her and it turns out she had some cysts on her ovaries.  He took care of them and supposedly, she's good to go.  We put her and Nick (our Jersey bull) together for date night while she was in standing heat, and we observed them romancing.  We marked down the date and so far, it looks like she skipped a cycle.  That means perhaps she's pregnant.

She'd better be!  She's a fat cow.  I tell her every day, "Elsie, you'd better be pregnant.  If you're not, you'd better get pregnant fast.  You are a milk cow.  Cows don't make milk unless they get pregnant.  If you don't get pregnant, we're not going to keep you around to just eat grass.  You'll go to be processed and put in our freezer."  Of course she has no clue of what I'm telling her, but it's true.

In looking her over yesterday, I noticed something.  It is a circular wound on her side, about the size of a silver dollar.  It is a nasty looking wound, yellow and festering and flies were around it.  We quickly moved into action.  We got some iodine in a sprayer from the shelf in the feed room in the barn and sprayed the area real good.  It must burn, because Elsie didn't like that one bit.  Today, it looked a little bit better.  We sprayed more iodine on it.  Tomorrow Tricia will inspect it and put either some honey (natural antibiotic) or some Neosporin.

We will continue to watch it.  Elsie is real rambunctious.  Two mornings ago, it got in the lower 50's in the morning.  It was cool and crisp and Elsie was acting frisky, running and kicking up her heels like small calves do.  She probably ran into something and that's how she got the injury.  We try to keep our eyes open for hazards like that and as soon as we see them, we try to get them corrected.

Hopefully the iodine treatments, followed by honey and Neosporin will do the trick and heal up Elsie's bobo.  We'll post an update as things change. 

Benjamin - Two Weeks Post Accident Status Report

In about an hour and twenty minutes, it'll be two weeks since we learned that our 22 year old son, Benjamin, fell from the third story of a parking garage in Lake Charles.  He suffered terrible injuries, but is recovering.  We thank God for His Goodness.  We thank you, family, friends, and readers for your prayers.  What we've seen is nothing short of a miracle, and God's not done yet.  We thank all the doctors, nurses, ER staff, ambulance drivers, surgeons, and support staff that have been wonderful!

We are currently at Lake Charles Memorial Hospital In-patient Rehab where Benjamin has a team of doctors and therapists working on him, assessing speech and cognition due to the skull fracture.  He undergoes a couple of hours of occupational therapy each morning in which he is being taught to put on a back brace and use a slide board to move from bed to wheel chair, from wheel chair to commode and back.  He also undergoes a couple of hours of physical therapy in the afternoon where they work with him to regain strength and mobility in his damaged legs, pelvis and back.  He is EXHAUSTED in the afternoon when all that is done.

Matters are complicated due to his two badly broken legs.  One of them is non-load bearing, so he cannot put ANY weight on it while it heals.  This could be anywhere from 6 to 10 weeks.  We have a family - treatment team meeting on Tuesday morning at 9:30.  I'll give another update Tuesday night as we'll know more about prognosis, goals, treatment plan moving forward.  You would not believe the improvement we've seen in the last week.  Here he is in the wheel chair.  The tape on his right arm is for nerve damage - numbness and pins and needles from elbow to fingers.  Feeling has not returned.  We're still praying about that.  

Staples in his left leg and right leg, except where the compound fracture was, come out tomorrow.  Staples in his spine come out Tuesday.  They are trying to figure out how to accomplish teaching him to shower with the restriction of no weight on the right leg and no hopping - only pivoting on the left leg.  Other than the numbness in his right arm and numbness on his left forearm, his upper body strength is really helping his recovery.  

He wanted to get out of the room for the past two days, so he pushed himself all over the hospital in his wheelchair.  His brother, Russ, was there to assist should he get tired.  Tricia wanted to avoid being in the photo.  She's hiding behind the door.

Benjamin had not been outside in 13 days, so we went out to the butterfly garden so he could get some sunshine and fresh air.

We anticipate being released to home for a number of weeks until his leg is load-bearing.  At that point, he'll be back in rehab.  This week I'll be moving a bed from upstairs into his old downstairs bedroom.  That bed is shorter.  I'll also be building a small ramp to enable him to get into the house over a four inch threshold.  We'll also remove the door from the bathroom in his room for easier access.  We will also be figuring out how to get him back to work as quickly as feasible.

Stay tuned for a "normal" post tomorrow night and then another update on our patient on Tuesday following the big meeting.  You'll never fully understand how appreciative our family is of your prayers, love, encouragement, and concern since this occurred.  Much love to you from the Sonnier's.

A Quick Trip to the Vet for Mocha

On Friday morning, we were out early to milk the cows.  We have a routine of separating animals, feeding and milking that resembles a rodeo more than anything else.  While I was settling down with the milking bucket, Tricia exclaimed, "Mocha, what happened to you?!"  Mocha is Agnes' little doeling.  Mocha had a huge gash on her abdomen that pulled her hide back about the size of your palm, exposing bare skin and muscle.  It was not pretty to look at.

I held her still while Tricia tried to pull the hide back in place, but it was of no use.  The goat was acting normally, but I'm sure it hurt!

While I went to work, Tricia loaded Mocha into a pet carrier in the back of the truck and drove her to the veterinarian.  Fortunately, he's just a mile down the road.  He had some other appointments ahead of us, but had us leave her and said he'd anesthetize her and sew it up or it would be a mess.

Shortly after lunch we were called to go pick her up.  After paying $125, we loaded her back in the truck and headed home.

You can see below how Dr. Fontenot shaved her side and then stitched her all up.  He told us she'd heal up and asked us to watch to ensure no flies got around the wound.

Tricia gently carried the little girl back to the pasture where a welcoming crew of cows, chickens and goats were waiting.

Back home with momma and all was right with the world.

I hunted around for the cause of the injury.  Dr. Fontenot said it seemed like the damage pointed to the culprit being either a fence or a bobcat.  After searching, I found a big tuft of hair and new exactly what happened.  If you look above, there is a fencing panel.  On the end of the panel, there are barbs that poke out.  Normally, they are cut off flush, but on this particular panel, there was a 3/8 inch portion that stuck out.  This panel was close to the hay bale, surrounding a young oak tree.  We surmise that the kids were being kids and a cow pushed her into the panel, cutting her open.  I removed the hazardous panel to ensure we'd have no further trips to the vet.  It's always an adventure, I tell ya!

Update on Rosie (And Her Injured Teat)

Well it's been two months since Rosie's no good, horrible, very bad day.  In this post: Watch Where You Step! you can see what happened.  For two months now, we've been having to milk out her one quarter once a day since she kicks and won't let her calf, LuLu nurse from it.  It has healed so that there is only a small scab.  She's come a long way, baby.  So you would think that she would let LuLu nurse off it now.  But, no.  She kicks her off.  Perhaps it is habit as we can't understand that it would still be that painful after two months' healing time.  Or the calf is too traumatized to even try after being kicked for two months each time she tries to suck off of that injured teat and now she doesn't even try.

Whatever the reason, we have to put an end to this.  Here's the plan and how it unfolded.  We figured that we would separate LuLu from Rosie all night so she was good and hungry.  Prior to putting LuLu with her, we would cover Rosie's other three teats, leaving the (slightly) injured one exposed, forcing LuLu to go after it.  Sounds like a good plan, right?

We used Tricia's flannel shirt draped over Rosie's bag as the barrier.

We worked to cover up the three uninjured and very full teats so that LuLu could not get to those.

We got some baling twine to tie the shirt tightly to keep it in place.  Not a pretty or professional job, but hopefully a workable one.

Here's where we test things out.  We let LuLu out of the stall.  She runs to her momma, at first confused by the shirt covering up her breakfast.  There's only one teat instead of four.  And it's the one that Rosie doesn't let her nurse on.  What a dilemma!!  Tricia helped to direct her to it.  Rosie kicked.  LuLu kept trying.

It was at an odd angle, so LuLu switched around to the back.  At this angle she was able to get it.  She nursed for a while and it worked!

Unfortunately, the very next morning we found that LuLu DID NOT nurse on the injured quarter.  We'll have to continue working with her.  Hopefully, we'll see a breakthrough soon.

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.