On call already?

Diagnosis: sick calf
Treatment: repeated poking with needles and tubes

I got back to my apartment after work on Saturday, wanting nothing but to sleep for an hour or two. My mom calls, and there's a sick sick calf at home. Since I'm the vet service for anything that doesn't need a real vet, I had to go home. It was just like being on call, and I haven't even started vet school yet! I forced myself awake, and talked my boyfriend into accompanying me home, and we went to see what the problem was.

The calf had a temperature and was listless. So listless that I probably could have given her the shot of antibiotics without sitting on her, but not quite so listless that she was going to swallow the sulfa drugs on the first try. The sulfa drugs come in the form of blue boluses, which you break in half before stuffing down the calf's throat...I had to give her 4 halves. I thought I had all of them down, but then I peered into her mouth and, surprise! 4 blue chunks that she was ready to spit out. On the second try I got her to swallow them all. And then we tubed her with electrolytes, which look like nothing so much as Tang.

I voted to stay at home and sleep, which meant the next morning I had to get up at 5 am to drive in to work. There were rather a lot of kennels to clean, for a Sunday. Thank goodness--otherwise I would have felt that going in was a waste. The calf, meanwhile, was still listless, though she was oddly eager to drink water from a bucket. Not normal behavior for a 3-week old. At least her mom hung around most of the day. Sometimes the cows don't do such a good job of keeping an eye on their calves. It was just as well that she went off to graze later, though. We tubed the calf with powerade, the electrolyte-substitute, and gave her a shot of Banamine. Banamine just to make her feel better.

This morning I found her in the wrong pasture. She had tried to follow her mom, I think, and wandered under the wrong wire. I escorted her at a slow walking pace all the way across the pasture. Her mom, whose pacience had been exhausted by yesterday's fast, stayed where she was and only occasionally gave an encouraging moo, through a mouthful of grass.

The final installation of shots was a single Nuflor injection this evening. This time I had to catch the calf, and I'm afraid she won't forgive me this time. Nuflor is a nasty sort of thing--super thick, and she needed a lot of it. At least I didn't have to force feed her any more energy drinks.