There’s an old song keeps going through my head. “Mama said there’d be days like this. There’d be days like this my mama said.”
Mama didn’t mention this one.
Our buck, Buck Henry, has been limping a bit for the past week or so. It hasn’t been real pronounced, but he was definitely favoring his left rear foot–not putting much weight on it when he walked, holding it off the ground when he was standing still.
We figured we needed to trim his hooves. That is a nasty job at best, because of course the owners of those hooves never cooperate. They pull and they tug and they flinch and they act like you’re trying to stash them in a trunk. Add to that a hundred and fifty or so pound animal and one who has been walking in mud for weeks and weeks, but now that mud has completely dried. It’s like concrete. I figured we’d need a jackhammer. I was really dreading the job.
Then I had an idea.
Drugs.
For him, not for us. (That was my second choice.)
On Saturday morning, I called the vet’s office and asked if I could get a tranquilizer for Buck. I told them what I wanted to do, and at first I got the “I don’t think so, but I’ll ask the vet” response. Fortunately, the vet on duty was one who we’ve worked with before, and she approved the overall plan. So I drove up and got two shots–one to put Buck to sleep and one to wake him back up.
On Sunday, we did the deed. Vanessa gave Buck the first shot, and about three minutes later, he went into this woozy three-tequila fugue state. He staggered around for a while, loved everyone–Buck has always been a happy drunk–and slowly started dipping. Lower and lower. Lower and lower.
About fifteen minutes in, he’s on the ground, and we start working. We don’t know how long he’ll be out. Could be two hours, could be ten minutes. We had to guess about his weight, which of course determined the amount of the sedative. It’s really hard to weigh a goat with any accuracy. They won’t stand on the scales long enough for you to read the meter.
Vanessa is working on his rear hooves, the one he’s limping on, when she finds some sort of strange growth. It’s about the size of a grape, growing between his hooves (which is why he’s limping, we guess), and it’s very fatty. She clips off the top, and it starts bleeding. And bleeding. And bleeding.
Then for some reason I still don’t understand, I’m down there working on his hind hooves, and blood is going everywhere, and I’m thinking, “I gotta cut this whole fatty-grape thing off.” I find where it connects, deep in between his hooves, but every time I try to clip it, Buck flinches–even though he is completely unconscious. This is not good.
So I do what I always do when things get really tough: I call Vanessa. “Sweetheart, can you do this?” I ask. “I’m not good at it.” There is a part of Vanessa that really wanted to be a surgeon when she was young, but that part of her got blocked by the part of her that enrolled in chemistry.
So Vanessa-the-wannabe-surgeon comes down and just clips the bleeding grape right off at the root. Then, we go from blood oozing to blood squirting. There was a steady stream, like a hole in a radiator. Blood was splattering everywhere. On the bucket, on the tarp, on the little bottle of rubbing alcohol I’d brought to sterilize everything.
“Surely, we are killing him,” I thought.
“Pack it with paper towels,” Vanessa said.
So I did. And after about 15 minutes, we got the bleeding to stop, and eventually even got to clean and disinfect the hoof.
Then I gave him the shot to wake him up. It didn’t work nearly as quickly as the first shot. For the next two hours, the most common utterance between us was, “Is he still breathing?”
He was. Every time.
Later, Vanessa told me was a lipoma–a fatty cyst growing between the muscle and the skin. Generally, they are benign, but this one was badly placed. I looked it up.
Buck is getting better now. He’s still limping, and I’m sure he’s sore. He may even have a hangover.
But I swear he is the most magnificent beast.
And Vanessa is pretty great, too.
