Heart Stopping Five Minutes

This blog was started in August and was finished Dec. 31. Most days are hectic around the farm. There may even be some excitement or drama mixed in now and again, but last evening we had five minutes of life and death struggle that leaves you weak kneed, excited and drained. We had left the new goat kid and her mother in with the other does yesterday. We did chores around 5:30 in the evening and everyone was fine. We had just begun to start cooking for our supper when Kris heard the new goat kid blatting over and over in major distress. She started running to the barn and I dropped what I was doing and raced to catch up. When we arrived she was in the barn with her mother and Rosie the guardian dog was keeping the other goats out of the barn. She was still blatting and walking in circles. We could tell she was in pain from something and began checking for injuries. Kris ran her hands gently over the baby. No blood, no obvious broken bones. I was kind of expecting her to stop blatting and walk it off after a few soothing words. Instead she blatted more insistently and began to breath in a labored fashion. I am now thinking maybe a goat pounded her and broke a rib or gave her some internal injury. Goat kids cost around fifty to a hundred dollars. Vets calls cost in the hundreds. Dorie the new goat kid was born into the hard economic reality of farming. No vet was coming, she was dependent on our very limited veteranary skills. Kris was now holding Dorie and we took her outside where the light was better. Dorie was getting visibly weaker fast. As her blats weakened I happened to see in her mouth her tongue was turning blue. She wasn't getting enough oxygen for some reason. Maybe a broken rib punctured a lung. It wasn't looking good for Dorie. Bubbles began coming out of her nostrils and she snorted bursts of mucous trying to clear her nose. Her breathing was becoming more labored. At chores she had played while I milked her mother. A picture of what a healthy goat baby looks like. Kris said to me "feel her feet, the blood is pounding through them." We felt helpless. Was this going to be our third goat baby to die? She was slipping away fast. Then Kris noticed a bump forming on her face. It was swelling quickly and her eye began to swell shut. "I think she got stung and is having an allergic reaction" I said. We had never seen a severe allergic reaction, but we had prepared for it since we give the goats a lot shots. Allergic reaction is one of the rare but possible consequences and we didn't want to watch helplessly as one of the goats died from one of our shots. We had a syringe of Epiniphrine set up literally five feet away. I opened the door to the feed room and grabbed the syringe off the shelf. This shot has to go into a muscle and all the shots we had given so far were just under the skin. I fussed over finding a big enough muscle in her leg-- wasting precious seconds, but we had only set up one syringe. If I missed the muscle or came out the other side, there would be no second chance. Kris held Dorie still and I pushed the small needle into her tiny leg. Kris reminded me to pull back on the plunger and check for blood. If you hit a blood vessel with shot, in some cases it is fatal. I wasn't taking any chances. I pushed the small amount of fluid into her leg, pulled out the needle and checked for fluid on both sides of her leg--nothing. She had got the full shot. Immediately, she stopped blatting and snorting. Her breathing improved. In just a few short minutes, she was back to normal. It was miraculous. Actually, there were two miracles. We actually correctly diagnosed an allergic reaction that was killing Dori, and we had the epinephrine set up within a few feet when precious seconds counted. Most of our veterinarian adventures are floundering guesses that at best usually don't make it any worse. During kidding season, we lost two baby's after trying different things, doing our best to nurse them along, but finally cradling the kids in our arms and watching helplessly as they slipped away. Maybe there was nothing we could have done, but you don't feel that way. You feel criminally inept. Your learning curve is proving fatal. It is just an awful feeling, part grief and part anger directed at yourself. So, when I tell you we were relieved and ecstatic and very drained, it is an understatement because words are just not capable of conveying emotions that deep. This is a picture of Dorie four months later.