I'm soo sorry I have let my poor followers down, but let me tell ya I've been one busy lady these last couple of weeks, but not to fear I have plenty of good blogging to follow because of it! Well as most of you know it's been calving season for a little bit here around these parts and I thought I was doing pretty good because I didn't have any "HORROR" stories to tell at the local watering hole. We hadn't lost a calf and not even pulled one to the day, but there I went and started pattin my own back before the season was over!
I have this shorthorn cow that I was starting to get a little nervous about because she was as big as a house, couldn't even fit through the dutch door in our barn! So I decided to palpate her on her due date the saturday before easter, well let me tell ya people it wasn't a normal experience. My grandmother even laughed about it afterwards because she had never seen me reach a hand in then yell "O, @#$*!". It felt as if she had the worlds biggest water ballon in her, I couldn't even find a calf there was so much pressure. So I decided to call ol' trusty doc for his expert opinon. Well of course he determined the same thing, this cow was in trouble and we needed to induce her right away! So I stayed by her side til tuesday morning, or as I like to call it the morning when I thought I had seen it all! Her water broke about 4 am, and when I mean her water broke, I mean the Hoover Dam opened up, litterally that stall had standing water for a day and a half! I decided to go ahead and throw her in the chute to check her out since all tha water pressure was gone. Needless to say I could feel a baby and determined to go ahead and pull it out. At 4:30am arrived my precious Millie all 30lbs of my tiny hairless baby, needless to say I was quite shocked that she was still alive! I noticed that my cow was still fairly large, so I decided to examine her again and that's when I felt the beast. I admitly knew it was a PHA calf and didn't quite know what to expect. I yelled at my grandfather to go call doc while I stayed with the cow and tried to figure out what I was going to do. Well unfortunately doc was on another call so i was gonna have to deal with this one myself, dear lord help me, was all I could think. The neighbor boy Harold came over to help me, ( I needed some extra muscle) I was able to get a set of chains on the bugger and thought well if I can just get the head out maybe it'll pop. Well to get the head and feet out we had to use our jack which let me say I had to dig it out of the mound of dust it had collected since we hadn't had to use it since I was in high school and I'm not gonna tell ya how long ago that was. We were able to get the shoulders out and it still hadn't quite poped. That's when I determined it was time to make it pop, I cringed at the thought of cutting this giant white thing hanging out of my cindy lou but I knew to save her I was gonna have to do it :(. When I punctured it water went flying everywhere! It was like a water hose! I caught two 5 gallon buckets of it till it finally drained. The poor thing still wouldn't budge so I made the horrifying decision to cut the front off and push it back in so we could jack it out by the hind legs. My poor cow stood in the chute through this whole process when it was all done she walked out of the chute got her a drink of water and went to the hay bale and started eating, she cleaned and is up and happy to this day. The beast took both of us to carry a piece out of the stall in all he weighed 210lbs!! My baby girl Millie only weighed 30lbs and is two weeks old tomorow, she lives in the house with the rest of us, gets fed every four hours and just realized how to run! Let me say she is quite a site! So now I can say I've had a set of twins with one being a PHA! I really don't think I'll brag on that one too much :p
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