I want to start this post by thanking everyone who prayed for Red Bird during and after her delivery of Rampart and Reluctant (Lucky). Red Bird is the first doe we’ve ever had to put down and your prayers really meant a lot to us.
If you didn’t read about Red’s delivery, let me summarize by saying that it was obvious something was wrong, but at the time we didn’t know what. We were working on four (or a combination of the four) possible causes for Red’s condition.
- ruptured uterus
- nerve issue
- calcium issue
- toxemia issue
None of us wanted to believe it was a ruptured uterus because that is fatal. I believed at the time that it was most likely a nerve issue. To me, that explained most of the symptoms. I didn’t really ever believe it to be a calcium issue, because of how we feed and care for our goats. And if it was toxemia, delivering the kids should fix the problem.
So the main goal throughout that Friday was to get the kids delivered. Jim worked for hours on Red Bird and successfully managed to deliver two live kids.
After the birth, we didn’t really know what to expect from Red as far as recovery went. We gave her all the care we could and spent the night with her. Brett took the first shift.
Saturday we were on the phone with the vet from Purdue again. Red still couldn’t stand or support herself, but she was starting to make progress in that she was eating and drinking and not running a fever. I also put a call into another closer vet that somebody recommended to us on Facebook. After I spoke with him on the phone and explained the situation, he said that he could come out to see her, but that we were already doing everything that he would come out and do. He said we could bring her into the hospital for calcium, but he didn’t really believe it to be a calcium issue either.
We were both leaning toward the pinched nerve being the cause and he said that was just an issue of time and it either would or would not heal on its own. We agreed to give her another day.
Indigo and Jade were making sure that Red had food and they were giving her molasses water from a syringe until she was strong enough to drink out of a bucket. The girls were her primary caregivers throughout most of the day.
Red Bird was not left alone throughout the night again, but Jim took his shift outside the stall because Red Bird was really mad at him and wouldn’t relax if he was in the stall where she could see him.
On Sunday, Red still couldn’t stand, but she was still eating, drinking, urinating, and pooping. But now she had a foul smelling discharge and her temperature was dropping. Even though we had given her antibiotics, I now felt that it was time for the vet to come out.
I believed that we were 48 hours passed the delivery, so if her uterus had ruptured, she would have bled out into her abdomen by now and would have died. I asked the vet about the timing of death on a uterine rupture and the vet said that she could take up to a week to die if that were the issue, depending on the severity of the tear.
While we were waiting for the vet, we propped Red up on a hay bale to give her some support since she had been laying down for so long. She had been making several futile attempts to stand, so we hoped this would make her feel better.
When the vet arrived, he did an internal exam and discovered that Red’s uterus had indeed ruptured.
At this point we gathered all of the children, talked it over, and decided it was time to put Red Bird down so she no longer had to suffer. Everyone said their good-byes and loved on Red for a little while. Brett decided that she didn’t want to watch and so she went back to the house. Everyone else stayed with Red as the vet gave her the injection and she went to sleep. There was a lot of tears and grief as you may imagine.
Farm life is filled with incredible riches, but when you have the care of animals, it not only comes with hard work, it also comes with the occasional sadness.
We did have a few questions that we wanted to answer.
Why didn’t you take her to a vet? There are a few reasons that we just spoke with the vets over the phone. Jim is very capable at delivering goat kids. If the goat can be delivered without a c-section, Jim can do it. If a c-section had needed to be performed, we would have taken her to a vet. But she was constantly making progress and never stalled completely. But more than that, goats are very susceptible to stress. Keeping the goats in the barn where they feel safe and comfortable is always preferable to transferring them to the vet. And quite honestly, we really didn’t know how we were going to get Red Bird into the Beast. We talked over several different ways, but even though she was alive, Red Bird was 200+ pounds of dead weight that needed to be lifted and handled gently. That was not going to be an easy thing to do by hand.
What caused the uterus to tear? Was the kid (Rampart) too big? A torn uterus is very rare. The vet said that it could have happened before she even started labor. He said that sometimes the uterine wall can get folded a little and pinched. This can cause the cells to start to die and make them susceptible to tearing. While Rampart was big, his size didn’t cause the uterus to rupture. Fashion just gave birth to a buckling (Factor) that was even bigger at 11.4 pounds and she did so without a hint of difficulty. Part of what made Rampart so difficult to deliver is that we now know that Red’s uterus wasn’t helping at all to push him out. Jim basically had to pull him out without any support from any force pushing from behind. The vet was very clear on telling us and the children that we didn’t cause this and that there was nothing we could have done to prevent it.
Why couldn’t you do a hysterectomy? We never really discussed a hysterectomy as a specific option. The vet gave Red Bird a 15% – 20% chance of recovery with treatment (I don’t know if that specifically meant a hysterectomy, I never asked what the treatment was). The family decided that we didn’t want to put Red Bird through all of that. It was important to the children that she was out of pain.
I was very hesitant to share this story publicly. 99.9% of people were wonderfully supportive and very kind to us during this ordeal. But there were two people who were both judgmental and downright mean. Unfortunately, Brett saw the comments before I did and it hurt her deeply because one woman basically accused us of causing Red Bird’s death because we didn’t take good enough care of her.
I can promise you that whether or not you feel we handled the situation appropriately, we love our goats more than anyone else and we do the best for them that we possibly can. So if you read this and feel that we were somehow at fault, please consider keeping that opinion to yourself. I don’t wish for Brett to be hurt again.
To everyone else, once again, thank you so much for your kindness and support of our family. It means so much to us that we can ask for prayer and y’all storm God’s throne for us!
