Post by Joelle on May 24, 2010 21:48:24 GMT -5
Not that that's a GOOD thing, but I finally understand the frustration of feeling like an idiot for not somehow keeping this guy away from my cow!!
Here's the back story: Farriers are really hard to track down in this area. Montie's hooves need to be trimmed fairly often, so after multiple fruitless attempts to get one to call me back I finally called one of the local vets. This guy is not our regular vet, but we've gone to him in the past when we can't reach the lady vet and he's done OK. Occasionally he'll do something that kind of makes us scratch our heads, but never really done any harm so we use him as a back up.
He agrees to do the farrier work, and for about 9 months now he's done a fine job as far as we can tell. Lately we've noticed Scarlette's hooves need to be trimmed so we asked him if he would do it and he said sure. He wanted to give her a sedative to put her down while he did it, and said he'd come back in a few days.
He comes back, administers the sedative and within minutes Scarlette is conked out. Then he starts working on her hooves, and to me it's suddenly pretty apparent he's not done this much. Or maybe, not at all? He's using these big clippers and just kind of hacking at her toes unevenly. Cory says something about "Is there a quick in there that you have to avoid?" and the vet replies that there is and keeps hacking. Three hooves go fairly well - they look kind of sloppy, but they're trimmed. Then we get to hoof number four.
CLUNK. "Oops, cut that one too deep." And the blood starts dripping. He moves to the next toe, and CLUNK. "Ooops, that one too." More blood. Now I'm kind of unnerved and getting angry - I really didn't want to deal with an injured hoof, and now our VET has given us something more to deal with than just long toes. He sprayed the foot with some stuff to make it stop bleeding (which didn't work very well), sprayed all her feet with fly spray and gives her the reversal drug to wake her up.
He says she should be back up on her feet within 30 minutes, and that he gave her a low dose of sedative. We wait for a while, and she's not waking up. In fact, she's got greenish stuff coming out of her nose and she's kind of gurgling. The vet gives some more reversal drug, and after another 20 minutes she's awake enough that we can get her up on her brisket, with Cory leaning against her shoulder to keep her up and my hanging on her horns to keep her head up. The poor thing looked wasted. The vet hangs around for a while, assures us that she'll be fine but not to be surprised if it's an hour or more () before she's back to normal, and takes off. After getting paid, of course.
It didn't take an hour for her to get up. It took almost four. She did finally get up though, and was eating and acting fairly normal. She limped a bit on the bad foot, but not too badly,
The next morning, her hoof is STILL bleeding, she's barely walking on it and just looks miserable. In fact, a section of hoof that the guy had cut awkwardly had actually broken off, leaving open flesh exposed. Cassandra and Cory toss her (gently) into the trailer and take her up to the REAL vet. Now the good news is, the good vet said it wasn't that bad, that some local antibiotics and this rubber boot thingy she gave us should do the trick and she doesn't expect any long term problems. But she was very tactfully appalled at the trimming job that vet number one did. Bottom line is, he didn't know what he was doing, and rather than admit that and tell us to find someone else, he did it anyway and cost us a lot of trouble and money to fix his mess. And poor Scarlette is out there bawling her head off because she's stuck in the little paddock away from her herd with a sore foot and an annoying bootie strapped on.
I'm just so annoyed about this whole thing, I haven't even taken the time to post about it till now. We're going to take the boot off tomorrow and get a look at it. She's not limping, so hopefully that will be OK. Oh, and we're watching for pneumonia too in case she inhaled some of the vomit when she was knocked out.
Now I try to be pretty forgiving with medical personnel - being a nurse I know that sometimes things look worse from the family's perspective than it really is. But needless to say, that man is NEVER touching on of my cows again. And I'm going to find a real farrier.
Here's the back story: Farriers are really hard to track down in this area. Montie's hooves need to be trimmed fairly often, so after multiple fruitless attempts to get one to call me back I finally called one of the local vets. This guy is not our regular vet, but we've gone to him in the past when we can't reach the lady vet and he's done OK. Occasionally he'll do something that kind of makes us scratch our heads, but never really done any harm so we use him as a back up.
He agrees to do the farrier work, and for about 9 months now he's done a fine job as far as we can tell. Lately we've noticed Scarlette's hooves need to be trimmed so we asked him if he would do it and he said sure. He wanted to give her a sedative to put her down while he did it, and said he'd come back in a few days.
He comes back, administers the sedative and within minutes Scarlette is conked out. Then he starts working on her hooves, and to me it's suddenly pretty apparent he's not done this much. Or maybe, not at all? He's using these big clippers and just kind of hacking at her toes unevenly. Cory says something about "Is there a quick in there that you have to avoid?" and the vet replies that there is and keeps hacking. Three hooves go fairly well - they look kind of sloppy, but they're trimmed. Then we get to hoof number four.
CLUNK. "Oops, cut that one too deep." And the blood starts dripping. He moves to the next toe, and CLUNK. "Ooops, that one too." More blood. Now I'm kind of unnerved and getting angry - I really didn't want to deal with an injured hoof, and now our VET has given us something more to deal with than just long toes. He sprayed the foot with some stuff to make it stop bleeding (which didn't work very well), sprayed all her feet with fly spray and gives her the reversal drug to wake her up.
He says she should be back up on her feet within 30 minutes, and that he gave her a low dose of sedative. We wait for a while, and she's not waking up. In fact, she's got greenish stuff coming out of her nose and she's kind of gurgling. The vet gives some more reversal drug, and after another 20 minutes she's awake enough that we can get her up on her brisket, with Cory leaning against her shoulder to keep her up and my hanging on her horns to keep her head up. The poor thing looked wasted. The vet hangs around for a while, assures us that she'll be fine but not to be surprised if it's an hour or more () before she's back to normal, and takes off. After getting paid, of course.
It didn't take an hour for her to get up. It took almost four. She did finally get up though, and was eating and acting fairly normal. She limped a bit on the bad foot, but not too badly,
The next morning, her hoof is STILL bleeding, she's barely walking on it and just looks miserable. In fact, a section of hoof that the guy had cut awkwardly had actually broken off, leaving open flesh exposed. Cassandra and Cory toss her (gently) into the trailer and take her up to the REAL vet. Now the good news is, the good vet said it wasn't that bad, that some local antibiotics and this rubber boot thingy she gave us should do the trick and she doesn't expect any long term problems. But she was very tactfully appalled at the trimming job that vet number one did. Bottom line is, he didn't know what he was doing, and rather than admit that and tell us to find someone else, he did it anyway and cost us a lot of trouble and money to fix his mess. And poor Scarlette is out there bawling her head off because she's stuck in the little paddock away from her herd with a sore foot and an annoying bootie strapped on.
I'm just so annoyed about this whole thing, I haven't even taken the time to post about it till now. We're going to take the boot off tomorrow and get a look at it. She's not limping, so hopefully that will be OK. Oh, and we're watching for pneumonia too in case she inhaled some of the vomit when she was knocked out.
Now I try to be pretty forgiving with medical personnel - being a nurse I know that sometimes things look worse from the family's perspective than it really is. But needless to say, that man is NEVER touching on of my cows again. And I'm going to find a real farrier.