Milk Fever

This is a picture of Nene* taken yesterday morning. The first thing you might notice about her is that she doesn't look dead. Friday night, she looked dead. Earl was with Cliffy and Jackson at baseball practice and the little boys and I were hanging out when Pam called from the barn. She had just gone to bring Nene into the parlor to be milked and Nene looked at her, lay down on her side, and didn't look very good. The words didn't sound all that bad to me, but Pam has very good intuition and if she's calling about a cow not acting right, I'm calling the vet. I hung up and called the vet's emergency answering service and pulled Dr. Pinello out a dinner party to come check on her. Dr. Pinello likes to know what to expect when she gets to the farm and I could only tell her what Pam had told me, so I put Harley into his barn boots and loaded Oliver on my back and went to call her from the barn. I rounded the corner to the holding pen and stopped in my tracks. I had expected Nene to look kind of bad, but I hadn't expected her to look that bad. I asked Pam if Nene was dead, and she said, "No," then looked closely and added, "not yet."

Nene was lying on her side, legs straight out, head back, ears back, eyes rolled back in her head, eyelids half open. I called Dr. Pinello and described the scene and told her I'd call her back if the cow died before she got here. She told me she'd hurry, and added, as an afterthought, that if Earl had any calcium around, I could try to get her to sit up on her brisket and give her some.

Pam and I scoured the medical supply shelves but all we found were a few bottles of antiseptic, about twenty bags of organic herbs (goldenseal root, black cohosh, echinacea, etc.) and some rolls of adhesive gauze. Pam went downstairs to see if she could find anything in the milkhouse and I decided to open up a new-looking cardboard box that was on the floor by the shelves. I was just pulling the flaps back when Pam came back empty handed and looked over my shoulder. "Hey," she said, "that says, 'Cow 911.' I think this situation might qualify." Inside were tubes of calcium concentrate that look almost exactly like tubes of caulking, like you use to seal the spaces around your bathtub. Pam's boyfriend, Dave, thought he remembered seeing a caulking gun around, but while he was looking I tried pressing the inside plunger-thing with my thumb and it squirted out easily, so I got a stick that the kids had left in the utility room and we were ready for the next step.

Up on her brisket is a big order with a 1,500 lb. cow and less than 500 lbs. of people, but Pam and I pulled and Dave pushed and then braced her and then I got the tube in her mouth and Pam held it steady and I pushed the plunger. And while we waited to see if it was going to do any good, Pam told the story of coming to get Nene and having her take one look at her and flop over and how it was hard not to take that personally. And then Nene, as if to make Pam feel better, started to bring her ears forward. Then she looked around. Then she seemed to take a deep breath and decide that she wasn't going to die just then after all. We pulled a little and repositioned her and Dave was able to stop bracing her. And when Dr. Pinello arrived a few minutes later, and Earl a few minutes after that, they found a not-dead cow hanging out with three people who were feeling pretty damned good about themselves.

Dr. Pinello gave Nene some IV calcium and checked out her health otherwise and Pam asked lots of questions about milk fever and I went back to the house to get the kids ready for bed. When Earl came back to the house, Nene was up and eating and drinking and much improved. Three days later, she's not in top form, but she's gaining strength and looking bright in the eyes.

Milk fever is a big deal in cows. It's not actually a fever at all, but it happens sometimes after a cow has had a calf and her body is gearing up to crank out the milk. The systems go into hyperdrive and the cow puts all her calcium into her milk and her own levels drop and she starts to feel all yucky and then lies down, which makes her feel yuckier, and then she needs some help or she can die. Before you could buy tubes of mineral concentrate from the Udder Necessities route truck, farmers used to pump air into a cow's udder with a bicycle pump to force the milk back into the cow's system. The science behind it wasn't well known, but it worked (sometimes, anyway).

I don't know a lot about milk fever, except that there are some herds and some breeds of cows that are more prone to it than others. Ours don't seem to be particularly susceptible. I can only think of a handful of times when it's come up, and Earl told me he mostly bought the Cow 911 for the calves, because it has a pretty well-balanced mineral mix that can really help a struggling calf have the energy to eat well and help her own cause. I think it happens more often in higher producing herds, especially with Jerseys.

What I do know, is that milk fever is pretty easy to treat with the big tubes of calcium/mineral stuff. I also know that the human administering the tubes of stuff gets to feel like a hero. I squirted some gray stuff down her throat, and now Nene isn't dead. The enormous efforts of my life rarely yield quantifiable results and so it's hugely satisfying to do a simple little thing like squirt a tube of mineral concentrate and just about bring a cow back from the dead.

*Pronounced Nay-Nay. She's Naan's calf and Neet's little sister and Nanco's granddaughter and sometimes you just name them the first thing that pops into your head. If you're Earl, anyway.