When I finally did fall asleep, I had a dream that was also a dream I probably never would have had before. I dreamt that I was learning how to inseminate cows again. The woman who was showing us, stuck her arm into the cow's rectum, and got very surprised. "Oh my god!" she exclaimed as she pulled out a big fish. The fish was still alive! But it was really sick and very fat from eating so much cow ingesta--you could hold it up to the light and see just how full it was. We put it in a bucket of water, but it just sort of floated, so we got some euthanasia medicine to put into the water to put it out of its misery. Back to the cow: you could feel not only the placentomes (spots on the uterus where an egg attached) but also all these little miliary lesions where the fish's spines had injured the reproductive tract as it swam downstream. Ew!!!
4 comments:
Alyssum,
After reading your post about inseminating cows, and hours of studying pediatrics, I had the craziest dream. I was at 'school', headed into surgery to repair a tetralogy of fallot in a huge bull. The bull was dressed up in the sort of costume I imagine one would wear in a Tibetan festival, bells and scarves hanging from its horns, a colorful blanket across its back. The operating suite was a ping-pong table covered in Astroturf, but the actual surgery was going to take place with the bull suspended from ceiling in big harness.
Instead of wearing scrubs, we were all in the hasmat suits.
It was crazy!!
eileen
I'm going to start keeping a closer eye on our local vets.
Your dream reminds me of an experience I had as a teenager working on John Northey's dairy farm (Doesn't every cheesehead work on a dairy farm at sometime in his/her life?). John had a heifer about to give birth to it's first calf and it was having severe dystocia! He decided to use mechanical traction. I was working the come along while he was monitoring the position of the head. It didn't go well! The size of the calf caused the uterus to tear.
So we had Dr. Crawley come out. The Doc had me hold one side open and John the other side as he stitched her up. It looked like ground beef (no pun intended) all the way up. I lasted about two minutes before I lost my lunch in the gutter!
The calf was dead and the cow went lame.
I had a couple of dreams around that time too, mostly about working as a lab animal vet, but one of them was cow-related too. I was doing one of my lab animal rotations at a lab that had a small cow herd that they were housing on-site temporarily for some non-invasive study. One of them tested seropositive for something I don't remember and we had to take blood from all of them, but the facility was set up really poorly for cows so it was hard to separate the ones we'd already done from the ones we hadn't yet. I got trampled a bit.
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