Milk Fever

My first encounter with parturient paresis, generally and somewhat erroneously referred to as milk fever, occurred one fine summer evening when I was 13 or 14 years old. Parturient paresis is a metabolic disorder which afflicts high yielding dairy cows shortly after calving. It is due to stress and the excessive drain on her reserves of calcium, and causes muscular dysfunction throughout the body.

The symptoms in chronological order are; the cow becomes unsteady, falls down and is unable to rise, suffers convulsions, lapses into a coma and dies.

This can happen quite suddenly, and at most will take only a few hours. If she does not receive treatment, the prognosis is as fatal and inevitable as that. At the time of which I am speaking, 1957 or 8, the procedure was to call a veterinary surgeon who would intravenously and subcutaneously inject massive doses of calcium borogluconate.

This remedy which had been discovered some 20 or 30 years previously, was relatively simple, usually highly effective. As described by James Herriott MRCVS, capable of producing quite spectacular results, literally snatching animals from the jaws of death. However, on this occasion it was not to be.

It is not my purpose to dwell on the suffering and death of that splendid animal. Nor to speculate as to whether or not she might have been saved, but certainly, with the benefit of hind sight, more might have been attempted. During the succeeding 40 years I purchased countless gallons of calcium borogluconate and injected it into dozens of cows and I cannot recall ever losing another animal to milk fever. However if that young vet had succeeded in saving Susan, for that was her name, the events which I am about to relate would never have occurred.

I was fifteen years old and had been working on the farm since leaving school. We had just finished dinner one day when I found Bonnie, a red roan shorthorn, displaying the initial symptoms of milk fever. I called my father, who had not been over impressed by the efforts of an inexperienced vet, nor his new fangled methods, and he took the executive decision that we were going to treat this case ourselves. My father at this time was severely handicapped by arthritis so in this instance ‘we’ meant me.

Prior to the advent of calcium borogluconate the only known treatment for milk fever was to inflate the patient’s udder, much like a football. This remedy is briefly referred to in a novel by James Herriott and recorded in great detail in various, weighty veterinary tomes.

My father did clean and sterilize the bicycle pump and valve, however it fell to me to insert the valve into the teat orifice, to inflate each quarter of the udder and tie off each teat with surgical tape, in turn.

I can only leave you to imagine the almost nightmarish state of suspended reality which prevailed during these bizarre proceedings. However I can clearly recall admiring, with some surprise, the neat precision with which I had tied the bows in the white tape. Precision dexterity was not usually my forte.

This procedure was concluded about half past two, I made Bonnie as comfortable as possible in the circumstances, offered her food and water, and awaited developments. I checked her condition periodically throughout the afternoon until at about twenty past four I found her gazing fretfully over the half door of the cow shed.

The state of unreality must still have persisted, for I experienced no immediate surprise at this remarkably phenomenon. The operation was a complete success and the patient lived for many years, to be pointed out to various sceptical or incredulous visitors as the cow which I blew up.

Farming has become an increasingly lonely occupation allowing many solitary hours for contemplation, and several aspects of this experience were to provide me with long hours of fascinating speculation.

a. How could pumping a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen into a cow’s mammary glands reverse a metabolically triggered, progressive muscular malfunction which would otherwise inexorably affect the muscles of her heart and lungs, causing her death?

b. More frivolously it has recently been suggested that this procedure might provide an inexpensive, do it yourself alternative for Katie Price wannabes.

c. If apothecaries in the past regularly resorted to this kind of remedy it is very little wonder some of them found themselves suspected of witchcraft.

d. What I have speculated about most of all is the first man who performed this operation. Now it is just possible that I am the very last person to ever perform this operation in earnest. I say this because I have never heard of anybody else even attempting it, very few of my contemporaries are actually aware of it.

I once saw a huge, brass, pneumatic pump in the boot of a vet’s car and he explained to me at length for what it was intended but he clearly had never used it and carried the implement purely as a conversation piece.

There used to be a parlour game played on radio and T.V. Who would you most like to meet and what would you say to them. The person I would like to meet is the first man who performed this operation, and I say MAN because, take it from me, this person whoever they were, was certainly not female. And what I would say to him is this

‘WHAT THE HELL DID YOU ACTUALLY THINK YOU WERE DOING?’

David Kelly