Adventures in Contagion

WARNING: THIS STORY MIGHT BE TOO MUCH FOR THOSE READERS WHO ARE SENSITIVE OR EASILY MADE QUEASY

My friend Tracy's sweet, mildly geriatric goat Leanna got an infection in her eye that Tracy noticed on the day after Christmas. She took Leanna to the vet, who prescribed antibiotics and some topical treatments. Here's the cutest picture I could find of her before all this started.

After a week on the antibiotics, things weren't getting any better. The weepy, goopy stuff had cleared up, but the eye got more and more cloudy.

Aside from the first one, I didn't take any of these pictures. Tracy took most of them with the exception of the last one, which the vet took. The after pictures were taken by @meanbees. Just so I don't get sued or something.

Anyway, Tracy told me that Leanna's eye was just getting worse and that a second goat now had an infection. These two ladies are the best of friends and sleep with their faces touching, so clearly the infection is something contagious. Tracy caught the infection in Buttons much more quickly and made an appointment to have her treated on the same day the vet was going to remove Leanna's eye, since it was cloudy to the point of blindness and was starting to swell.

We loaded the girls into the crate in the back of the truck and drove off through the rain to the vet's office. We put Leanna in a stall while we dealt with Buttons. The vet had already figured out that the first antibiotic she prescribed hadn't done the trick, so she tried a different one, along with sending swabs to Oregon State University to have the particular culprit identified. It turned out to be listeriosis, which is a major bummer.

By the way, these pictures are just the ones Tracy took to document Leanna's eye condition as it continued to worsen, so they're not super exciting. But I couldn't take pictures of the super exciting part because I was right in the middle of it.

The vet said she would have to do the eye removal later in the day because the other vet had gone on a farm call with the vet tech. I expressed my huge disappointment (I've wanted to watch an enucleation but have never gotten to see one. I realize that sounds grisly, and I apologize). The vet then looked at me and said "Unless you want to do it." And of course I said yes. I will admit that there was a moment while she was getting all the supplies ready when I wondered if this was going to be the moment that I passed out and shamed myself forever in her eyes, but I was pretty hungry and I'm sure that was where that anxiety was coming from. The vet administered the sedative, which doesn't actually put the animal out. It just basically makes them really stoned. It takes a while to take effect, so I stayed in the stall with Leanna as she staggered around so that she wouldn't bang her bad eye against the wall and rupture it. Once she was down and Tracy was well out of range (she wanted nothing to do with these proceedings), we propped her up on a couple of hay bales and got to work.

My job was to hold the clamp while the vet cut out the eye. It turns out that it's a lot more difficult to remove an eye than the horror movies and gory TV shows would lead you to believe. It took almost an hour. There is a lot more than the optic nerve holding your eyes in place. There are a lot of muscles and fascia and other bits involved in keeping eyes where they belong. Since I was holding the clamp and moving it around to get out of the way of the scalpel, I was the one who actually pulled out the eye. I couldn't take pictures during this whole thing for obvious reasons, and I wouldn't have posted them even if I had any, because they would have grossed everybody out beyond recovery. Anyway, once the eye was out, the vet (after showing me all the cool stuff inside the socket, packed it with gauze soaked in Betadine to keep any infection from developing while the tissues healed. Then she sutured the eye closed with a little piece of gauze sticking out of the hole.

Three days later we went over to Tracy's for dinner, which was her way of paying me back for going out in the dark afterwards and pulling the gauze out of Leanna's eye. It was pretty funny in a gallows humor sort of way. It just kept coming. It wasn't as gross as the vet warned me it might be, but Tracy stayed well away from this part too.

It was a bit like a magician pulling a scarf out of his sleeve.

Two weeks later, I went over and took out the sutures. That part wasn't particularly difficult or gross.

The hardest part was keeping her still so I didn't poke her with the surgical scissors.

There was still more swelling than I expected, but that has since gone down and Leanna is out happily grazing with her friends.

I assumed that Leanna would be pretty mad at me, since I was involved in all of the procedures, but she was more forgiving than I expected. She even let me hug her.

Sadly, a week or so later, one of the retired brush goats, Arlo, went down. He was alert and eating, but had no muscle control and couldn't hold himself up. After two weeks of Tracy going out several times a day to feed him and give him water with a syringe, she decided that he wasn't going to get any better and made an appointment to have the vet come out and euthanize him. He died the night before the vet was due to come out. When goats are infected with listeria, it usually manifests in one of two ways. They get the septicemic version, which kills them quickly, or they get the encephalitic version, which means it's in the brain. Both are fatal if not treated extremely quickly. I think, and the vet agrees with me, that Arlo had the encephalitic listeriosis, and since it wasn't immediately obvious what had caused him to go down, he wasn't given the massive doses of IV antibiotics that could have saved him. We are both very sad, but he was an old goat who didn't have much of a chance of surviving something as catastrophic as this. Tracy has a difficult road ahead of her, since listeria can hang around for years and everything has to be disinfected. I will close with this adorable picture of Arlo.

I realize that this is a grim story to post about after such a long absence, but it's been the most interesting thing happening lately, aside from another rather tragic goat adventure that I will tell you about later.