More good news!!

There is a factor to why Dan and I decided to get so invasive with Ruby that I haven’t discussed yet, and its something some of you might been asking yourselves about. “Why didn’t you just call a vet in when you realized things were going downhill so quickly?” Well, around here most livestock farms are massive, as in hundreds of animals, and compared to that, our group of 25 pigs is tiny. All the vets around here work on yearly contracts with these farmers, and this is simply beyond our budget. What makes it even more complicated is that none of these vets will make a house call to a farm that’s not under contract, no matter how grave the emergency is. That’s why we give our own pennicilin shots to sick pigs and attempt procedures like the one we had to do on Ruby.

Well, thanks to the wonderful interwed and some searching and cold calling, Carrie was able to locate an unlisted vet who was willing to come out and see Ruby. Her words were: “I don’t know how you found me, but now that you did, I’ll come and take a look.” She was here on wednesday and took a good look at Ruby. Her diagnosis was that she had a Uterun infection, and she pulled out a lot of compacted dead tissue from her vagina. The same stuff that we saw her pee out a couple days before. She washed out her vagina and gave her a number of shots, which was a work out for us, a pig doesn’t like to sit still, especially not when you are stabbing her with 6 different shots! 

She got a long acting antibiotic, a shot of something that makes her uterus contract so she could get the last of the dead tissue out, B-12 shots to elevate her mood and to stimulate her appetite. She also left us with three more shots to give her, much to Dan's and my chagrin. 

Since she has gotten these shots, she is greatly improved, eating solid food, getting up and walking around. Being more social with us and paying more attention to her brood. We are all delighted that this is happening, as there were a couple moments where I thought she wasn’t going to make it. The vet even said that she might possibly be able to breed again! And more good news came from her when she said that the piglets look better than they should if they had only been eating formula, which means Ruby is still making small amounts of milk, and might come back to full production when she starts eating again. 

The visit from the vet was exactly what we needed, and she agreed to be our vet from now on, which is the best news yet. So if anything like this happens again, we’ll call her right away and leave it to her to decide what to do.....

I leave you with some gratuitous piglet pictures, they are simply too cute for words....