The Grossness Factor
By Kris Garrett
I didn’t even hesitate as I picked up the cold, slimy placenta that had just fallen out of my mare’s rear end with a wet PLOP. It was heavy with fresh blood and birth fluids, and speckled with manure and straw. She had been dragging it around behind her for the last half an hour as it slowly dislodged from her uterus. I kept tying it up to she wouldn’t step on it, but it was so heavy and wet, it kept sliding out of the knot. When her body finally let it go, it slithered out like a wet slime beast from a cheap horror movie. It piled up on itself on the stall floor, a giant gray slug peeking through the bright yellow straw. It glistening with sticky goo in the weak dawn sunlight that filtered in over the stall door.
The placenta was amazingly heavy. It had recently housed a dark colored, long legged, Andalusian colt, who was now tottering around Lumina’s stall looking for her ample udder in all the wrong places. It took both my cold, bare hands to heft it up and over my forearms so I could haul it outside. It looked like a fat, dead, sea eel as it draped over my wrists. My hands were stunned with its icy cold, numbing my fingers to the point I could barely hold on.
Somehow I got the gian
t slug outside and laid it out in the snow, stretching each part to roughly reconstruct the shape it had been when it was still in side the horse’s body. Specifically, I was looking for both uterine horns to make sure they were intact. I had to verify that no part of the placenta had torn off and remained inside my mare. That could kill her with infection faster than a bite by a rabid skunk.
I stretched the two horns out and saw the bloody tear where the colt had passed through. You could still see the big veins traversing the thick balloon that had carried the baby for the past eleven months. The bloody end that had been attached to the mare’s uterine wall looked like a painful abrasion road-rash wound. But it was all there. I was relieved.
My husband showed up with the big black garbage bag, and commented that he was glad it was trash day. Dogs and coyotes love to eat these things, so the sooner it was far away, the better. Let the coyotes at the dump enjoy their own version of a spring bounty.
John started to reach for the weird, slimy monster, and then hesitated. Even with gloves on, his maximum grossness level was almost reached. I stepped in and said, “I’ll get it, Hunny… I’m already a mess.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I started to giggle. A mess…. well, that was an understatement! I had blood, horse poop, and birth fluids coating the arms of my barn jacket. My hands were stained a horrible reddish brown from the iodine I had splashed on myself when I dipped the foal’s navel in the small cup of antibacterial fluid. The front of my jacket was smeared with mud, wet horse saliva, and green masticated hay thanks to Lumina, from when she had brushed against me with her mouth.
I had not had a shower, nor had I so much as pulled a brush through my hair before rushing out at John’s early morning news that Lumina was foaling. I had old baggy pajama pants on, mud and poop covered muck boots, and wet hair that been soaked by the heavy falling rain/snow mix as I ran to the barn. My glasses were so splotchy from the rain and snow, I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. I had muddy dog footprints smeared down my coat and pant legs from the over zealous greeting I’d received from our excited black lab.
Let’s just say, I would have fit in nicely in an artic camp for the Survivor show. Or maybe Man (or in this case, Woman) versus Nature.
The grossness factor. Every time I think I can no longer be grossed out, I find out I’m wrong. Animals will do that for you. I used the think that a dog who’s been eating horse hoof clippings has the grossest smelling breath on the planet. That was before I smelled my dog after he rolled in a ripe, maggot infested skunk he had found on the side of the road.
I used to think that the blood and goo that comes with an open wound infection was pretty gross. That was until our drought of 2002, and my introduction to pigeon fever. Now THAT is gross! Pigeon fever has nothing to do with birds except that the swelling from the infection (spread by biting flies) often occurs in the horse’s chest, the abscess sticking out like a pigeon’s breast bone. It swells and swells, and eventually makes a hole in the horse’s skin for the viscous fluid to escape. Oh my… the goo that comes out of a pigeon fever abscess is gross. I mean, turn your stomach, gag ya to the point of vomiting, gross. But it is also thrilling to see the sickening stuff finally ooze out of your beloved horse’s skin, as well as the subsequent relief the horse expresses in it’s body language. The pain from the swelling is obvious and is even worse if near a joint. Trying to drain it too soon would only result in it coming back. Once the abscess was open and draining, we would stick a garden hose up in the hole and rinse the thick slime out of the resulting cavity under the horse’s skin, thrilled at seeing the pus and infection wash away. We’d be so happy that it was finally open that we’d forget how gross it was.
Last week, our high school trained exhibition gelding colicked. For those of you who are not horse people, colic can mean anything from a little bit of gas in the tummy, to impending death from a twist in the gut. It’s very scary because it is very hard to tell the difference between a little gas, and an emergency call to the vet. It could pass in a few minutes, or you could be looking at a ten thousand dollar surgery and a year’s recovery, if they survived at all.
We suspected that our gelding had the impaction kind of colic, which basically means he didn’t drink enough water to keep his gut wet and moving. It meant that he had some dry, partially digested food, stuck or moving very slowly through his intestine, causing him a lot of pain. It also meant an emergency call to the vet.
We reached the on-call Vet’s answering service, but he was on his way to another colic and we were second on the list. We’d just have to wait. We knew our horse needed fluids, and we also knew that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. So since we had nothing else to do while we waited, we decided to try adding some hydration from the other end.
We got an enema bag and filled it with warm water. My very tall husband held it high in the air as I put the nozzle end of the hose in the horse’s rear end. The water drained gently into his body and disappeared. It went in so fast, I figured another bag’s worth was in order. So I refilled the bag and we repeated the procedure. It went right in without any coaxing or fuss.
When the second bag was empty, I pulled out the nozzle and patted the horse on his rump. At that moment, the water decided it didn’t really want to be in the horse. It decided it would rather spray out in a surprisingly powerful, two-foot long, liquid projectile, all over me. Of course by this time it wasn’t just water. It was greenish brown poop water. My grossness tolerance factor was challenged. But what do you do? After shrieking like a little girl, I laughed at my embarrassment at putting myself in the line of fire. I deserved the direct hit for being so careless.
The vet finally came and stuck our horse with several syringes full of powerful painkillers. The effects were quick and welcomed. The poor horse relaxed and let the Vet check his pulse and respiration without flinching. Then the Vet pumped the sedated gelding full of mineral oil, water and electrolytes through a stomach hose stuck down his nose. He, too, knows you can’t make a horse drink… that is, unless you have a long stomach hose. The Vet threaded the hose down our fellows nose, then smelled the gasses coming back out the hose to make sure he had it in the horse’s stomach and not in his lungs. Pouring water and oil into the lungs would be a bad thing. A REALLY bad thing. The Vet’s grossness tolerance factor has to be, by the very nature of his job, very, very high. He didn’t seem to mind sniffing horse gut gas at all. I’m sure he’s done much worse.
The idea behind this kind of colic treatment is to pump the mineral oil and water into the horse’s tummy so it will make its way down the intestine and eventually to the impaction. The impaction softens and then moves, finishing its long journey through the yards and yards of equine intestine. This takes hours, and it is not comfortable for the horse, as anyone who’s been severely constipated knows. That’s why pain killers and tranquilizers were invented.
I spent most of that night dozing in a chair outside our gelding’s stall, wrapped in his dirty winter horse blanket. At about 4:00 am, I was awakened by the PLOP PLOP of wet poop hitting the ground. I jumped up, thrilled to see a big pile of oily manure steaming in the dark! I laughed at myself, thinking back to my son’s first bowel movement. “Look, Daddy! His first POOP!” I had excitedly shared with John. This time I sent John the message by text. “4:00 am, We have POOP!” I don’t remember ever being more thrilled to see a pile of dung. It didn’t even make a noticeable tickle on my grossness tolerance level.
My dad was one of the original CSI guys. Decades ago he invented a lot of the procedures you now see in the popular television series. He has seen the worst of the worst. He’s photographed and handled human beings literally from the inside out. He’s dealt with the results of the grossest murders and deaths you can possibly imagine. He has experienced so many gross but interesting events; he even had a book written about him. (No Stone Unturned, by Steve Jackson) He has the highest grossness tolerance factor of anyone I know.
Maybe it’s hereditary.
-Kris
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