Our First C-section: Caboose’s Story

Episode 149
For the Love of Goats

Lessons Learned from Caboose’s Story

Transcript

Introduction
Deborah, for the love of goats, we are talking about everything goat, whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures. We’ve got you covered. And now here’s Deborah Niemann,

Deborah Niemann 0:16
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. This is our third episode this week, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the podcast, which is incredibly exciting to me. I cannot believe it’s been five years. It has been so much fun, and I look forward to continuing to do this for many more years.

Deborah Niemann 0:36
I especially love interviewing all of the vet professors and researchers, and love being able to ask them questions and learn more about our goats. And last month, when I was at Podfest, people were talking about the importance of telling stories, and I realized that after 23 years with goats, I do have a lot of stories, and they talked about the fact that people tend to learn better from stories than just a bunch of facts and figures.

Deborah Niemann 1:10
And so I decided that a good way to celebrate our fifth anniversary was to have three special episodes this week to tell you some stories that would be a good teaching opportunity. The first special episode this week was about Coco’s birth, which was a doe that died from a uterine rupture and a hemorrhage after birth. And then the second special episode was about sharing milk with baby goats, and how to go about that. And today’s episode is going to be about our first C-section.

Deborah Niemann 1:46
And I want to tell you that when I actually first wrote about that in my blog, when it happened, someone said, and that was the name of it. It was our first C section, and and someone actually responded to that by saying, Oh, I thought you guys did the C section yourself, which I was kind of horrified by. I was like, Oh my gosh, no, that’s crazy. We would never try that. And so I want to say at the very beginning that not only would it be unethical to do a C-section on your own goat with no anesthesia or anything like that, it would also be illegal.

Deborah Niemann 2:29
And in fact, many years ago, it was in the early 2000s there was a person who was arrested for doing a C-section on their own goat, and he did it in front of a couple of farm hands who turned him in so that it is not ethical. And I actually was rather horrified to discover that there is a book out there. Now, I’m not going to tell you what it what it is, but there is a book out there that talks about how to do a C-section, and I just want to say that that is a horrible, horrible idea. Don’t even attempt that if you think like, oh well, the goat’s gonna die, so we’re just gonna shoot her and cut her open and take the kids out, because you probably are not gonna get live kids.

Deborah Niemann 3:17
So I’ve seen 3 c-sections on goats, and it is not that easy. It’s not like there’s a zipper that you just go, you know, you just open it up and pull the kids out. It’s actually pretty challenging. And one of the C sections, they actually had a really hard time getting the kid out. So it is very challenging. And the other thing too is that kids do not go from being perfectly alive to dead in an instant.

Deborah Niemann 3:46
It’s actually they become oxygen deprived because they’re attached to the placenta, and as long as the placenta is attached to mom, they’re good. They have got all the oxygen that they need and all the nutrients and everything. But when that placenta starts to separate, or when the mom dies, then there is no more oxygen, and so the kid becomes oxygen deprived, and before it’s dead, the organs of the body stop functioning.

Deborah Niemann 4:14
And so you could wind up with a kid that is blind or mentally deficient and can’t function properly, like it can’t take a bottle, even, and so then you wind up, within a few days, having to put it down because it’s impossible for it to live a normal life. So this is all about our first experience with a goat that could not give birth naturally. We’ve had 760 kids. We’ve had 3 C-sections, and at some point I may be telling you the stories of the other two, because they were all very different in terms of like, why they happened, and then the way that the C-section happened also. But in every case, we wound up driving the mom two hours to the University of Illinois for the C-section, and I’m really glad that I did that, especially with the third one.

Deborah Niemann 5:07
A lot of people are unhappy if they can’t get a vet to come to their farm, but the reality is, if you need a C-section, you really want to be in a facility that has everything available that you could possibly need in that situation, and that is not your barn. So it’s really, and with our last C-section, I really thought long and hard about whether I should take her in or stay there and call a vet. And I just really, I really felt like this is going to be a C-section, and if it’s a C-section, I want it to be at the university. I don’t want it to be in my barn, and I was glad I did, because that goat never would have survived a barn C-section.

Deborah Niemann 5:50
So let’s get started and talk about our first C section, which, you know, I the story is in my book Goats Giving Birth, and I used to be a really big blogger. And by big blogger, I don’t mean famous, I mean devoted. I used to write in my blog, like sometimes, every day, and especially if somebody was giving birth. I always wrote about every birth. I wrote about all the things that were happening on the farm.

Deborah Niemann 6:21
Most years I had somewhere between 150 into the upper two hundreds, you know, 270 or something, blog posts. And so there was a lot that I wrote about. And I really like that, because it has allowed me to go back and read some of these things and say, Oh, wow, I did that, or oh I did that, you know, so sometimes realizing that I did not do the best thing, when other times I did make some good decisions. So one of the things when I was writing about the C-section in my blog, when it happened, I wanted to be as I wanted to provide as many details as possible, because I had a friend who had a Nubian that needed a C-section, and I asked her how she knew, and all she would say is, oh, you’ll know. And I was like, but how? Like, what happened? How did you know? And so I documented everything.

Deborah Niemann 7:19
Like, as soon as this happened, I sat down and I documented everything very carefully, and so I’m actually going to be referring to this quite a bit throughout this podcast. The name of my book is Goats Giving Birth, What to Expect During Kidding Season. And you can get it through any bookstore or online. You can also get it through my website, and we’ll have a link to it in the show notes, in case you want to get it because it’s it’s all about goats giving birth. It’s a lot of different goat birth stories.

Deborah Niemann 7:47
So the name of the goat that had the C-section, the first C-section was Caboose, and she was originally my daughter’s goat. My oldest daughter got very into goats while she was a teenager, and she even bought her own goats. And then when she went off to college, she was going to sell them. And I was like, oh, you can’t sell them. And so that she’s like, well, you can buy them. And so she sold her goats to me, and that so that was Caboose. Interestingly enough, my daughter was in her senior year as an engineering student at the University of Illinois when I had to take Caboose down there.

Deborah Niemann 8:24
So I called her and told her I was on my way, and she met me at the hospital. But let me back up a little bit. This was on Friday, February the 25th 2011 and at nine o’clock on Wednesday night, I noticed a four-inch string of mucus hanging out of Caboose back end. Usually that means you’ll see kids in a couple of hours. So I decided to stay with her until past midnight. She wasn’t even acting uncomfortable. But I decided to sleep in the barn, because you just don’t normally see a four-inch string of mucus unless the kids are really close, and I didn’t want to be running across the yard in the you know, at 2 am to catch babies and spending the night in the barn is not as rustic as it sounds. I’m not quite that hardy.

Deborah Niemann 9:10
Back then, we called it the barn office. Now we call it the bunk house. And basically it’s kind of like a studio apartment. It’s also we’ve got a kitchen in there. It’s where we make our soap, butcher chickens and things like that, so that people in the house can still use the kitchen in there for normal, everyday kind of things.

Deborah Niemann 9:25
So nine o’clock Wednesday night is when she’s got this four inch string of mucus, and I think she’s probably getting close. And I decided to sleep on the futon in the barn office, and little more than six hours later, at 3:44am she woke me up with a bleat that sounded serious, although it wasn’t quite as long as most goat screams that mean the babies are coming. So I put on my insulated overalls, boots, coat, and hat, grabbed an arm full of towels, the heating pad, the camera, the phone.

Deborah Niemann 9:58
Remember, this is February in Illinois, and so I go to the kidding pen and sit down in the straw next to her. An hour later, she still hasn’t done anything, so I go back into the barn office and lie down on the futon, hoping to get some sleep before something else happens. Every 15 or 20 minutes, she lets out a bleat. That’s about half as long as one that means she’s really pushing. So I spend the next hour feeling like a Jack in the Box as I pop up and look out the window from the office at Caboose when she lets out a short scream. 6am the sun is coming up. I still haven’t had any sleep, so I check on Caboose again, and she seems fine.

Deborah Niemann 10:37
So I start doing chores, and I’m taking care of all the animals in both barns, and about every 15 minutes I hear Caboose let out a scream that sounds like she’s getting serious now. And so I go in there, thinking that I’m going to see a nose or a hoof or something, but there’s nothing. 8am I decide to do a vaginal exam, thinking that the kid must be sideways or something. And as soon as I felt a nose, I thought, awesome. I should see a, you know, a kid coming out within about 15 minutes. So I’m going to finish doing chores right now while I can, because once the kid’s born, I’m going to be too busy to do it. Get finished half an hour later, I’m done with chores, and she still hasn’t had the kids.

Deborah Niemann 11:18
So I do another vaginal exam, and then realize that if I move my hand past the nose, that her cervix is around the kids muzzle so she’s not dilated. And I immediately think of my friend who had the Nubian because her Nubian had a C-section because she failed to dilate. And so I call the University of Illinois, and when I tell the professor that I’m two hours away, he says that I could attempt to manually dilate the cervix, and that if that doesn’t work, that I’m going to have to bring her in for a C-section. And so he gave me instructions on how to do that, telling me to be very, very careful, because there is a risk of tearing the cervix when you do that. And so I tried. And I really wish, like, I hate reading this now, I really, really wish he had given me a time limit and said, If this doesn’t work, within like 10 minutes, bring her in. Because he did not give me a time limit.

Deborah Niemann 12:24
And instead of calling him back, I called another goat breeder, and she was just adamant, like, Oh, your goat does not need a C-section. You can do this. It. You know, it might take you half an hour, 45, another half hour, 45 minutes. The thing is, I’d already tried for an hour. That was ridiculous. And the reality is, so after this was over, I researched this some more, and the vet textbooks tell you that they really don’t think this works.

Deborah Niemann 12:57
Yes, a lot of breeders think it works, but they’re probably just doing it, but they probably don’t need to be doing it, like if they had just left the left the goat alone, she would have finished dilating. And so it’s in true cases of failure to dilate, which people will call ring womb, R, I N, G, W, O, M, B, in true cases of failure to dilate, you have to have a C-section, like you can’t just force a cervix open. And think about this with humans. If a human is not dilating, they put a human on a Pitocin drip, and they don’t do that with goats.

Deborah Niemann 13:36
So really, if the animal’s not dilating, the answer is, do a C-section. I have also looked for research on this, and I was only able to find one study, and in that study, which was done by researchers, they found that 82% of the goats wound up with a C-section. So 82% with a C-section is huge. That really, really means that it, it probably doesn’t work at all. Like the 18% that didn’t have a C-section probably would have finished dilating on their own anyway, because we can’t turn back time with a single animal and see like, oh, well, what exactly happened with that single animal? Because obviously we can’t time travel.

Deborah Niemann 14:26
So anyway, looking back on this, I wish that he would have told me, like, if he told me to try it like, Well, you got, you’ve got nothing to lose. That he would have said, you know, don’t if this doesn’t work in 10 or 15 minutes, you need to come. You need to bring her in. So instead, if you look at the time stamps on here, I wound up wasting like two hours, which is awful. So finally, at 11 am, I am on the road to the university, because at 10:30 is when I’m like, Okay, this is not working. I don’t care what my friend says who’s got all these goats. This is not working. We’re going to the university.

Deborah Niemann 15:04
So it took another half hour to get the goat loaded up, and I’m finally on the road to the university. And I get there at 12:45 pm and my daughter has just finished her last class, and so she meets me there, and I can’t really read you all the stuff I wrote, because if I do, I’m probably going to start crying, because it was very, it was very scary in the moment and so, and I write about all of the little details and stuff. But basically they, they did a vaginal check on Caboose, and they’re like, yeah, the cervix is, like, right around her muzzle. There’s no way that the kid is coming out. The other thing too, that I discovered when I was trying to manually dilate the cervix and when I was like, Okay, that’s it. I don’t care what anybody says, I’m calling it quits, is that when I pulled my hand out, the glove was covered with hair, which I knew meant that the presenting kid was dead.

Deborah Niemann 15:59
And I just by that point, by 2011 I knew, like, Oh, if there’s a dead kid in there, that just tends to mess up everything. And so that was when I said, That’s it. I’m calling it quits. We’re going to the university. So it was really interesting, because it was not a super busy day. And so this was one of the things I like about being at the university, is that we had like the surgeon and their assistant. We had an anesthesiologist and her assistant, and then there were two students just standing there waiting to do whatever they needed to do. And then half a dozen more students were standing around ready and waiting to do whatever they were told.

Deborah Niemann 16:36
So the C-section did not actually start until 1:37 pm so a lot of time has passed since, you know, she woke me up at 3:44am and now it’s already 1:37 they start the C-section, and it took, within seven minutes, the first kid is delivered and handed to a student who’s waiting with a towel, seven minutes. So this is where I’m saying, like, don’t try this at home, people. It takes a professional seven minutes to get a kid out, and so you’re really not going to be able to, you know, get a kid out fast enough if, like, that one book says, you know, oh, well, if a goat, if you’re sure your goat’s gonna die anyway, you could put her down and cut the kids out. No, you really can’t.

Deborah Niemann 17:26
And I have heard of someone doing that, and they did wind up with a blind kid because of the oxygen deprivation. Blind is actually even surprising, because it would normally take so long to get a kid out that there’s no way that they would survive that long. So the first kid was out after seven minutes, and they suctioned its airway, and the anesthesiologist was working on the kid quite a bit. And then another kid was born, and they took it over to where the first kid was. The third kid that was pulled out was incredibly obvious to me that that was the dead kid, because it was in a sack that looked like it was full of mud. It was really gross. And so nobody needed to tell me that.

Deborah Niemann 18:15
You know, that was the kid that had been dead for quite some time already, and it had been stuck in the cervix, and then the fourth kid was delivered. So she ultimately had four kids. And what had happened was, and this kind of gives you, I think this gives you a really good illustration of how the placenta works. The kids just don’t go from like, alive to dead instantly. So we had the one kid that was dead, that had been dead for who knows how many days, because it was, you know, hair was coming out, and it was in this bag of what looked like mud. And then one of the kids was born and died within, like, about five minutes of birth.

Deborah Niemann 19:00
And the third kid, and this is not the order they were told that they came out in, but this, I’m this is basically from, like the worst to best condition. So the second worst off kid was one that the anesthesiologist asked for a crash cart almost immediately, and she was giving it injections, she put it on oxygen, and within about five minutes, there was no heartbeat anymore. The kid in the third worst or second best condition was one that needed oxygen, and it also needed what they call a bear hugger, which is kind of like a heating pad that is temperature controlled, because his temperature, his body temperature fell to like 91 degrees very quickly. He couldn’t maintain his body temperature.

Deborah Niemann 19:48
So they put him in the little bear hugger to help him maintain his body temperature, and they put an oxygen mask on him. And then he was fine after an hour. And then the fourth kid was a little screamer in no time, you know, she was screaming, and she’s trying to stand, and everybody from, you know, receptionist to custodians were coming in there like they could hear her all over the hospital, because she was such a loud little thing. They were all coming in there to see how, you know, like, oh my gosh, what is it? Oh, it’s so cute. I’m gonna take her home with me, because y’all have all seen baby goats, and you know how incredibly adorably cute they are.

Deborah Niemann 20:25
And so the way that it was explained is that, because she had been in labor for a long time, is that the placenta was starting to separate at one end. Now, you know, after a goat gives birth, the placenta comes out. It feels like, you know, it takes a really long time. It’s a couple hours, maybe three, and it’s coming out, like inch by inch, and that’s because it’s separating from the uterus one cotyledon at a time. So those purple, pruny things are what is attached to the uterus, and they release gradually, and as they release, that’s why you have more and more of the placenta hanging out, until finally, the whole thing just drops out.

Deborah Niemann 21:08
And if there are still kids inside, basically after a doe has been in labor and pushing for a certain number of hours, is when the placenta will start to separate. Because all of this is, is the whole labor thing happens, like this hormonal change in the goat’s body that’s initiated with the kid that the body’s like, Okay, we’re gonna have a baby now. So all these things start changing. So the body is like, Oh, shut down the colostrum production now we’re gonna make the mature milk, and pretty soon we don’t need this placenta thing anymore, and so we’re gonna let the placenta go and all that kind of stuff.

Deborah Niemann 21:48
But it is like, you’ve got about six to eight hours before that starts happening and then think about the fact that it takes a couple hours for the placenta to, like, fully release. So basically what happened was the kid that survived for about five minutes, he was attached to a part of the placenta that was starting to separate, and so he was already compromised. And in fact, when he didn’t make it, the vet said to me, you’re actually lucky he didn’t make it, because if he only survived for, you know, a few minutes, if he would have survived, he would have had a lot of problems, and you probably would have wound up putting him down in a few days.

Deborah Niemann 22:27
So you don’t necessarily want to try to work too hard to save a kid that’s that close to death, because you might just wind up having to make the worst decision ever down the road, like we did with our llama, that got meningeal worm. You know, it’s like we spent almost $2,000 to save her, and then six months later, she’s still paralyzed. And that was like the hardest decision ever to make, like you’ve tried so hard to help an animal survive, and then you realize that this is hopeless. So that is a really, really important thing for people to understand, is that a kid does not just go from 100% healthy and alive one minute to dead the next minute – it’s a gradual process, and it all has to do with the placenta.

Deborah Niemann 23:16
And so that third kid that was on oxygen for about an hour, he grew up to be big and healthy. And the fourth kid, obviously, her part of the placenta was still very well attached, because she came out, you know, kicking and screaming, and she was up and trying to stand, you know, like a pretty normal kid, like you wouldn’t have known what she had been through, which she really hadn’t been through anything. Her siblings had been through a lot, but she really hadn’t been through much to arrive into this world, not like her siblings anyway.

Deborah Niemann 23:50
So it really did not take me long to be kicking myself for not going to the university hospital sooner. You know, I think I was like looking at the times on what I wrote in the book, and it’s like the first time I called the vet was at 8:30 and we did not leave for the vet until 11:05 and then we got there at 1:37 so I really wasted two hours trying to dilate the cervix, which is something like I said, research has shown that it doesn’t work over 80% of the time.

Deborah Niemann 24:33
And when something has that low of a quote, unquote success rate, then you don’t even consider that successful. I mean, who wants to line up and say, Yes, I want to volunteer to have this procedure done that has an 18% so-called success rate, like that’s less than randomly good, you know. So knowing what I know now, there is no way that I would waste time attempting that. You know? And the thing is, it’s not like she just needed more time, because she was pushing at that point, and so she wasn’t going to dilate, and she really needed to be taken in.

Deborah Niemann 25:13
And if I had gone in to the hospital two hours earlier, that third kid probably would have survived easily, because that was is a big difference. Two hours is a big difference. And so this is why a lot of times people think like, oh, I don’t have time to get to the hospital. Yes, you do, you do have time. It’s not a matter of like, just because there’s not a vet right around the corner, you know? And the other thing is that the doe survived just fine.

Deborah Niemann 25:43
You know, a lot of times you see people talk about like they think their goat is gonna die any second, and they don’t like the way that. So assuming your goat is healthy, she does not have toxemia, she doesn’t have hypocalcemia, she wouldn’t die for a few days, like, if she could not give birth to her kids, then they would die inside of her. She would become septic, and she would die from an infection in three or four days.

Deborah Niemann 26:10
So you have plenty of time to get a goat to the hospital. I would say, maybe in all the years I’ve been teaching, I would have two students that I could say might not be able to do that. One lived in northern Alaska, and their vet would fly in once a year on a helicopter to do a farm visit. So they would not probably be able to get their goat to a vet, depending on what the weather was like.

Deborah Niemann 26:40
I had another student that was out in the Aleutian Islands. So it’s a very similar situation, except instead of helicopter access, it was boat access. So you know, if the weather, I mean, even they could have gotten their goat to a vet as long as the weather cooperated with them. So anybody that lives, you know, in the continental US or Canada, or anywhere normal like that that’s not in a place super remote. You’ve got plenty of time to get your goat to a vet for a proper C-section.

Deborah Niemann 27:12
And we talked about fetotomy as an alternative in the two episodes ago, when I talked about Coco’s birth and why I would not do that. I would opt for a C-section because that’s it’s much more controlled, and the chances of success, especially in a small goat, are going to be much better. There’s a question in the chat that says, Did she not dilate because the kid wasn’t pushing hard enough against the cervix? No, it is not. It’s not just pressure that causes the cervix to dilate. It’s hormones, which is why, like with humans, they put you on a Pitocin drip. Is because oxytocin causes the cervix to open.

Deborah Niemann 27:53
And so for whatever reason, there was not enough oxytocin, it’s one of the possibilities, is that she was calcium deficient. That was really the only possibility that the vet suggested. He said that maybe she was calcium deficient. And at the time, you know, I didn’t know enough about hypocalcemia to know what the other symptoms of hypocalcemia would be, but that was the thing that made me aware that that was even a potential possibility, because calcium is responsible for muscles.

Deborah Niemann 28:27
And so, you know, in our one of our courses, you know, in Goats 365, in our kidding course, there is a lecture on hypocalcemia, and it lists all of the symptoms of hypocalcemia, and they’re all related to muscles. So like, if a goat has hypocalcemia, she might not have sufficient contractions to open her cervix because the uterus is a big muscle. Her eyes may not dilate because that’s a muscle. She might stop pooping and peeing because those are muscles. She might not be able to stand or walk very well, because, obviously, muscles, so that’s a possibility. But the other one is that, for whatever reason, she she didn’t have enough, you know, oxytocin, or something else was going on that prevented her but it’s not a matter.

Deborah Niemann 29:14
It’s not just a matter of pressure against the cervix. In fact, see, we hear this a lot as humans, because again, we’re upright, and so as humans, our babies are putting pressure on our cervix. Goats, they’re horizontal. Their babies are not putting gravity is not pushing their babies against the cervix. What’s pushing the babies out is the muscles of the uterus. They’re pushing the baby out.

Deborah Niemann 29:39
So gravity is really not helping a goat, unless somebody’s got a goat that’s walking around on two legs, gravity is not helping your goat at all, and it really has nothing to do with that, which is why trying to manually force the cervix open doesn’t work, because that’s just not it. It’s like it’s all about the hormones and possibly the calcium. That was a great question, though, because I think that’s a really big misconception. I hear people saying that all the time, oh, my goat wasn’t dilating because the kid wasn’t perfectly in the cervix. And that is not what you need. Like, that’s not what it’s about.

Deborah Niemann 30:16
Because the goats, because goats are horizontal, they’re not vertical like we are. So their babies – Gravity’s not pushing their babies against their cervix like humans. I hope you have found this episode helpful and that you have a better understanding now of what things might look like. This is just one scenario of a C-section. Our second goat had a C-section because the kid was just way too big for her. And the third had a C-section because she had a deformed kid that was a schistosomas reflexus, which the nickname for that is inside-out kid.

Deborah Niemann 30:55
And that is just as horrible as it sounds like. There was no way that a kid so severely deformed could possibly come out the normal exit. So there are different reasons for C-sections, but the bottom line is that you’ve got a goat that just cannot get the kid out. And this is why it’s really, really important to have a relationship with a vet that you can call in an emergency and talk through these things and get your goat in for whatever assistance that goat needs as quickly as possible.

Deborah Niemann 31:31
Because, you know, a couple hours could have made a difference with one of those kids if I had not wasted time at home. I hope you’ve enjoyed the three extra episodes that we did this week in celebration of our fifth anniversary, and it has been a lot of fun to have our Goats 365 members here and sharing their questions and comments.

Deborah Niemann 31:53
As we enter our sixth year, we are moving back to weekly episodes, while also including more case studies and personal stories of goats and the people who love them. If you’re interested in learning more about Goats 365 and joining our community, visit goats365.com to learn more. See you again next time. Bye for now.