An Infection Made a Run For It

Late late Sunday night, or early early Monday morning, whichever you prefer, I was troubled in my sleep by sharp throbbing pain in my left hand. Sometime on Sunday, I had gotten a tiny wound — the size of a pin prick — right on top of the middle knuckle of the left middle finger. Wounds on knuckles are often painful because knuckles move so much, so I didn’t really think anything about the pain. I just tried to go back to sleep while avoiding bumping my hand or laying on top of it while I tossed and turned.

I got up at about 5am. When I started to make a pot of coffee, I realized that the pain was bad enough that I would have to avoid using that finger. The top of the knuckle was swollen and red, which is, again, something that is not unusual for knuckle wounds. I sat on the couch and had a couple of cups of coffee and read some blogs, and then went out to do my chores at about 6am.

The first thing on my list of things to do was check on the hundred meat chicks that my brother Peter and I had picked up the day before. My friend John brooded them for me from day olds to four weeks. I am not well set up for brooding chicks, but John is. John and his wife Kirsten took over the old Zimmer Farm in Gallupville, which has the most beautiful old chicken barns, including a nice little brooding building. The chicks were fine. They had plenty of food and water.

Next, I moved the sheep. As with making the coffee, my knuckle hurt so bad that I couldn’t use that finger. I quickly found out that handling electronet without using one’s middle finger is not all that easy, especially since I have small hands. My middle finger usually serves to retain the last few posts as the diameter of the bundle of posts gets bigger and bigger as I pick them up. I worked it out, but it made moving the electornet take about twice as long as usual. Every few seconds, I would bump, bang, or knock that finger and a bolt of pain would shoot through it.

I remembered that I needed to bring a few bags of food over to the pig fields, so I loaded the tractor up with four bags and drove it across the street, and then fed the pigs.

On my way back from the pig field, I happened to glance down at my knuckle. It was red and swollen, and the swelling and redness had traveled down my finger onto the back of my hand. Then I noticed that the redness didn’t stop at the back of my hand. It kept going. I was about halfway across the farm road between the far pig field and the hedgerow by the bend in the road that leads back down to the road. When I stopped, I was only about ten yards away from the middle pigs’ paddock. They were still eating, but when they heard me stop, a bunch of them left their troughs and came bounding over to the fence line to see me. I could just make out their grunts above the sound of the idling engine. I looked a little closer at the back of my hand. From the back of my hand at my wrist, two large red lines ran up the top of my forearm, branching out here and there on their way up to my elbow, where they stopped. I pressed against the nearest streak, and it was extremely tender. It hurt, actually.

“Uh oh,” I thought to myself. My cell phone was in my left pocket, so I reached across with my right hand and fished it out while first holding my left hand high up in the air, but thought perhaps after a moment that this was one time when I might not want to elevate the wound, so I switched the position of my arm so that it pointed down toward the ground. I felt a searing throbbing pain in my hand and knuckle as the blood rushed into it.

“Better in my hand than my heart,” I thought.

I fished the cellphone out of my pocket and turned it over so the screen was facing me. It was 8:30am. “Holy shit,” I said out loud, and then thought to myself “that can’t be good.” The infection had streaked from my knuckle to my elbow in just two hours. I have had infections streak in the past and not done anything about it, but they had only gone a couple of inches, and only over a relatively long period of time. This thing was sprinting.

I turned the key on the tractor and the engine died. The pigs had lost interest in me and were nosing about in the ground along the fencline, grunting contentedly. My neighbor is a nurse, so I dialed her number. My next move was to go to the hospital, but I wanted to hear it from her, just to make sure I wasn’t overreacting.

“You’ve got to get to the hospital right away. You need anitbiotics. You have to go right now. Do you need a ride? Do you need any help taking care of things on the farm?”

I told her that I could get myself to the hospital and that my brother could take care of the place for the few hours that I would be gone. Then I thanked her for her help and drove the tractor up to the house and parked it in the garage. On my way in, I noticed that Peter’s car was gone. He had mentioned going down into town for a run in the morning, so I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote him a note:

“Peter, I have an infection in my knuckle that is making a run sprint for my heart. I had to go the hospital for antibiotics. Take care of the animals — make sure the chicks have food and water. I’ll call you later.”

Peter was coming up the hill in his car as I was going down the hill in the truck, so I flagged him down and we stopped and I told him what was going on, and I guess it was a good thing that we saw each other because later I found out that Peter felt that my terse note would have been a bit more than disconcerting had he seen it without having seen me first. He got such a kick out of the note that he put it on the fridge.

When I wrote the note, and while on my way to the hospital, I was still under the spell of the old wives’ tale that once an infection reaches the heart, you die, so I was actually quite concerned how close it was to my heart and how fast it was moving. While in the emergency room the second time, the doctor said as he readied me to be admitted, with the infection now practically up to my arm pit, “and, oh, by the way, it is just an old wives’ tail that once an infection reaches the heart you die.” Had I known that, my note to Peter would have been a little less dramatic.

To make a very long story a little shorter (mostly becaues it is 6:30am and I need to go out to do chores), I went to the emergency room. The nurse and doctor were impressed with the infection. The doctor gave me a prescription for oral antibiotics. The nurse cleaned up the wound and bound it in gauze. They sent me home with orders to get back there if it got worse. Later in the day, after taking my second antibiotic pill, Peter and I went down into town to get lunch at Linaia’s. Linaia, who I found out yesterday “sees auras,” was quite abruptly drawn to my arm in the middle of our conversation. She stopped mid-word, seeming very much like someone that had just suddenly seen something interesting and reached down and put her hand on my forearm and then wrapped her other hand around my arm, and then gently ran both hands up and down my forearm, then held it for a second and let go. “That’s bad,” she said. “You’ve got to do something about that.” On our way out the door, I took a closer look at my arm, which I hadn’t done in a couple of hours, and not only were there more streaks, but they were further up my arm, two of them were halfway up my bicep.

When we got back to the house, I called my sister-in-law, who is a doctor, and she told me that I had to go back to the hospital where they would admit me for IV antibiotics, so that’s what I did, and that’s what they did.

I went into the hospital on Monday afternoon and I got out late Wednesday morning. I suffered through hours of boredom and watched more tv than I have in five years. But, the infection is gone and I am back home. As soon as I got home, Peter and I took a walk around the farm. Everything was fine. Peter, a city boy born and bred, had done a great job of taking care of the place while I was gone.

 

Maggots (Flystrike)

If suffering is the guiding principle on the farm, I failed badly to meet the demands of it the last few days. Yesterday I discovered that Jason the Icelandic ram was suffering badly from “flystrike,” an infestation — in his case horrific — of fly maggots. Flystike can happen anywhere on a sheep’s body, but is most common around the tail, especially undocked tails, due to the collection of feces, but also anywhere on a sheep there is an open wound, or where it is warm and moist and stinky. Jason’s infestation is around his horns and down the top of his neck. There were thousands of them, and they had spread over a large portion of his head and neck. The flies lay so many eggs and the larvae hatch so quickly and the maggots are so horrifically voracious that I have no idea how long he was being eaten alive by them. It could have been a week, or only a couple of days. I know only that it must have been utterly horrible for him to feel thousands of maggots squirming about burrowing ever deeper into his flesh, especially because it was in a place that he could not scratch.

About three days ago, I noticed that the wool around Jason’s neck had become soiled. He is white, and the wool around his neck had become brown. I didn’t really think anything of it. There is a wood pile in the paddock that I had seen him scratching his head in, and I assumed that maybe he had rubbed his head and neck in the ashes that were on the ground from the last time we burned the pile. Of course, he was desperately trying to scratch at the maggots, not just simply scratching an itch. And, of course, it wasn’t ashes that had made his neck wool dirty. It was blood and excrement — from the thousands of maggots devouring his flesh.

The day before yesterday, Jason wasn’t quite himself. He seemed a bit apathetic, but, still, I made no connection between the dirty neck wool and his condition. I just made a mental note to keep an eye on him. Throughout the day I saw him alternately up and grazing, but still a bit off. Yesterday morning while doing my round of chores before leaving for the farmers market, he was off laying by himself, well away from the rest of the flock. He was clearly in trouble. At first, because of the position of his body and how far away he was, I thought he was dead, but as I approached him, he raised his head, and then he lumbered to his feet and started to walk away. I walked after him and after a  few feet he stopped and I took a hold of his horns. There were a few green metallic flies buzzing about his head and a couple had alighted on the wool on the back of his head. There was a bit of blood between his horns. That is when, finally, it registered…flystrike. I didn’t take a closer look. There was nothing I could do about it as I had to get to the farmer’s market, and it wasn’t going to kill him in the next few hours, so I just let him go. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to know at that moment just how bad it was.

Over the past month of nearly non-stop rain, I have been worried about flystrike, but not in the Icelandics. I have been worried about the half of the Texel-Cheviot ewes that have undocked tails. Their rear ends are soiled with manure and a bunch of them have quite a few “dags,” clumps of manure and wool dangling from their back ends. That is the classic conditions for flystrike and the very reason that farmers dock the tails of long-tailed wool sheep. It is also the reason for the horrific practice of mulesing common in Australian merino sheep. Mulesing is the practice of cutting away the wool and skin of a sheep around its tail to prevent manure build up. To increase wool production, the naturally occurring folds of skin in Merino sheep have been increased through selective breeding practices. More folds means more surface area means more wool means more money — but it also means a higher incidence of flystrike. Mulesing is done without anesthetic and is a very bloody, and so obviously quite painful, practice. So far, the Texel-Cheviots have not been subject to flystrike, although now I feel the need to take a closer look to make sure.

Jason, as do all Icelandics, have naturally short tails, which is one of the reasons I chose Icelandics as I wanted to avoid tail docking. However, while Jason does not have a long tail, he has large curly horns that grow close to his head. As the wool on his head grew, it filled in the space between his skull and his horns. Then a month’s worth of nearly constant rain kept it constantly damp, and because the horns are a major site of heat exhange, those damp pockets were also nice and warm. It is likely that Jason scratched his head on the wood pile because the wet wool itched, and one of the sticks broke the skin causing an open wound right in an area that happens to be the absolutely perfect environment for fly maggots to live in, warm and damp. The environmental conditions in those pockets were so perfect that it is possible that Jason didn’t even need to have cut himself to start the strike. The flies might have chosen that site anyway.

Regardless, the strike started and I just twiddled my thumbs. My inexperience and shortcomings really shine when there is a problem. At this point I pick up on the fact that something is wrong, but I still just sit there, partly because I hope it will resolve itself, and partly because I am overwhelmed by the anxiety of ignorance and fear that I won’t have the skills to take care of whatever the problem is. The likelihood that all new farmers make similar mistakes and suffer the pains of traveling along the learning curve affords little comfort whenever the image of the writhing mass of maggots half buried in Jason’s flesh pops into my head.

On my way out the door to the farmers market I left my brother a note letting him know that Jason was not well and that we would need to take care of him when I got back. When I got back, I explained to him what I thought the problem was.

“Maggots? I don’t deal well with maggots,” Peter said sort of rhetorically as we walked down to the barn to get a lead rope. I didn’t respond. I needed to take care of the sheep and I needed Peter’s help, maggots or no.

As soon as I looped the lead rope around Jason’s neck, I could see the maggots beneath the wool. His skin was crawling with them. We led him out of the paddock and over to the barnyard where I had the shears set up. Peter held the lead rope while I sheared the wool off. At the first clear site of the maggots, I had to fight the urge to be sick. There is something about the site of a writhing mass of maggots that turns the stomach. It seems universal enough that it serves some purpose, perhaps making sure we don’t eat rotten meat, even if we are starving. Even a starving person loses their hunger when their stomach turns. When the wool fell away it released the stench of rotten flesh, and I think I even groaned as I held back the urge to throw up. Peter was struggling as bad as I was, but he stayed focused and held the rope. Luckily,  Jason is both very tame, and was feeling very sick, so he pretty much just stood there.

After a few minutes, I had sheared the area as best I could. The maggots went from his horns halfway down the back of his neck towards his shoulder. They were clearly worse on one side of his head than the other. Now that there was a writhing mass of exposed maggots, we needed to get them off of him. I wanted to kill them with an insecticide, but I didn’t know what I could use and if I had it, and I didn’t know if killing all of those maggots in place would make things worse. I called Jen, who was up at the house, from my cellphone and asked her to check it out on the internet. Meanwhile, I decided that Peter and I should get to work getting the maggots off of Jason. Peter held Jason while I went into the barn looking for appropriate tools. I found the perfect one, an old file the farrier had left behind. The end of the file is a long blunt point, a perfect probe to slide along the folds of Jason’s skin where the maggots were concentrated.

At first, the maggots fell off in great squirming clumps because there were so many of them. It took about an hour to get the majority of them off. Periodically, Peter or I would need to turn away, but after a while we became pretty desensitized. By the end, we were picking the stragglers off by hand.

Jen had found some information on the internet, but I decided to call Dave Gessert my sheep shearer for his opinion. Not only does he know a thing or two about sheep, his wife Mary is a vet. Dave said to shear the area really well, wash the maggots off with water, then follow up by cleaning the area with a mild detergent, and then, most importantly, get the area as completely dry as possible. The maggots thrive in the damp. They do not do well in dry conditions. Peter and I did the best we could with a hose to wash the maggots off. We got nearly all of the large maggots, but the next generation, the tiny ones that were only a couple of millimeters long, of which there were hundreds if not thousands, were well protected from the water in the nooks and crannies of Jason’s skin. After using just water, I mixed a tablespoon of povidone iodine solution with about a gallon of water, which turns out to have been a bit of overkill, but it didn’t bother Jason. I could have just used a mild hand detergent. Peter very carefully applied the solution with a sponge, being especially careful to keep it out of Jason’s eyes. A few minutes later, just as carefully, we rinsed it off.

Then, after about three hours of standing almost perfectly still and never once making any real effort to get away, Jason cried. “He’s had it,” I said. “We’ve got to finish. Go grab those towels so we can start to get him dried off.” As Peter walked away to get the towels, I sort of relaxed my hold on Jason’s horn, and as soon as he felt just that tiny bit of “personal” space, he peed. I am pretty sure he cried out of discomfort because he needed to pee and didn’t feel comfortable doing it while we were poking and prodding him and hosing him down. He peed for a long time, so we waited for him to finish, and then when he was finished, we started to towel him off. After toweling him off, we used a blow drier to get him completely dry. I had worried about what would happen when we turned a blow drier on right next to Jason’s head, but he just stood there perfectly still until we were finished.

Then, finally, after nearly four hours, we put Jason in a stall in the barn. I gave him some hay and he immediately started eating. Then I gave him some water. Peter and I watched him for a few minutes and then went up to the house at about 8pm. Luckily the pizza shop down in town was open even though it was the Fourth of July because I was beat and I sure as hell wasn’t cooking dinner. I checked on Jason at 9:30pm and then went to bed.

At about 11:15pm my father called to tell me that my 97-year old grandmother had died. Today we’ve got to take care of Jason, build a chicken coop, pick up 100 four week old meat chickens from a friend, feed and water the animals, finish the pig pasture fence, and then move a group of pigs a quarter of a mile to another field, and during all of that I’ve got to figure out how to open myself up enough to let my grandmother in at least a little bit because right now I’m shut down as tight as a ship in a storm and I can’t hardly feel anything, but over the years I have found that one purpose of funerals is to pry open even hard cases like me.

 

Swimming Pigs

Starting at about 6:15 yesterday evening, and ending about thirty or forty minutes later, we had torrential rain, and when I say torrential, I mean torrential. There was a torrent running down every inch of the slightest slopes and pools in every depression or hole. About twenty minutes into it, I realized that it was bad enough that the pig shelters would be flooded. So, after having changed my wet clothes for the third time already, I put on another dry pair of pants and shirt, slipped on my rain gear and knee boots and headed back out into the rain.

I stopped at the barn and loaded four bales of hay onto the forks of the tractor. I checked the middle-sized pigs first. Half of them were laying in wet, half of them were standing in an inch or more of water in their shelter. I looked around the paddock for a dryer spot to move the shelter to, but there wasn’t one. There were rivers running through the paddock in some places. My only option was to spread out two bales of hay in their shelter, which I hoped would be enough to keep them dry. As soon as I was finished spreading the hay, the pigs all went running back into the shelter. I realized just how hard it was raining when I stepped out of the shelter. It was like I had been whacked with a board. It just slammed right into me. I put my head down and trudged over to the tractor.

I checked the big pigs next. As I passed through the hedge row, I turned onto the pig field road. If I were driving a car and not a tractor, and even if the road were paved, I would have had to turn back. The water was probably eight inches deep in some spots, and rushing past me. There was about four inches of water in the big pig’s shelter, much too much to manage with a little bit of hay. I decided that I would need to move the shelter, but I hadn’t brought the chain with me, so I would have to come back.

On my way to check on the little pigs, I had to cross a narrow stream, over a foot and a half diameter culvert. The water had overwhelmed the culvert and jumped the stream banks. If I hadn’t known the road so well and where the edges of the culvert were, I might have ended up off the road with a wheel buried in the stream. As I crossed, it looked to me that the water was more than a third up the back wheels of the tractor. I could see the water through the holes in the floor of the steel operators platform, rushing past just a few inches beneath it.

My brother Pete and I had moved the pigs to a new section of the field earlier in the day, a bit higher up the hill, so the flooding in the shelter wasn’t as bad as it would have been. The spot where they had been was pretty well under water. As it was, the water had seeped into the shelter in the new spot, but it wasn’t that bad. There were a couple of wet spots, but since the pigs are still so small there is still a lot of space inside the shelter for them. Nevertheless, I didn’t know for how long it would continue to rain, and I did not want the pigs to get chilled, so I spread out two bales of hay in the shelter, concentrating it along the length of the driest side.

Mercifully, as I was finishing bedding down the little pigs’ shelter, the rain stopped, just like that, literally as if someone had turned off the tap. One second a torrential down pour, the next, nothing. When a rain like that stops just like that you realize just how incredibly overwhelming it had been. I hadn’t realized it, but while it was raining there had been a constant great roar that drowned (literally) everything else out. In its place, an eerie silence and utter stillness, broken only by the quiet grunts of the little pigs settling into their bedding. Within moments, however, the birds started to chirp, slowly inching back out from deep in the crooks of the tree boughs into the open air. I looked around and listened and took it in for a second, but then I got back to work because the big pigs were still under water.

As I drove from the little pigs’ field back to the barn, it started to spit a bit, but the rain had finished. The middle pigs were out, playing and rooting around in the wet ground. I stopped and checked their shelter. The bedding was still reasonably dry in most places, but I was worried that the moisture would wick up through the hay over night, so I decided to add one more bale of hay. Back at the barn,  I loaded three more bales of hay onto the forks and grabbed the chain.

I distracted the big pigs by putting some food in their trough and then drove the tractor into the paddock and hooked up to the shelter. I had scouted the paddock after I filled the trough and there weren’t any really dry spots, but I did find one spot that would do. I dragged the shelter slowly into place and then unhooked the tractor and then spread two bales of hay inside the shelter. By the time I was finished, the pigs had finished their food, so I had to put some more in the trough so that I could get the tractor out of the paddock.

On my way back to the barn, I stopped and spread the last bale of hay in the middle pigs’ shelter, and then finally parked the tractor at the barn and walked up to the house where I announced that I would most definitely not be cooking dinner. Pete, Jen, and I went down to Middleburgh to Hubie’s, where I nodded in and out of sleep between bites.