Jordy man. This boy, for almost a year, he had our vets and I perplexed. One evening, the spring before we moved, our spunky, life loving boy was off. Really off. He had a fever which I treated. I started our pneumonia protocol due to the high fever but he was acting painful. After chatting with Dr. P we decided he should see him so at 10pm I loaded up and we headed to the vet office. He received all sorts of treatments, but we didn't get any real answers. Bloodwork didn't show much, neither did ultrasounds.
For a few weeks he was ok then he was just off again. I had both our vets out multiple times as I knew something was wrong, really wrong, we just couldn't figure out what. Jordy was the first recipient of super kid Finch's rumen fluid but there was still no real improvement. Jordy was stable but still not himself, we moved and still, he wasn't improving. He was loosing weight and I could not shake the feeling that we were missing something, but what?
Dr. P suggested a barium x-ray series. Barium coats the digestive tract as it moves through and would show us any abnormalities. We tubed Jordy with barium and then took x-rays every 30 min over 2 hours so we could watch it move through his system. Sure enough, it was bypassing something in his abomasum. It wasn't a foreign object, it didn't look like a mass or tumor, Dr. P wasn't sure what it was. But he wanted to find out.
A few days later Jordy had major abdominal surgery. What Dr. P found was sludge, a couple cups of just sludge. We don't know why it accumulated but he cleared it out, closed him up and we waited to see what would happen. He was on medication to help keep his system moving but he didn't really want to eat. Something that had been all too common for Jordy for awhile at that point. He was in a small stall in our heated medical space as he was so very thin. Most days, a banana was all I could get him to eat. One day, a few weeks after his surgery without him having improved much, Dr. P suggested giving it another week and if he wasn't improving, that it might be time to let him go.
A week came and went and he still hadn't improved much but my gut said it wasn't time. He wasn't suffering and when he looked at me with those big, bright eyes, I knew, we were going to keep going. It was a LONG recovery but he did exactly that. He started wanting to go out with the herd again. He started to eat again. He was so painfully thin that it was hard to look at him but slowly, he was coming back.
Jordy, so very thin a few months after his surgery
The day he jumped into the hay cart, I teared up, our spunky boy was back. It has been a year since his surgery and just in the last 2 months we have been able to stop his supplemental feeding and he is holding his weight. He now runs and plays and has his spirit back. He will never poop normal goat poop pellets and we're not exactly sure why but other than that, you would never know what this boy has been through.
I have always been a gut feeling person. On this farm, it has saved lives. It pushed our vets to keep digging and it told me to give this sweet boy the time he needed to recover. It was a long and tough road to get where we are today but boy was it worth it!
Love you Jordy man!
