She was obviously a brainer.

I could see it from 300 feet away as easily as I could at 30.

She was down in the northwest corner of pen 3, laying on her left side.

Her head was cranked back at an awful, unnatural angle over her right shoulder and her eyes were rolled way up and was twitching and jerking spasmodically. 

I came near to her and tried to ease her head back around, even though I knew it was of no use. 

And it wasn’t.  Trying to twist her head back to where it should be was like trying to move the wall of our house I’m sitting beside right now with my bare hands.

She hollered when I tried to move it.  I wondered if from pain or agony of mind.

Brainers are caused from two things that I know of.  Both are feed related; one from a type of grass, the other from an unbalanced ration that has too much distiller’s grain in it.  Her problem was the latter.  In each scenario, the chemicals in a calf’s brain are altered to the point that they lose normal function, and it often involves balance. 

This was the case with her.  Her head twisted off to the side like that, even when laying down, was evidence that her mind was telling her that her body was in a different place than it actually was. 

In ten years, I think we’ve had 5 brainers.  I’ve managed to save one out of those five, and I knew the statistics weren’t in my favor as I walked back to the shed to get a heavy dose of Thiamine ready to inject.  At that point, I wasn’t aware of just which statistics weren’t in my favor. 

I was acutely conscious of several other things as I walked back to get the meds for her.  High on the list was the fact that I had dropped my eldest son off at the airport the day before and that he was going to be gone for 6 months.  I didn’t like that idea at all, but I wholeheartedly supported him in the volunteer service he was going to give.  Second on the list was how cold it must have gotten overnight; the manure patties were frozen completely solid, and I kept tripping over them because of that.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in dealing with cattle, it’s take the opportunity they give you, even if it means a split second decision.  More than likely they won’t give you the same opportunity again and the next one might not be as good as the one just given.

When I got back to my sick girl, she was up on some very unsteady feet and aimlessly moving in the general direction of some panels that were situated nearby in a ‘v’ shape.  I had been planning on working her up to the squeeze chute, but this opportunity looked better for her; she was so unstable I wasn’t sure I’d even get her as far as the chute.  So, I eased up against her and got her facing into the narrow part of those panels.

She was so weak; she could hardly stay upright.  I leaned up against her left hindquarter, just in front of her back leg and wedged her forward and against the opposite panel.  I got my syringe ready and quickly injected the meds. 

Part of them, anyway.

She screamed like it hurt something terrible, and the next thing I became conscious of, was that my right leg had experienced some extreme power exerted upon it, and I caught a glimpse of my knee splayed outwards to the right at a neat 45 degree angle.  The bend would have looked normal if it had been front to back; sideways like that came through dimly to me that something must have happened.

I say dimly, because it seemed like for a bit there my mind operated in very slow motion, and even though it was only 3 degrees Fahrenheit, I was sweating profusely for some reason. 

And it seemed that, as I tried to walk towards the nearby panel, my right leg wouldn’t cooperate at all.  Seemed sort of floppy.

It’s easy to see now what happened then.  As I leaned up against her, one of those frozen clumps locked my right foot on the outside of it from moving at all, which was good to brace against for the injection I needed to give.  But the poor girl was so distressed and evidently in so much pain that she reacted by getting her left hind leg just inside my right leg and her consequent kick backwards did the deed that splayed my knee out sideways.

I called my good wife from my hunched over position against the panel.  The calf wasn’t an issue anymore; she had given out and laying on the ground.  She came out there in the car and got me through the main fence, somehow or another, and into the car. 

I had her stop by the conduit rack, and I cut a piece of ¾ inch steel conduit down to size and took the bender to it, making a makeshift cane for myself and the time being, because something still didn’t feel right in my knee, even though it didn’t hurt nearly so badly anymore.

She, my good wife, thought we needed to get right in to see the Doctor.  Me, not so much.  I’d tough this one out, I told her.  It would just end up being a strained something or other and be fine in a day or two.

She prevailed, like a good woman ought to, and we were soon on our way to the Doctor.  Halfway there, I told her it was feeling so much better and had her stop so I could show I was fine and could walk normally. 

Except I couldn’t walk on that stupid leg.  It wouldn’t cooperate.

The Doctor took my limp little leg in his strong arms and did a few cursory assessments.  His brow was still furrowed as he was trying to decide what the problem was when he stopped, dead still, and said, “Whoa.”

Next, he called the nurse over and said, “I want you to feel this.”  He had her take my leg in her arms and do just as he had.  She said quite a bit more than ‘Whoa’ and it wasn’t very respectful to the One I normally pray to.

He asked her, “Did you feel how you could have kept on going right around his whole neck with his leg?”

Anyways, the MRI came back with a severed ACL and a torn MCL, among other things, and surgery was scheduled.

If you see me limp a bit or notice I don’t really run anymore, you might understand now that it all traces back to a brainer calf.

And if you see me taking an interest in anyone wearing a knee brace, you can bet that I know what they feel like, after having worn one for more than 8 weeks. 

I must say, though, I got pretty fast on the crutches.  Especially after I modified them to my liking.