Prolapse

Prolapse Marilyn separated herself from the herd last night, and I fully expected to find lambs from her this morning. Instead, she was down, and when I went to check her out, I found she had a prolapse. I’d never actually seen one before, but it was all we could think of. It looked like a basketball coming out her back side. Since we’ve never dealt with this before, I called the vet and Jan came out in about an hour.

Me and the vet After she got the prolapse back inside, she found Marilyn wasn’t that dilated, but was straining and would push the prolapse back out if left alone. So she used her fingers to manually dilate the cervix, which only took a few minutes. It wasn’t too painful, I could tell, but I’m sure it wasn’t comfortable. It brought back awful memories of my own labors all those years ago. Ugh!

One lamb (ewe) Soon enough, though, she was dilated enough for Jan to pull out two lambs. (I didn’t know you could sort of force dilation that way.) First was a little white ewe lamb, and I was worried when I saw it that it was dead, but she felt a heartbeat, swung her a little to clear out the lungs and sure enough, she started breathing. We put the lamb up near Marilyn’s head and she started cleaning her straight away, while Jan delivered another white lamb, this time a ram with HUGE horn buds.

Marilyn & lambs Mother and babes are all doing fine. I’ve got them jugged, down near where I still have Naomi and Selina with their lambs. (Naomi didn’t have another overnight, so it looks like she just had the one single ewe lamb and the two moorit ram lambs are indeed Selina’s, like I had originally thought.) We are to give Marilyn penicillin for a couple of days, just to be on the safe side, and considering how dirty that prolapse got that makes a lot of sense to me.

Hopefully, we won’t have another prolapse, but now that we’ve seen how to handle it first hand, I guess we’ll do it on our own next time and not need to call the vet. But I’m so grateful we have a vet who makes farm calls!

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