The fetotomy of a lifetime..

I don't really get grossed out by things. Not animal things, anyway. Occasionally, though, something might get to me a little bit. Usually it's a horrible smell of some sort. This story is about one such smell that will be forever engraved in my memory.

I was job shadowing at a large animal clinic one day, and a guy brings in a donkey (not a small donkey either.. a bigger-than-a-normal-horse donkey). The owner wanted the vet to do a pregnancy check. The vet attempted to stick her hand in there and feel around, but something was blocking the birth canal. And you know, it's the birth canal, so that usually means there is a baby. And there was.. oh, there was.

The vet tried to maneuver the foal around so we could pull it out (because it was very obviously stuck), and as she spread apart that poor donkey's vagina, a god awful smell emitted from the depths of the creature's reproductive tract. Imagine the sticky, sweet smell of blood combined with sweaty underwear combined with rotting flesh combined with horrible diarrhea, and you can kind of get an idea of what it smelled like (except it was worse than that.. much, much worse). I was holding the donkey's tail to the side, and every single waft of that smell hit me directly in the face. I thought I was going to pass out, and it got worse the longer the vet had her hand in there. We knew then that the baby had been dead in there for quite some time.

The vet's maneuvering attempts weren't getting us anywhere, so we began one of the most horrific (and kinda cool) procedures I have ever assisted with: a fetotomy. Basically, that baby wasn't budging. It was a huge baby to begin with (probably overdo when the mom went into labor), but it was also bloated and super slippery (the fur was just falling off of it). There was no way we could get that thing out in one piece. So we cut it up...

The vet wrapped a wire around the babies neck (while it was still lodged in the birth canal), and we threaded the wire through a pipe (to prevent burns from heat caused by friction) and started pulling back and forth. I got to do the honors, and it was pretty hard work. I mean, you're basically sawing through bone with a wire, and it takes a bit of force. It was also kinda hard because blood kept squirting at me from the end of the pipe, and things were getting slippery. Finally, though, I got through the head. I was completely out of breath, but I felt quite accomplished.

This is kinda what it should have looked like.

For the next 2 hours, we pulled that baby donkey out piece-by-piece (it was so rotted that it was falling apart at almost every joint). At the end, we probably had a dead baby donkey pile of around 10-15 pieces. It was pretty sick. And oh my god, the smell.

What it really looked like.. except it wasn't a calf, and it was in a LOT more pieces. It also looked more decomposed, and the skin/hair from almost every limb was completely pulled off. I wish I would have taken a picture, but there were a lot of people standing around.. it would've been weird.

We were all really relieved and ready to go home, but then the vet gave the mom donkey another dose of a sedative to help calm her down so she could recover, and for whatever reason, that second dose caused the donkey to start seizing (yeah, just imagine a huge donkey just flopping over to start seizing on the ground in front of you.. pretty scary). Eventually she stopped, but she looked horrible. I hated to see her in so much pain. That had to have been one of the most traumatizing things any animal could go through. I had to leave after that, so I never knew how much longer she had to endure, but I know that she didn't survive.

It's really sad. We did all we could to at least give her a chance at life, but going into it, we knew she probably wouldn't live much longer. It makes me wonder if putting her through all that pain was worth the slim survival rate. Just another medical, moral dilemma, I suppose.