Field Surgery doesn’t necessarily refer to doing surgery in a field, but it means that it is not at the hospital or clinic. This surgery was in the barn.

Patchwork BettyLou is a sheep that I bought in 2021 from a well-respected flock in Georgia. She is only three years old and has several years ahead of her. I had a dilemma.

This is Bettylou in May of this year. The UCD Field Service vets were out here for something else and I brought her in for an exam. The recommendation was to take her to C-Barn (the vet school large animal hospital) for a further look. It was determined that she had an abscess. The abscess was lanced and drained and I was to flush the opening for ten days while it was healing. I did that and finally let her back out.

This is September. I had been watching this get larger over the last couple of months.. It didn’t feel like an abscess and it didn’t seem to bother Bettylou. She didn’t show any pain when I touched it and she was acting normal. I needed to do something though. I am trying to sell a few sheep to lighten the load while we go forward with the big pasture project. Bettylou is not one on the list of most likely to sell, but sometimes you have to cull sheep with problems that will make them less fit to stay in the flock. I couldn’t sell her like this and I didn’t want to sell her anyway, but I needed to do something. The first visit was about $350. I talked to one of the veterinarians on the phone and she asked if I could reduce the swelling. I had been hesitant to manipulate that more than to find out that Bettylou didn’t seem to be in pain and that it didn’t feel like an abscess. Sure enough, I could easily squeeze everything back through a hole in the body wall and feel the opening that was about the diameter of a golf ball. It was a hernia that could probably be fixed with surgery. I got estimates for surgery if I took her to C-Barn and for field surgery. I chose field surgery, the less expensive option. That call was three weeks ago and the hernia was definitely larger by the time we had this appointment.

How did Bettylou get first the abscess and then the hernia? It was not on the midline, but off center. Have you ever seen Jacob sheep at the feeder? Sometimes one will put her head down and butt the one next to her. You can imagine the damage those pointed top horns can do. That’s the only thing I can figure out–that she had a small wound that became infected. It turns out that an access can weaken the tissue around it so maybe that is why a hernia developed even though the original abscess was cleared up.

I hope I don’t get somehow blacklisted for showing the following photos. It’s real life and a happy ending. So what’s wrong with that?

The vets brought a cradle on wheels to hold the sheep in position. She was given anesthesia first and the wool on her belly was trimmed away. Notice how the protrusion is gone. Gravity helped with that as the intestine and fatty tissue dropped back inside the hole in her body wall.

Bettylou’s belly was thoroughly scrubbed and the vets injected lidocaine around the place where the wound would be.

This is the extra skin that had stretched as the tissue weighted it down from the inside.

The vets cut an ellipse in the skin around the area.

Once that skin and the next layer of tissue was removed you could see the ring through which the fat and intestines were dropping. The vets made sure that any adhesions were loosened before closing the wound.

They stitched three layers. First they closed that hole and used what I think they said was a mattress stitch. The different stitches they used reminded me of teaching hemstitching in weaving classes. They closed another layer of membrane (or muscle?)

Then they closed the skin wound.

The final coating of an aluminum bandage spray.

Here is Bettylou on her feet…

…and back in a pen where she’ll stay for 2 weeks.

Bettylou won’t be bred this year but she’ll be ready to go for next year. I’m glad to have been able to keep her in the flock.