Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A worrying time!

Now of course, having lost the alpaca baby that was born when I was in England, we are of course very paranoid, and the plan was to give the baby blood plasma intravenously within the first few hours of its birth, as extra protection. So when the baby was born on Christmas Eve, the plan was still to give him the plasma, however also I was very concerned that he did not seem to be feeding sufficiently, that old paranoia creeping in again! We phoned Andres, our vet, who was at a very noisy party, at around 4pm. As he was away, he suggested we took the baby to the vetinary hospital in Cordoba for the plasma to be given. Well we thought we did the right thing in asking Nigel and Ginny Cobb to phone ahead and tell them we were coming, but they said they had no one there that could do it, they only had large animal vets there at that time, which is crazy! I am sure if we had just turned up they would have had to have seen us and dealt with little Santa. Anyway they did arrange for a horse vet, that was on call, to meet us Cordoba football club in the car park! Yes you did read that correctly!


Well Juan the vet turned up and we expected him to say follow us to the clinic, oh no! He said is the alpaca in the car? Er yes........ so he put on his green vet gear on and set to work getting things ready from the boot of his car, the plan was to put the drip in whilst the alpaca was in the car, we couldn't believe it! Well to cut was is already a very long story just a little bit shorter, alpacas are notoriously difficult to get a drip into. Their jugular vein is 'hidden' from predators and the veins in their legs are just so very tiny, they are both very hard to find, and even harder to insert a needle into. Well after about half an hour of trying, Juan eventually managed to get a needle into the vein, but the bag of plasma with saline would not go through the 'tap thingy' So we then had to follow him into Cordoba city where he has an animal ambulance to get another bag and tap. Unfortunately during the journey, the needle had moved out of the vein even though it had been taped down. At that point we felt the baby alpaca had been put though enough. He had already been away from his mum for over 2 hours, with almost an hour journey before we arrived back home, and we were then worrying if we were doing more harm than good and we all decided to call it a day! We had to accept that we were taking him home hoping that Bermuda would become very maternal seeing him again and help him feed. Nature had to take it's course!


Well we arrived home at about 11pm, Christmas Eve night, and took the little boy straight in to a very loudly humming Bermuda, she was making a wonderful clucking noise and pretty soon was feeding. After about an hour of standing in the cold and rain, we went to bed, and I don't mind telling you, I said a few prayers!


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